MR. CRABS: Mobile RGB-D Camera-LIDAR Robot for Autonomous Bimanual Manipulation & Sensing

Giuse Pham, Matthew Strong, Alex Qiu, Joonwon Kang, Monroe David Kennedy

Keywords: mobile manipulation, bimanual, active cameras, point clouds, 3d

TL;DR: A new bimanual mobile manipulation platform with hardware designed for comprehensive and active perception.

Abstract: Near-ground bimanual manipulation is seldom studied, despite a variety of household items requiring ground interaction with two arms. Additionally, most robots in this domain require moving their entire body to view the relevant scene, making tasks such as environment reconstruction much slower. To fill these gaps, we present a fully integrated perception system for near-ground bimanual mobile manipulation. This consists of a novel bimanual holonomic robot equipped with dual Intel RealSense depth cameras and a small LiDAR. Unlike other near-ground and bimanual robots, our robot, entitled MR. CRABS, is equipped with a pan-and-tilt bottom RealSense, which we show improves mapping and search tasks. Finally, MR. CRABS can perform a proof-of-concept bimanual task for demonstration collection, alleviating the need for teleoperation.

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Submission Number: 32