Greedy Stone Tower Creations with a Robotic Arm

Abstract

Predominately, robotic construction is applied as prefabrication in structured indoor environments with standard building materials. Our work, on the other hand, focuses on utilizing irregular materials found on-site, such as rubble and rocks, for autonomous construction. We present a pipeline to detect arbitrarily placed objects in a scene and form a structure out of the detected objects. The next best stacking pose is selected using a searching method employing gradient descent with random initial orientations, exploiting a physics engine. This approach is validated in an experimental setup using a robotic manipulator by constructing balancing vertical stacks without mortars and adhesives. We show the results of eleven consecutive trials to form such towers autonomously using four arbitrarily in front of the robot placed rocks.

Cite

Text

Wermelinger et al. "Greedy Stone Tower Creations with a Robotic Arm." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018. doi:10.24963/IJCAI.2018/760

Markdown

[Wermelinger et al. "Greedy Stone Tower Creations with a Robotic Arm." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018.](https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/2018/wermelinger2018ijcai-greedy/) doi:10.24963/IJCAI.2018/760

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wermelinger2018ijcai-greedy,
  title     = {{Greedy Stone Tower Creations with a Robotic Arm}},
  author    = {Wermelinger, Martin and Furrer, Fadri and Yoshida, Hironori and Gramazio, Fabio and Kohler, Matthias and Siegwart, Roland and Hutter, Marco},
  booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2018},
  pages     = {5394-5398},
  doi       = {10.24963/IJCAI.2018/760},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/2018/wermelinger2018ijcai-greedy/}
}