MANiBOT research presented at ICRA 2024

MANiBOT was proudly present at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024), taking place in Yokohama, Japan, from May 13-17. A paper entitled “Active-Perceptive Motion Generation for Mobile Manipulation”, was presented at the conference by authors Snehal Jauhri and Sophie Lueth and co-author Georgia Chalvatzaki, from project partne Technical University of Darmstadt.

The research received funding from MANiBOT, the German Research Foundation (DFG) Emmy Noether Programme (CH 2676/1-1), and the Daimler Benz foundation.

In this publication, the researchers introduce an active perception pipeline for mobile manipulators to generate motions that are informative toward manipulation tasks such as grasping in initially unknown, cluttered scenes.

The proposed approach, ActPerMoMa, generates robot trajectories by looking ahead a short distance at a time. It tries out different paths and calculates their effectiveness based on two goals: getting the best visual understanding of an unknown area and achieving specific tasks, such as successfully reaching and grabbing objects, in the most efficient way.

You can find the paper, demo video and code here.