Robotic Agents Representing, Reasoning, and Executing Wiping Tasks for Daily Household Chores

Universal robotic agents are envisaged to perform a wide range of manipulation tasks in everyday environments. A common action observed in many household chores is wiping, such as the absorption of spilled water with a sponge, skimming breadcrumbs off the dining table, or collecting shards of a broken mug using a broom. To cope with this versatility, the agents have to represent the tasks on a high level of abstraction. In this work, we propose to represent the medium in wiping tasks (e. g. water, breadcrumbs, or shards) as generic particle distribution. This representation enables us to represent wiping tasks as the desired state change of the particles, which allows the agent to reason about the effects of wiping motions in a qualitative manner. Based on this, we develop three prototypical wiping actions for the generic tasks of absorbing, collecting and skimming. The Cartesian wiping motions are resolved to joint motions exploiting the free degree of freedom of the involved tool. Furthermore, the workspace of the robotic manipulators is used to reason about the reachability of wiping motions. We evaluate our methods in simulated scenarios, as well as in a real experiment with the robotic agent Rollin’ Justin.