Jan Rosell

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya | UPC · IOC - Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering

In the automotive industry, several robots are required to simultaneously carry out welding sequences on the same vehicle. Coordinating and assigning welding points between robots is a manual and difficult phase that needs to be optimized using automatic tools. The cycle time of the cell strongly depends on different robotic factors such as the tas...

Robotic manipulation in semi-structured and changing environments requires systems with: a) perception and reasoning capabilities able to capture and understand the state of the environment; b) planning and replanning capabilities at both symbolic and geometric levels; c) automatic and robust execution capabilities. To cope with these issues, this...

The Mobile Manipulation Hackathon was held in late 2018 during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) to showcase the latest applications of wheeled robotic manipulators. The challenge had an open format, where teams developed an application using simulation tools and integrated it into a robotic platform. Th...

One of the problems that service robotics deals with is to bring mobile manipulators to work in semi-structured human scenarios, which requires an efficient and flexible way to execute everyday tasks, like serve a cup in a cluttered environment. Usually, for those tasks, the combination of symbolic and geometric levels of planning is necessary, as...

Encoding practical knowledge about everyday activities has proven difficult , and is a limiting factor in the progress of autonomous robotics. Learning approaches , e.g. imitation learning from human data, have been used as a way to circumvent this difficulty. While such approaches are on the right track, they require comprehensive knowledge modell...

Manipulation planning under incomplete information is a highly challenging task for mobile manipulators. Uncertainty can be resolved by robot perception modules or using human knowledge in the execution process. Human operators can also collaborate with robots for the execution of some difficult actions or as helpers in sharing the task knowledge....

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy – ADDENDUM - Volume 35 - Alberto Olivares-Alarcos, Daniel Beßler, Alaa Khamis, Paulo Goncalves, Maki K. Habib, Julita Bermejo-Alonso, Marcos Barreto, Mohammed Diab, Jan Rosell, João Quintas, Joanna Olszewska, Hirenkumar Nakawala, Edison Pignaton, Amelie Gyrard, Stefano Borgo, Gu...

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of re-use, there needs to b...

This paper addresses the problem of obtaining the required motions for a humanoid robot to perform grasp actions trying to mimic the coordinated hand–arm movements humans do. The first step is the data acquisition and analysis, which consists in capturing human movements while grasping several everyday objects (covering four possible grasp types),...

Autonomous indoor robots are supposed to accomplish tasks, like serve a cup, which involves manipulation actions, where task and motion planning levels are coupled. In both planning levels and execution phases, several sources of failures can occur. In this paper, an interpretation ontology covering several sources of failures in automated planning...

Planning efficiently at task and motion levels allows the setting of new challenges for robotic manipulation problems, like for instance constrained table-top problems for bi-manual robots. In this scope, the appropriate combination of task and motion planning levels plays an important role. Accordingly, a heuristic-based task and motion planning a...

La robótica colaborativa, en la que los robots comparten el espacio de trabajo con los humanos e interactúan con ellos, toma un papel cada vez más relevante. En este contexto, el artículo presenta desarrollos realizados en diferentes aspectos técnicos necesarios para que estos robots funcionen adecuadamente y cumplan las expectativas en cuanto a su...

Autonomous indoor service robots are supposed to accomplish tasks, like serve a cup, which involve manipulation actions. Particularly, for complex manipulation tasks which are subject to geometric constraints, spatial information and a rich semantic knowledge about objects, types, and functionality are required, together with the way in which these...

The recent advancements in robotic systems set new challenges for robotic simulation software, particularly for planning. It requires the realistic behavior of the robots and the objects in the simulation environment by incorporating their dynamics. Furthermore, it requires the capability of reasoning about the action effects. To cope with these ch...

Robotic systems composed of several mobile robots moving in human environments pose several problems at perception, planning and control levels. In these environments, there may be obstacles obstructing the paths, which robots can remove by pushing or pulling them. At planning level, therefore, an efficient combination of task and motion planning i...

Physics-based motion planning is a challenging task, since it requires the computation of the robot motions while allowing possible interactions with (some of) the obstacles in the environment. Kinodynamic motion planners equipped with a dynamic engine acting as state propagator are usually used for that purpose. The difficulties arise in the setti...

Manipulation planning in human environments is one of the challenging areas in robotics research. It is focused on making the robot capable of performing complex manipulation tasks, which requires manipulation planning capabilities in cluttered and unstructured environments. These capabilities need, on the one hand, a rich semantic description of t...

Assembly recipes can elegantly be represented in description logic theories. With such a recipe, the robot can figure out the next assembly step through logical inference. However, before performing an action, the robot needs to ensure various spatial constraints are met, such as that the parts to be put together are reachable, non occluded, etc. S...

Planning motions to grasp an object in cluttered and uncertain environments is a challenging task, particularly when a collision-free trajectory does not exist and objects obstructing the way are required to be carefully grasped and moved out. This paper takes a different approach and proposes to address this problem by using a randomized physics-b...

This paper presents a planning procedure that allows an anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic system to perform a manipulation task in a natural human-like way by using demonstrated human movements. The key idea of the proposal is to convert the demonstrated trajectories into attractive potential fields defined over the configuration space and then use...

Grasping an object in unstructured and uncertain environments is a challenging task, particularly when a collision-free trajectory does not exits. High-level knowledge and reasoning processes, as well as the allowing of interaction between objects, can enhance the planning efficiency in such environments. In this direction, this study proposes a kn...

The recent advancements in robotic systems set new challenges for robotic simulation software, particularly for planning. It requires the realistic behavior of the robots and the objects in the simulation environment by incorporating their dynamics. Furthermore, it requires the capability of reasoning about the action effects. To cope with these ch...

Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for planning this type of actions. However, physics-based motion planning is computationally intensive due to the...

In manipulation planning, dynamic interactions between the objects and the robots play a significant role. In this scope, dynamic engines allow to consider them within motion planners, giving rise to physics-based motion planners that consider the purposeful manipulation of objects. In this context, the representation of knowledge regarding how the...

One of the main foci of robotics is nowadays centered in providing a great degree of autonomy to robots. A fundamental step in this direction is to give them the ability to plan in discrete and continuous spaces to find the required motions to complete a complex task. In this line, some recent approaches describe tasks with Linear Temporal Logic (L...

One of the main foci of robotics is nowadays centered in providing a great degree of autonomy to robots. A fundamental step in this direction is to give them the ability to plan in discrete and continuous spaces to find the required motions to complete a complex task. In this line, some recent approaches describe tasks with Linear Temporal Logic (L...

One of the main foci of robotics is nowadays centered in providing a great degree of autonomy to robots. A fundamental step in this direction is to give them the ability to plan in discrete and continuous spaces to find the required motions to complete a complex task. In this line, some recent approaches describe tasks with Linear Temporal Logic (L...

This paper addresses the problem of designing a planning algorithm for anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic systems to find paths that mimics the movements of real human beings by using first-order synergies (correlations between joint velocities). The key idea of the proposal is to convert captured human movements into a vector field of velocities, de...

This paper discusses motion planning for anthropomorphic dual-arm robots. It introduces a measure of the similarity of the movements needed to solve two given tasks. Planning using this measure to select proper arm synergies for a given task improves the planning performance and the resulting plan.

In order to solve mobile manipulation problems, the efficient combination of task and motion planning is usually required. Moreover, the incorporation of physics-based information has recently been taken into account in order to plan the tasks in a more realistic way. In the present paper, a task and motion planning framework is proposed based on a...

En algunas asignaturas STEM, el bloque práctico incluye el uso de programas informáticos desconocidos para los alumnos. Esto origina una serie de problemas para el alumnado tales como la falta de aprovechamiento de las sesiones prácticas, desmotivación y frustración. A fin de incrementar la motivación, satisfacción y aprovechamiento de los alumnos...

This work presents a knowledge-based task and motion planning framework based on a version of the Fast-Forward task planner. A reasoning process on symbolic literals in terms of knowledge and geometric information about the workspace, together with the use of a physics-based motion planner, is proposed to evaluate the applicability and feasibility...

To cope with the growing complexity of manipulation tasks, the way to combine and access information from high- and low-planning levels has recently emerged as an interesting challenge in robotics. To tackle this, the present paper first represents the manipulation problem, involving knowledge about the world and the planning phase, in the form of...

To cope with the growing complexity of manipulation tasks, the way to combine and access information from high-and low-planning levels has recently emerged as an interesting challenge in robotics. To tackle this, the present paper first represents the manipulation problem , involving knowledge about the world and the planning phase, in the form of...

Motion planning has evolved from coping with simply geometric problems to physics-based ones that incorporate the kinodynamic and the physical constraints imposed by the robot and the physical world. Therefore, the criteria for evaluating physics-based motion planners goes beyond the computational complexity (e.g. in terms of planning time) usually...

Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for planning this type of actions. However, physics-based motion planning is computationally intensive due to the...

For everyday manipulation tasks, the combination of task and motion planning is required regarding the need of providing the set of possible subtasks which have to be done and how to perform them. Since many alternative plans may exist, the determination of their feasibility and the identification of the best one is a great challenge in robotics. T...

The paper deals with the problem of planning movements of dual-arm anthropomorphic systems, with the aim of reducing the computational cost of the problem and making the movements look as human-like as possible. The key idea of the proposal is the search of synergies of the dual-arm anthropomorphic system in order to use them to reduce the dimensio...

The paper deals with the problem of planning movements of dual-arm anthropomorphic systems, with the aim of reducing the computational cost of the problem and making the movements look as human-like as possible. The key idea of the proposal is the search of synergies of the dual-arm anthropomorphic system in order to use them to reduce the dimensio...

Traditionally, grasp and arm motion planning are considered as separate tasks. This paper presents an integrated approach that only requires the initial configuration of the robotic arm and the pose of the target object to simultaneously plan a good hand pose and arm trajectory to grasp the object. The planner exploits the concept of independent co...

The use of anthropomorphic mechanical hands allows the execution of complex manipulation tasks and, therefore, its use is increasing, both in humanoid robots and mobile manipulators. The planning of the motions of these hands is not easy due to the high number of degrees of freedom (DOF) involved. Even when they may be mechanically independent, the...

The planning of collision-free paths of a team of mobile robots involves many degrees of freedom and therefore the use of sampling-based methods is a good alternative. Among them, the RRT∗ planner has been proposed to cope with optimization problems, and has been proven to be asymptotically optimal. Any optimization function can be defined, althoug...

This paper presents the software tool used at the Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC-UPC) for teaching and research in robot motion planning. The tool allows to cope with problems with one or more robots, being a generic robot defined as a kinematic tree with a mobile base, i.e. the tool can plan and simulate from simple two degre...

This paper introduces a supervised teleoperation system to cope with some of the main problems that arise in the teleoperation of hand-arm robotic systems. The set-up consists of two magnetic trackers and two sensorized gloves that command, respectively, two industrial robots and the mechanical hands with which they are equipped. The basic mapping...

Teleoperation of robotic tasks is usually performed in the Cartesian space due to the kinematic differences between the master and the slave. This entails several requirements, like the definition of a proper mapping between workspaces, the need to avoid collisions of the teleoperated robot with the environment, and the use of the inverse kinematic...

This paper proposes a method for segmenting the airways from CT scans of the chest to obtain a 3D model that can be used in the virtual bronchoscopy for the exploration and the planning of paths to the lesions. The method is composed of 3 stages: a gross segmentation that reconstructs the main airway tree using adaptive region growing, a finer segm...

The planning of collision-free paths for a hand-arm robotic system is a difficult issue due to the large number of degrees of freedom involved and the cluttered environment usually encountered near grasping configurations. To cope with this problem, this paper presents a novel importance sampling method based on the use of principal component analy...

Teleoperating a robotic hand with the aid of a sensorized glove presents some particular problems. A certain problem is due to the kinematic differences between the human hand and the robotic hand, which do not allow a simple direct mapping of the sensor readings from the glove to the robotic hand. This problem is addressed with different types of...

Virtual Bronchoscopy (VB) permits the preplanning of operations concerning the airways and provides the necessary guidance to reach the pulmonary lesions. Fundamental for a good VB is the reconstruction of a 3D model of the airways from the CT images. Airway segmentation algorithms usually return the biggest detected volume connected to the trachea...

Haptic guidance is a powerful tool for people rehabilitation, for handcraft skills acquisition and all kind of en-active tasks. In this paper, different techniques to achieve reliable haptic feedback on the execution of virtual robotic tasks, based on the efficient combination of path planning methods and haptic guidance primitives, are presented....

Como parte del proyecto de investigación Sistemas de Guiado en la Broncoscopía GUIBROd [1], cuyo objetivo es el de asistir en la exploración y diagnóstico de lesiones del nódulo pulmonar periférico, este artículo presenta un Módulo de Planificación de Movimientos que permite la búsqueda automática de una trayectoria solución hacia a una región de i...