Mobile manipulation: The robotic assistant

Towards developing a robot assistant for uterus positioning during hysterectomy: system design and experiments

Background: In traditional laparoscopic hysterectomy, an assistant is typically assigned to hold a uterus manipulator to facilitate the surgical procedures. The responsibility of the assistant is to position the uterus according to the primary surgeon’s instructions. Throughout the surgery, which typically lasts more than 90 min, the assistant has to support the uterus manipulator with his/her ...

Cognitive and physical stimulation services with a robotic agent in a domestic setting

In this paper, we present the service developed for cognitive and physical stimulation of elderly or handicapped people. The services rely on an assistant mobile robot composed of a mobile platform on top of which is set up a manipulator arm. Stimulation relies on scenarios defined together with the partners of ITEA Midas project. In order to build the scenarios, we developed object recognition...

Close-range Scene Segmentation and Reconstruction of 3D Point Cloud Maps for Mobile Manipulation in Human Environments

In this paper we present a framework for 3D geometric shape segmentation for close-range scenes used in mobile manipulation and grasping, out of sensed point cloud data. Our proposed approach proposes a robust geometric mapping pipeline for large input datasets that extracts relevant objects useful for a personal robotic assistant to perform manipulation tasks. The objects are segmented out fro...

Challenges and Solutions for Autonomous Robotic Mobile Manipulation for Outdoor Sample Collection

In refinery, petrochemical, and chemical plants, process technicians collect uncontaminated samples to be analyzed in the quality control laboratory all time and all weather. This traditionally manual operation not only exposes the process technicians to hazardous chemicals, but also imposes an economical burden on the management. The recent development in mobile manipulation provides an opport...

Direct manipulation of 3-D objects through multimodal control: Towards a robotic assistant for people with physical disabilities