Sponsor: Office of Naval Research
ONR Award Number: N00024-10-D-6318 / DO#N0002420F8705
Project Leads: Aaron Marburg (UW), Joe Davidson (OSU), Geoff Hollinger (OSU)
Project Dates: April 2020-April 2024
This project conducted fundamental research in control, perception, planning, and human interfaces to enable dexterous, robust, and flexible robotic manipulation in underwater environments.
The project’s motivation is the development of semi-autonomous remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) capable of performing complex tasks such as hull cleaning or environmental sampling, in highly energetic conditions. An operator would provide high-level commands to the vehicle through an interface that provides advanced decision support, and the commands would be interpreted and executed using advanced robotic perception and trajectory optimization and control algorithms. The vehicle would use a soft gripper attached to a high-degree-of-freedom arm with onboard touch sensing to feel its way around the environment and provide a robust grasp.
The project developed technologies in test environments, beginning with operation and manipulation of robotic arms on fixed, underwater test stands. The project’s four thrust areas included (1) perception and object identification, (2) gripper and tactile sensing, (3) decision support, and (4) trajectory optimization.
Link to short videos to learn more about this project’s components.
Publications & Presentations
2024
S. Chow, Learning-based Techniques for Fast and Robust Motion Planning, PhD Thesis, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, March, 2024.
Yixuan Huang, Jialin Yuan, Chanho Kim, Pupul Pradhan, Bryan Chen, Li Fuxin, Tucker Hermans. Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Reasoning and Planning about Unobserved Objects with Video Tracking Enabled Memory Models. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Yokohama, Japan, 2024.
M. Jiang, S Khorram, F.Li. Comparing the Decision-Making Among Transformers and CNNs with Explanation Methods. IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Seattle, WA, 2024. Best Student Paper Runner-Up.
M. Rosette, H. Kolano, C. Holm, G.A. Hollinger, A. Marburg, M. Pickett, and J.R. Davidson, “WAVE: An open-source underWater Arm-Vehicle Emulator,” Accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Yokohama, Japan, May 2024.
A. Ullah, T. Yan, F. Li. CVAE-SM: A Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Style Modulation for Efficient Uncertainty Quantification. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
2023
S. Bhawsinghka, N. Troxler, S. Walker, and J.R. Davidson, “Hydraulic modulation of silicone knuckles for variable control of joint stiffness,” In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), Singapore, Apr. 2023, 6pp.
S. Chow, D. Chang, and G. Hollinger, “Parallelized control-aware motion planning with learned controller proxies,” Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 4. pp. 2237-2244, April 2023.
M. Jiang, S. Khorram, Li, F. “Diverse Explanations for Object Detectors with Nesterov-Accelerated iGOS++ “,” in Proc. British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), Aberdeen, UK, 2023.
Wesley Khademi, Li Fuxin. Diverse Shape Completion via Style-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks. In Proc. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeuRIPS), New Orleans, LA, USA, 2023.
W. Khademi, F. Li. “Diverse Shape Completion via Style-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks,” In Proc. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeuRIPS), New Orleans, LA, USA, 2023.
H. Kolano and J.R. Davidson, “Forecasting vehicle pitch and roll of a lightweight UVMS with recurrent neural networks,” In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ Int’l Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop on: Robotics for the Blue Economy and Climate Resiliency, Detroit, MI, Oct. 2023, 1pp.
T. Player, D. Chang, L. Fuxin, and G. Hollinger, “Real-time generative grasping with spatio-temporal sparse convolution,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, London, UK, May 2023.
N. Pusalkar, M.-R. Giolando, and J. A. Adams, “Decision Support System for Autonomous Underwater Robot Grasping,” Late Breaking Report, Proceedings of the Companion of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp 198-202, 2023.
N. Pusalkar, M.-R. Gioland, and J. A. Adams, “Autonomous Underwater Robot Grasping Decision Support System,” Abstract and Video, Proceedings of the Companion of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp 887-888, 2023.
2022
A. Agrawal, D. Chang, and G. Hollinger, “Task and motion planning for collective robotic construction,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Collective Robotic Construction (ICRA), Philadelphia, PA, May 2022.
M. Pickett, H. Kolano, J.R. Davidson, and A. Marburg, “Design of a robotic testbed for underwater manipulation research,” In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA): Workshop on Robotics for Climate Change, Philadelphia, PA, May 2022, 3pp.
K. Puente, S. Walker, J. Davidson, and G. Hollinger, “Design and grasp planning for a reconfigurable variable stiffness underwater robotic hand,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Compliant Manipulation (ICRA), Philadelphia, PA, May 2022.
K. Sullivan, H. Chizeck, A. Marburg “Using a rigid gripper on objects of difference compliances underwater.” in MTS/IEEE Oceans Conference 2022, Hampton Roads. October 2022.
B. Stoddard, M. Cravetz, T. Player, H. Knight “A Haptic Multimodal Interface with Abstract Controls for Semi-Autonomous Manipulation.“ HRI Video Demo in Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2022), Virtual Event. March 2022.
2021
D. Chang, S. Chow, T. R. Player, and G. A. Hollinger, “Adaptive and informative planning for an underwater vehicle-manipulator system,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop on Advanced Marine Robotics: Active Perception, 2021.
S. Chow, G. Olson, and G. Hollinger, “Compensating for unmodeled forces using neural networks in soft manipulator planning,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Xi’ian, China, May 2021.
L. Lindzey and A. Marburg, “Extrinsic Calibration between an Optical Camera and an Imaging Sonar,” OCEANS 2021: San Diego – Porto, 2021, pp. 1-8.
M. Scott and A. Marburg, “Quantifying the Degradation of Optical Algorithms in Increasingly Turbid Mediums,” OCEANS 2021: San Diego – Porto, 2021, pp. 1-10.