Robotics: Science and Systems XVI

A Berry Picking Robot With A Hybrid Soft-Rigid Arm: Design and Task Space Control

Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Benjamin Walt, Aaron Havens, Armeen Mahdian, Girish Chowdhary, Girish Krishnan

Abstract:

We present a hybrid rigid-soft arm and manipulator for performing tasks requiring dexterity and reach in cluttered environments. Our system combines the benefit of the dexterity of a variable length soft manipulator and the rigid support capability of a hard arm. The hard arm positions the extendable soft manipulator close to the target, and the soft arm manipulator navigates the last few centimeters to reach and grab the target. A novel magnetic sensor and reinforcement learning based control is developed for end effector position control of the robot. A compliant gripper with an IR reflectance sensing system is designed, and a k-nearest neighbor classifier is used to detect target engagement. The system is evaluated in several challenging berry picking scenarios.

Download:

Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Uppalapati-RSS-20, 
    AUTHOR    = {Naveen Kumar Uppalapati AND Benjamin Walt AND Aaron Havens AND Armeen Mahdian AND Girish Chowdhary AND Girish Krishnan}, 
    TITLE     = {{A Berry Picking Robot With A Hybrid Soft-Rigid Arm: Design and Task Space Control}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2020}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Corvalis, Oregon, USA}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2020.XVI.027} 
}