Task-specific object grasps using primitive shapes and symbolic reasoning

In household and retail store environments, humans efficiently identify grasp regions of an object to perform everyday tasks. To enable robots to understand the requirements of a task and the properties of an object, a novel grasp framework, called the Shape Primitive and Reasoning Grasping Engine (SPaRGE), is proposed in this thesis. SPaRGE...

Object Affordance Detection for Mobile Manipulation in Retail Environments

Modern retail stores are increasingly implementing automated systems with the aim of assisting both the customer and employee. Much research is conducted on robotic applications within such environments; one of these applications concerns deploying an autonomous mobile manipulator to assist humans in retail stores. Such a robot requires the...