VVV09 Manipulation Group

A place for meeting/discussion for people interested in doing manipulation with the iCub: Topics:

• Reaching
• Grasping
• 3-D vision

Last year's reaching/grasping group: Link

Ideas / Message wall

• Demo idea: Two-handed manipulation, putting lego pieces together using both arms of the iCub.
• Please add your name to the participant lists and feel free to make subteams, and reorganize goals/ possible solutions
• A git repository for sharing our code is ready! Please send me (Alexis) your public ssh key (usually ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub or ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub). Then you will be able to pull and push to the GIT repository. Instructions below!
• Let's try to sit together on Wednesday to work together faster

Divide and conquer

We had a small informal meeting on Tuesday (21.7.) before lunch and came out with a possible work distribution:

Perception team

This team has the following goals:

• First we detect the lego pieces on the table, and after grasping them, we need to detect them again in the hand, to see where they really are held.
• We need a 3D position in the coordinate frame of the cameras (or better, of the iCub).
• Initially, we can keep the eyes fixed, but moving the head and eyes would be a nice plus.
• Matteo has a working ball tracker that might be adjusted (if you want to use that, please see: 3D_ball_tracker).
• We could put the legos together 'with eyes closed' (see first, then move pieces together), or use visual servoing to make the process better.

Participants:

• Matteo
• Jakob
• Federico T.
• Giovanni

Grasping team

This team has the following goals:

• make a small library of grasps (e.g. 3-finger pinch, 2-finger pinch, power grasp).
• when a grasp movement is being executed, monitor the positions and currents of the hand -> Detect contact with the object and stop.
• when holding the object, monitor the currents/positions and figure out if the piece is falling down. -> Learn a classificator using joint positions/currents?
• Avoid destroying the iCub's hand!

Participants:

• Julian
• Theo

Reaching team

This team has the following goals:

• Use inverse kinematics to get the hand in the right position and orientation for grasping.
• After grasping the piece, bring it close to the face, and rotate it until the perception team finds the exact position of the piece in the hand.
• Redefine the tool of the arm as the position of the piece, and move in cartesian coordinates based on it.
• Put the two pieces together, detect the event monitoring the force sensors, or vision?

Participants:

• Alexis
• Federico
• Boris

git repository

Install git on your laptop, give Alexis your public ssh key, and then do the following:

 git clone gitosis@192.168.2.253:vvvmanipulation.git

You should get a directory called vvvmanipulation

When you make your changes, remember to do:

 git add files
 git commit            #Add some good comment
 git pull --rebase     #This synchronizes with the server
 git push              #Sends your changes to the server