A Hardware-based Accessibility Analysis for Real-time Robotic Manipulation

This paper presents a new approach to real-time accessibility analysis for manipulative robotic tasks using graphics hardware. The workspace is captured using a stereo camera, and heterogeneously modeled with the recognized plane features, recognized objects with complete solid models, and unrecognized 3D point clouds organized with a multiresolution octree. When the service robot is requested to manipulate a recognized object, the local accessibility information for the object is retrieved from the object database. Then, accessibility analysis is done to verify the local accessibility and determine the global accessibility. The verification process utilizes the visibility query, which is accelerated by graphics hardware. The experimental results show the feasibility of realtime and behavior-oriented 3D modeling of workspace for robotic manipulative tasks, and also the performance gain of the hardware-accelerated accessibility analysis obtained using the commodity graphics card.