scholarly journals Manipulation of Articulated Objects Using Dual-arm Robots via Answer Set Programming

Author(s):  
RICCARDO BERTOLUCCI ◽  
ALESSIO CAPITANELLI ◽  
CARMINE DODARO ◽  
NICOLA LEONE ◽  
MARCO MARATEA ◽  
...  

Abstract The manipulation of articulated objects is of primary importance in Robotics and can be considered as one of the most complex manipulation tasks. Traditionally, this problem has been tackled by developing ad hoc approaches, which lack flexibility and portability. In this paper, we present a framework based on answer set programming (ASP) for the automated manipulation of articulated objects in a robot control architecture. In particular, ASP is employed for representing the configuration of the articulated object for checking the consistency of such representation in the knowledge base and for generating the sequence of manipulation actions. The framework is exemplified and validated on the Baxter dual-arm manipulator in the first, simple scenario. Then, we extend such scenario to improve the overall setup accuracy and to introduce a few constraints in robot actions execution to enforce their feasibility. The extended scenario entails a high number of possible actions that can be fruitfully combined together. Therefore, we exploit macro actions from automated planning in order to provide more effective plans. We validate the overall framework in the extended scenario, thereby confirming the applicability of ASP also in more realistic Robotics settings and showing the usefulness of macro actions for the robot-based manipulation of articulated objects.

Author(s):  
RICARDO GONÇALVES ◽  
MATTHIAS KNORR ◽  
JOÃO LEITE

Abstract Forgetting – or variable elimination – is an operation that allows the removal, from a knowledge base, of middle variables no longer deemed relevant. In recent years, many different approaches for forgetting in Answer Set Programming have been proposed, in the form of specific operators, or classes of such operators, commonly following different principles and obeying different properties. Each such approach was developed to address some particular view on forgetting, aimed at obeying a specific set of properties deemed desirable in such view, but a comprehensive and uniform overview of all the existing operators and properties is missing. In this article, we thoroughly examine existing properties and (classes of) operators for forgetting in Answer Set Programming, drawing a complete picture of the landscape of these classes of forgetting operators, which includes many novel results on relations between properties and operators, including considerations on concrete operators to compute results of forgetting and computational complexity. Our goal is to provide guidance to help users in choosing the operator most adequate for their application requirements.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCELLO BALDUCCINI ◽  
DANIELE MAGAZZENI ◽  
MARCO MARATEA ◽  
EMILY C. LEBLANC

AbstractConstraint answer set programming (CASP) is an extension of answer set programming that allows for numerical constraints to be added in the rules. PDDL+ is an extension of the PDDL standard language of automated planning for modeling mixed discrete-continuous dynamics. In this paper, we present CASP solutions for dealing with PDDL+ problems, i.e., encoding from PDDL+ to CASP, and extensions to the algorithm of the ezcsp CASP solver in order to solve CASP programs arising from PDDL+ domains. An experimental analysis, performed on well-known linear and non-linear variants of PDDL+ domains, involving various configurations of the ezcsp solver, other CASP solvers, and PDDL+ planners, shows the viability of our solution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 520-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN GEBSER ◽  
PHILIPP OBERMEIER ◽  
TORSTEN SCHAUB ◽  
MICHEL RATSCH-HEITMANN ◽  
MARIO RUNGE

AbstractAutomated storage and retrieval systems are principal components of modern production and warehouse facilities. In particular, automated guided vehicles nowadays substitute human-operated pallet trucks in transporting production materials between storage locations and assembly stations. While low-level control systems take care of navigating such driverless vehicles along programmed routes and avoid collisions even under unforeseen circumstances, in the common case of multiple vehicles sharing the same operation area, the problem remains how to set up routes such that a collection of transport tasks is accomplished most effectively. We address this prevalent problem in the context of car assembly at Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH, a large-scale producer of commercial vehicles, where routes for automated guided vehicles used in the production process have traditionally been hand-coded by human engineers. Such ad-hoc methods may suffice as long as a running production process remains in place, while any change in the factory layout or production targets necessitates tedious manual reconfiguration, not to mention the missing portability between different production plants. Unlike this, we propose a declarative approach based on Answer Set Programming to optimize the routes taken by automated guided vehicles for accomplishing transport tasks. The advantages include a transparent and executable problem formalization, provable optimality of routes relative to objective criteria, as well as elaboration tolerance towards particular factory layouts and production targets. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is efficient enough to deal with the transport tasks evolving in realistic production processes at the car factory of Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stijn Heymans ◽  
Davy Van Nieuwenborgh ◽  
Dirk Vermeir

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (18) ◽  
pp. 2320-2326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carito Guziolowski ◽  
Santiago Videla ◽  
Federica Eduati ◽  
Sven Thiele ◽  
Thomas Cokelaer ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 800-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELA INCLEZAN

AbstractThis paper presents CoreALMlib, an $\mathscr{ALM}$ library of commonsense knowledge about dynamic domains. The library was obtained by translating part of the Component Library (CLib) into the modular action language $\mathscr{ALM}$. CLib consists of general reusable and composable commonsense concepts, selected based on a thorough study of ontological and lexical resources. Our translation targets CLibstates (i.e., fluents) and actions. The resulting $\mathscr{ALM}$ library contains the descriptions of 123 action classes grouped into 43 reusable modules that are organized into a hierarchy. It is made available online and of interest to researchers in the action language, answer-set programming, and natural language understanding communities. We believe that our translation has two main advantages over its CLib counterpart: (i) it specifies axioms about actions in a more elaboration tolerant and readable way, and (ii) it can be seamlessly integrated with ASP reasoning algorithms (e.g., for planning and postdiction). In contrast, axioms are described in CLib using STRIPS-like operators, and CLib's inference engine cannot handle planning nor postdiction.


AI Magazine ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kaufmann ◽  
Nicola Leone ◽  
Simona Perri ◽  
Torsten Schaub

Answer set programming is a declarative problem solving paradigm that rests upon a workflow involving modeling, grounding, and solving. While the former is described by Gebser and Schaub (2016), we focus here on key issues in grounding, or how to systematically replace object variables by ground terms in a effective way, and solving, or how to compute the answer sets of a propositional logic program obtained by grounding.


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