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Paul Birkmeyer

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Birkmeyer.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Stow: Robotic Packing of Items into Fabric Pods

This paper presents a compliant manipulation system capable of placing items onto densely packed shelves. The wide diversity of items and strict business requirements for high producing rates and low defect generation have prohibited warehouse robotics from performing this task. Our innovations in hardware, perception, decision-making, motion planning, and control have enabled this system to perform over 500,000 stows in a large e-commerce fulfillment center. The system achieves human levels of packing density and speed while prioritizing work on overhead shelves to enhance the safety of humans working alongside the robots.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Learning to Detect Slip through Tactile Estimation of the Contact Force Field and its Entropy

Detection of slip during object grasping and manipulation plays a vital role in object handling. Existing solutions primarily rely on visual information to devise a strategy for grasping. However, for robotic systems to attain a level of proficiency comparable to humans, especially in consistently handling and manipulating unfamiliar objects, integrating artificial tactile sensing is increasingly essential. We introduce a novel physics-informed, data-driven approach to detect slip continuously in real time. We employ the GelSight Mini, an optical tactile sensor, attached to custom-designed grippers to gather tactile data. Our work leverages the inhomogeneity of tactile sensor readings during slip events to develop distinctive features and formulates slip detection as a classification problem. To evaluate our approach, we test multiple data-driven models on 10 common objects under different loading conditions, textures, and materials. Our results show that the best classification algorithm achieves a high average accuracy of 95.61%. We further illustrate the practical application of our research in dynamic robotic manipulation tasks, where our real-time slip detection and prevention algorithm is implemented.

cs.RO↗