The PR2 Cleans Up After Our Hackathons!

While we at Willow Garage tend to be paragons of tidiness, there are times when we do forget to pick up after ourselves.  Our second hackathon this month made the robot do this for us by pushing around a wheeled cart and using it to take used cups, bowls, and boxes of Spam to the kitchen.  Because, what's a roboticist without Spam?

Cart pushing presented new challenges for our navigation stack.  First, the cart occludes the area immediately in front of the robot from the robot's sensors.  Second, our default planning algorithm works best for approximately circular robots, while the robot and the cart together form a long, thin shape.  The navigation stack has a highly modular, plug-in based architecture, though, so we were able to substitute in the sbpl forward-search-based planner, from the University of Pennsylvania, which works much better in this setting.

The robot must also recognize cups and bottles in its environment, and decide which ones need to be removed, and don't contain liquids, which could be unsafe for our robot to carry.  We used a human-in-the-loop approach, in which the robot sends an image of the scene to a (possibly remote) human, who draws a box around the next object to grasp.  The robot figures out the 3D position of the corresponding object, then uses our soon-to-be-released grasping pipeline to pick up the object and place it in the cart.

Our robot probably can't apply for a job at a restaurant just yet.  However, we believe that pushing carts, wheelchairs, and other wheeled objects is a very useful capability for personal robots, and we're continuing to work on improving its robustness.