Temporal Projection for Everyday Robot Object Manipulation
Lars Kunze, Mihai Dolha, Michael Beetz · 2011
In ever yday object manipulation tasks, like mak ing a pancake, autonomous robots are required to decide on the appropriate action parametrizations in order to achieve desired (and to avoid undesired) outcomes. For determining the right parameters for actions like pouring a pancake mix onto a pancake maker, robots need capabilities to predict the physical consequences of their own manipulation actions. In this work, we integrate a simulation-based approach for making tempo ral projections for robot manipulation actions into the logic programming language PROLOG. The realized system enables robots to determine action parameters that bring about cer tain effects by utilizing simulation-based temporal projections within PROLOG's chronological backtracking mechanism. For a set of formal parameters and their respective ranges of values, the developed s ystem translates the manipulation problems into physical simulations, monitors and logs the relevant data struc tures of the simulations, translates the logged data back into first-order time-interval-ba sed representations, called timelines, and eventually evaluates the individual timelines with respect to specified performance criteria. Integrating the proposed approach into robot control programs allow robots to mentall y simulate the consequences of different action parametrizations before committing to them and thereb y to reduce the number of undesired outcomes.