A visibility-based accessibility analysis of the grasp points for real-time manipulation

This paper presents a novel approach to accessibility analysis for manipulative robotic tasks. 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 multi-resolution 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 object 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 real-time 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.