Research Lab for Household Transportation tasks

In the research lab you have access to and can experiment with generalized robot plans for transporting objects within man-made human living and working environments, including apartments and retail stores. The generalized robot plan controls different robots transporting a variety of objects in different environments for different purposes in different contexts.

“The EASE household challenge is subject of the IEEE spectrum article ‘It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to Autonomously Do Household Chores’” by Evan Ackerman (IEEE Spectrum, 17.06.2021)

Interactive Actions and/or Examples

Description

Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.

In a paper presented at ICRA 2021, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge.

Example Videos

Publications

• Gayane Kazhoyan, Simon Stelter, Franklin Kenghagho Kenfack, Sebastian Koralewski and Michael Beetz, “The Robot Household Marathon Experiment”, In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2011.09792

• Gayane Kazhoyan, Arthur Niedzwiecki and Michael Beetz, “Towards Plan Transformations for Real-World Mobile Fetch and Place,” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Paris, France, 2020, pp. 11011-11017, doi: 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197446\

Software Components

• CRAM

  is a software toolbox for the implementation of autonomous robots.
  source code

• KnowRob

  is a knowledge processing system for robots.
  source code

• OpenEASE

  is a web-based knowledge service providing robot and human activity data.
  source code

• GISKARD

  is a framework for constraint- and optimization-based robot motion and planning control.
  source code

• ROBOKUDO

  is a perception framework targeted for robot manipulation tasks.
  source code

• PyCRAM

  is the Python 3 re-implementation of CRAM. PyCRAM is a toolbox for designing, implementing and deploying software on autonomous robots.
  source code

Courses and/or Turorial

• Courses:

  • Integrated Intelligent Systems

    This lecture covers contemporary techniques of AI in cognitive robotics.

  • Robot Programming with ROS

    Getting into the Robot Operating System ROS is a steptone for future roboticists.

  • SUTURO - sudo tidy-up-my-room

    Students in this project design their own application to run on a real robot.

• Tutorials:

  • CRAM Plan Executive

    Check out the online hands-on tutorials on the CRAM plan executive.

See also

• Using Web Knowledge For Flexible Meal Preparation
• Interactive Task Learning by Natural Instruction Methods
• euROBIN Demo
• Joint Probability Trees