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arXiv · 2004.12916

Interactive Movement Primitives: Planning to Push Occluding Pieces for Fruit Picking

Sariah Mghames·Marc Hanheide·Amir Ghalamzan E
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Abstract

Robotic technology is increasingly considered the major mean for fruit picking. However, picking fruits in a dense cluster imposes a challenging research question in terms of motion/path planning as conventional planning approaches may not find collision-free movements for the robot to reach-and-pick a ripe fruit within a dense cluster. In such cases, the robot needs to safely push unripe fruits to reach a ripe one. Nonetheless, existing approaches to planning pushing movements in cluttered environments either are computationally expensive or only deal with 2-D cases and are not suitable for fruit picking, where it needs to compute 3-D pushing movements in a short time. In this work, we present a path planning algorithm for pushing occluding fruits to reach-and-pick a ripe one. Our proposed approach, called Interactive Probabilistic Movement Primitives (I-ProMP), is not computationally expensive (its computation time is in the order of 100 milliseconds) and is readily used for 3-D problems. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with pushing unripe strawberries in a simulated polytunnel. Our experimental results confirm I-ProMP successfully pushes table top grown strawberries and reaches a ripe one.

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Sariah Mghames, Marc Hanheide, Amir Ghalamzan E. 2020-04-27. Interactive Movement Primitives: Planning to Push Occluding Pieces for Fruit Picking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12916

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