Early reactive grasping with second order 3D feature relations

Abstract

One of the main challenges in the field of robotics is to make robots ubiquitous. To intelligently interact with the world, such robots need to understand the environment and situations around them and react appropriately, they need context-awareness. But how to equip robots with capabilities of gathering and interpreting the necessary information for novel tasks through interaction with the environment and by providing some minimal knowledge in advance? This has been a longterm question and one of the main drives in the field of cognitive system development. The main idea behind the work presented in this paper is that the robot should, like a human infant, learn about objects by interacting with them, forming representations of the objects and their categories that are grounded in its embodiment. For this purpose, we study an early learning of object grasping process where the agent, based on a set of innate reflexes and knowledge about its embodiment. We stress out that this is not the work on grasping, it is a system that interacts with the environment based on relations of 3D visual features generated trough a stereo vision system. We show how geometry, appearance and spatial relations between the features can guide early reactive grasping which can later on be used in a more purposive manner when interacting with the environment. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.