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 cluttered environment


Generalizable Collaborative Search-and-Capture in Cluttered Environments via Path-Guided MAPPO and Directional Frontier Allocation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Collaborative pursuit-evasion in cluttered environments presents significant challenges due to sparse rewards and constrained Fields of View (FOV). Standard Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) often suffers from inefficient exploration and fails to scale to large scenarios. We propose PGF-MAPPO (Path-Guided Frontier MAPPO), a hierarchical framework bridging topological planning with reactive control. To resolve local minima and sparse rewards, we integrate an A*-based potential field for dense reward shaping. Furthermore, we introduce Directional Frontier Allocation, combining Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) with geometric angle suppression to enforce spatial dispersion and accelerate coverage. The architecture employs a parameter-shared decentralized critic, maintaining O(1) model complexity suitable for robotic swarms. Experiments demonstrate that PGF-MAPPO achieves superior capture efficiency against faster evaders. Policies trained on 10x10 maps exhibit robust zero-shot generalization to unseen 20x20 environments, significantly outperforming rule-based and learning-based baselines.


CHOICE: Coordinated Human-Object Interaction in Cluttered Environments for Pick-and-Place Actions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Animating human-scene interactions such as pick-and-place tasks in cluttered, complex layouts is a challenging task, with objects of a wide variation of geometries and articulation under scenarios with various obstacles. The main difficulty lies in the sparsity of the motion data compared to the wide variation of the objects and environments as well as the poor availability of transition motions between different tasks, increasing the complexity of the generalization to arbitrary conditions. To cope with this issue, we develop a system that tackles the interaction synthesis problem as a hierarchical goal-driven task. Firstly, we develop a bimanual scheduler that plans a set of keyframes for simultaneously controlling the two hands to efficiently achieve the pick-and-place task from an abstract goal signal such as the target object selected by the user. Next, we develop a neural implicit planner that generates guidance hand trajectories under diverse object shape/types and obstacle layouts. Finally, we propose a linear dynamic model for our DeepPhase controller that incorporates a Kalman filter to enable smooth transitions in the frequency domain, resulting in a more realistic and effective multi-objective control of the character.Our system can produce a wide range of natural pick-and-place movements with respect to the geometry of objects, the articulation of containers and the layout of the objects in the scene.


Generating Future Observations to Estimate Grasp Success in Cluttered Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

End-to-end self-supervised models have been proposed for estimating the success of future candidate grasps and video predictive models for generating future observations. However, none have yet studied these two strategies side-by-side for addressing the aforementioned grasping problem. We investigate and compare a model-free approach, to estimate the success of a candidate grasp, against a model-based alternative that exploits a self-supervised learnt predictive model that generates a future observation of the gripper about to grasp an object. Our experiments demonstrate that despite the end-to-end model-free model obtaining a best accuracy of 72%, the proposed model-based pipeline yields a significantly higher accuracy of 82%.


A Vision-Guided Robotic System for Grasping Harvested Tomato Trusses in Cluttered Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Currently, truss tomato weighing and packaging require significant manual work. The main obstacle to automation lies in the difficulty of developing a reliable robotic grasping system for already harvested trusses. We propose a method to grasp trusses that are stacked in a crate with considerable clutter, which is how they are commonly stored and transported after harvest. The method consists of a deep learning-based vision system to first identify the individual trusses in the crate and then determine a suitable grasping location on the stem. To this end, we have introduced a grasp pose ranking algorithm with online learning capabilities. After selecting the most promising grasp pose, the robot executes a pinch grasp without needing touch sensors or geometric models. Lab experiments with a robotic manipulator equipped with an eye-in-hand RGB-D camera showed a 100% clearance rate when tasked to pick all trusses from a pile. 93% of the trusses were successfully grasped on the first try, while the remaining 7% required more attempts.


Grasping as Inference: Reactive Grasping in Heavily Cluttered Environment

#artificialintelligence

Although, in the task of grasping via a data-driven method, closed-loop feedback and predicting 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) grasp rather than conventionally used 4DoF top-down grasp are demonstrated to improve performance individually, few systems have both. Moreover, the sequential property of that task is hardly dealt with, while the approaching motion necessarily generates a series of observations. Therefore, this paper synthesizes three approaches and suggests a closed-loop framework that can predict the 6DoF grasp in a heavily cluttered environment from continuously received vision observations. This can be realized by formulating the grasping problem as Hidden Markov Model and applying a particle filter to infer grasp. Additionally, we introduce a novel lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that evaluates and initializes grasp samples in real-time, making the particle filter process possible. The experiments, which are conducted on a real robot with a heavily cluttered environment, show that our framework not only quantitatively improves the grasping success rate significantly compared to the baseline algorithms, but also qualitatively reacts to a dynamic change in the environment and cleans up the table.


Path Planning for Shepherding a Swarm in a Cluttered Environment using Differential Evolution

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In computational In this paper, we present an evolutionary path planning intelligence research, the concept is used more broadly to approach for shepherding that takes into account the collection model and analyze the behaviour of biologically inspired and movement of the swarm (sheep) in addition to the swarms, where multiple agents of different type interact with sheepdog. The problem is different from conventional path each other in a proactive and reactive manner. The reactive planning for robot navigation in the sense that the control agents are analogous to the sheep in the problem; they respond agents (sheepdog) have access to global information when to the presence of the proactive agent, the sheepdog, and are seeking an optimal path, while the movement of others (sheep) repulsed from it. The sheepdog makes a sequence of decisions is purely reactive. The two-phase algorithm starts by identifying to influence the sheep and to guide them towards a goal the path for the sheepdog to move from any initial position area. A recent comprehensive review on the subject can be to a position behind the swarm. The path is constrained to be found in [1]. The shepherding problem using robotic swarms obstacle free and so as not to impact the sheep; lest the sheep is of interest in several applications beyond the biological be repulsed and scatter, making their collection even harder inspiration of shepherding itself; applications include crowd and more time-consuming. In the second phase, the algorithm control [2], cleanup of oil spills [3], disaster relief and rescue plans the path for the sheepdog by identifying the next series operations [4], and security/military procedures [5], among of way points to guide the sheep towards their final destination.