SeqReg for Tool-Point Positioning

James Sergeant

Utilised in

J. Sergeant, G. Doran, D. R. Thompson, C. Lehnert, A. Allwood, B. Upcroft, M. Milford, "Towards Multimodal and Condition-Invariant Vision-based Registration for Robot Positioning on Changing Surfaces," Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation 2016 [under review], 2016.

J. Sergeant, G. Doran, D. R. Thompson, C. Lehnert, A. Allwood, B. Upcroft, M. Milford, "Appearance-Invariant Surface Registration for Robot Positioning," International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2017 [under review], 2017.

Multimodal Dataset

The associated Multimodal Rock Image Dataset can be found here. After uncompressing to desired location, ensure to specify the path to the dataset when initialising the SeqReg_TPP object in MATLAB. To run the test for all test casees in the dataset:

seqreg = SeqReq_TPP();
seqreq.test_dataset();

Other Images

Various input parameter pairs can be provided to both ImagePair() and ImageRegistration(), see next section.

image_pair = ImagePair();
image_pair.set_images(image1,image2,relative_scale);
registrator = ImageRegistration()
% methods include 'seqreg','cnn','surf'
results = registrator('method',image_pair);

Parameters

Parameters can be set in seqreq.parameters.

Robot Experiments

Requirements

ROS Indigo MATLAB (only tested on R2016a) MoveIt Smach Relies on the the apc_grasping and moveit_lib ROS packages from the ACRV Amazon Picking Challenge repository

MATLAB ROS Modification Steps

This step may be required if the image registration process takes longer than 10 seconds as a part of a ROS Service call. In MATLAB perform the following steps:

1. edit robotics.ros.ServiceServer
2. Add obj.ResponseBuilder.setTimeout(120000); after line 173. This is a 2 minute timeout.
3. rehash toolboxcache
4. Restart MATLAB.

Generate Custom ROS Service Message for MATLAB

1. Install ROS Custom Message Generator
2. rosgenmsg('path/to/seqreg_tpp')
3. Follow instructions provided by the script.

Robot Configuration

Various robot configuration parameters can be set in state_machine/parameters/global.yaml

State Machine

Start the state machine with 'roslaunch state_machine_seqreg state_machine'

1. Manipulator will move to an initial position.
2. Operator required to select a region of interest on the surface in the image.
3. Manipulator moves to secondary position.
4. Image registration.
5. Manipulator moves to estimated required position.
6. Repeats previous 2 steps until completion criteria met or failed image registration.