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arXiv · 2205.01026

Safety-Critical Manipulation for Collision-Free Food Preparation

Andrew Singletary·William Guffey·Tamas G. Molnar·Ryan Sinnet·Aaron D. Ames
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Abstract

Recent advances allow for the automation of food preparation in high-throughput environments, yet the successful deployment of these robots requires the planning and execution of quick, robust, and ultimately collision-free behaviors. In this work, we showcase a novel framework for modifying previously generated trajectories of robotic manipulators in highly detailed and dynamic collision environments using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). This method dynamically re-plans previously validated behaviors in the presence of changing environments -- and does so in a computationally efficient manner. Moreover, the approach provides rigorous safety guarantees of the resulting trajectories, factoring in the true underlying dynamics of the manipulator. This methodology is extensively validated on a full-scale robotic manipulator in a real-world cooking environment, and has resulted in substantial improvements in computation time and robustness over re-planning.

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Andrew Singletary, William Guffey, Tamas G. Molnar, Ryan Sinnet, Aaron D. Ames. 2022-05-02. Safety-Critical Manipulation for Collision-Free Food Preparation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01026

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