Robotic automation has been a part of state-of-the-art manufacturing for many decades. Robotic manipulators are used for such tasks as welding, painting, pick and place tasks etc. Robotic manipulators are quite flexible and adaptable to new tasks, but a typical robot-based production cell requires extensive specification of the robot motion and construction of tools and fixtures for material handling. This incurs a large effort both in time and monetary expenses. The task of a vision system in this setting is to simplify the control and guidance of the robot and to reduce the need for supporting material handling machinery. This dissertation examines performance and properties of the current state-of-the-art local features within the setting of object pose estimation. This is done through an extensive set of experiments replicating various potential problems to which a vision system in a robotic cell could be subjected. The dissertation presents new local features which are shown to increase the performance of object pose estimation. A new local descriptor details how to use log-polar sampled image patches for truly rotational invariant matching. This representation is also extended to use a scale-space interest point detector which in turn makes it very competitive in our experiments. A number of variations of already available descriptors are constructed resulting in new and competitive features, among them a scale-space based Patch-duplet. In this dissertation a successful vision-based object pose estimation system is extended for multi-cue integration, yielding increased robustness and accuracy. Robustness is increased through algorithmic multi-cue integration, combining the individual strengths of multiple local features. Increased accuracy is achieved by utilizing manipulator movement and applying temporal multi-cue integration. This is implemented using a real flexible robotic manipulator arm. Besides work done on local features for ordinary image data a number of local features for range data has also been developed. This dissertation describes the theory behind and the application of the scene tensor to the problem of object pose estimation. The scene tensor is a fourth order tensor representation using projective geometry. It is shown how to use the scene tensor as a detector as well as how to apply it to the task of object pose estimation. The object pose estimation system is extended to work with 3D data. A novel way of handling sampling of range data when constructing a detector is discussed. A volume rasterization method is presented and the classic Harris detector is adapted to it. Finally, a novel region detector, called Maximally Robust Range Regions, is presented. All developed detectors are compared in a detector repeatability test.

In order for assistive robots to collaborate effectively with humans for completing everyday tasks, they must be endowed with the ability to effectively perceive scenes and more importantly, recognize human intentions. As a result, we present in this dissertation a novel scene-dependent human-robot collaborative system capable of recognizing and learning human intentions based on scene objects, the actions that can be performed on them, and human interaction history. The aim of this system is to reduce the amount of human interactions necessary for communicating tasks to a robot. Accordingly, the system is partitioned into scene understanding and intention recognition modules. For scene understanding, the system is responsible for segmenting objects from captured RGB-D data, determining their positions and orientations in space, and acquiring their category labels. This information is fed into our intention recognition component where the most likely object and action pair that the user desires is determined. Our contributions to the state of the art are manifold. We propose an intention recognition framework that is appropriate for persons with limited physical capabilities, whereby we do not observe human physical actions for inferring intentions as is commonplace, but rather we only observe the scene. At the core of this framework is our novel probabilistic graphical model formulation entitled Object-Action Intention Networks. These networks are undirected graphical models where the nodes are comprised of object, action, and object feature variables, and the links between them indicate some form of direct probabilistic interaction. This setup, in tandem with a recursive Bayesian learning paradigm, enables our system to adapt to a user's preferences. We also propose an algorithm for the rapid estimation of position and orientation values of scene objects from single-view 3D point cloud data using a multi-scale superquadric fitting approach. Additionally, we leverage recent advances in computer vision for an RGB-D object categorization procedure that balances discrimination and generalization as well as a depth segmentation procedure that acquires candidate objects from tabletops. We demonstrate the feasibility of the collaborative system presented herein by conducting evaluations on multiple scenes comprised of objects from 11 categories, along with 7 possible actions, and 36 possible intentions. We achieve approximately 81% reduction in interactions overall after learning despite changes to scene structure.

Pose estimation has been studied since the early days of computer vision. The task of object pose estimation is to determine the transformation that maps an object from it's inherent coordinate system into the camera-centric coordinate system. This transformation describes the translation of the object relative to the camera and the orientation of the object in three dimensional space. The knowledge of an object's pose is a key ingredient in many application scenarios like robotic grasping, augmented reality, autonomous navigation and surveillance. A general estimation pipeline consists of the following four steps: extraction of distinctive points, creation of a hypotheses pool, hypothesis verification and, finally, the hypotheses refinement. In this work, we focus on the hypothesis generation process. We show that it is beneficial to utilize geometric knowledge in this process. We address the problem of hypotheses generation of articulated objects. Instead of considering each object part individually we model the object as a kinematic chain. This enables us to use the inner-part relationships when sampling pose hypotheses. Thereby we only need K correspondences for objects consisting of K parts. We show that applying geometric knowledge about part relationships improves estimation accuracy under severe self-occlusion and low quality correspondence predictions. In an extension we employ global reasoning within the hypotheses generation process instead of sampling 6D pose hypotheses locally. We therefore formulate a Conditional-Random-Field operating on the image as a whole inferring those pixels that are consistent with the 6D pose. Within the CRF we use a strong geometric check that is able to assess the quality of correspondence pairs. We show that our global geometric check improves the accuracy of pose estimation under heavy occlusion.

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Teaching a robot how to behave so it becomes completely autonomous is not a simple task. When robotic systems become truly intelligent, interactions with them will feel natural and easy, but nothing could be further from truth. Make a robot understand its surroundings is a huge task that the computer vision field tries to address, and deep learning techniques are bringing us closer. But at the cost of the data. Synthetic data generation is the process of generating artificial data that is used to train machine learning models. This data is generated using computer algorithms and simulations, and is designed to resemble real-world data as closely as possible. The use of synthetic data has become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly in the field of deep learning, due to the shortage of high-quality annotated real-world data and the high cost of collecting it. For that reason, in this thesis we are addressing the task of facilitating the generation of synthetic data with the creation of a framework which leverages advances in modern rendering engines. In this context, the generated synthetic data can be used to train models for tasks such as 6D object pose estimation or grasp estimation. 6D object pose estimation refers to the problem of determining the position and orientation of an object in 3D space, while grasp estimation involves predicting the position and orientation of a robotic hand or gripper that can be used to pick up and manipulate the object. These are important tasks in robotics and computer vision, as they enable robots to perform complex manipulation and grasping tasks. In this work we propose a way of extracting grasping information from hand-object interactions in virtual reality, so that synthetic data can also boost research in that area. Finally, we use this synthetically generated data to test the proposal of applying 6D object pose estimation architectures to grasping region estimation. This idea is based on both problems sharing several underlying concepts such as object detection and orientation. / Enseñar a un robot a ser completamente autónomo no es tarea fácil. Cuando los sistemas robóticos sean realmente inteligentes, las interacciones con ellos parecerán naturales y fáciles, pero nada más lejos de la realidad. Hacer que un robot comprenda y asimile su entorno es una difícil cruzada que el campo de la visión por ordenador intenta abordar, y las técnicas de aprendizaje profundo nos están acercando al objetivo. Pero el precio son los datos. La generación de datos sintéticos es el proceso de generar datos artificiales que se utilizan para entrenar modelos de aprendizaje automático. Estos datos se generan mediante algoritmos informáticos y simulaciones, y están diseñados para parecerse lo más posible a los datos del mundo real. El uso de datos sintéticos se ha vuelto cada vez más popular en los últimos años, especialmente en el campo del aprendizaje profundo, debido a la escasez de datos reales anotados de alta calidad y al alto coste de su recopilación. Por ello, en esta tesis abordamos la tarea de facilitar la generación de datos sintéticos con la creación de una herramienta que aprovecha los avances de los motores modernos de renderizado. En este contexto, los datos sintéticos generados pueden utilizarse para entrenar modelos para tareas como la estimación de la pose 6D de objetos o la estimación de agarres. La estimación de la pose 6D de objetos se refiere al problema de determinar la posición y orientación de un objeto en el espacio 3D, mientras que la estimación del agarre implica predecir la posición y orientación de una mano robótica o pinza que pueda utilizarse para coger y manipular el objeto. Se trata de tareas importantes en robótica y visión por computador, ya que permiten a los robots realizar tareas complejas de manipulación y agarre. En este trabajo proponemos una forma de extraer información de agarres a partir de interacciones mano-objeto en realidad virtual, de modo que los datos sintéticos también puedan impulsar la investigación en esa área. Por último, utilizamos estos datos generados sintéticamente para poner a prueba la propuesta de aplicar arquitecturas de estimación de pose 6D de objetos a la estimación de regiones de agarre. Esta propuesta se basa en que ambos problemas comparten varios conceptos subyacentes, como la detección y orientación de objetos. / This thesis has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education [FPU17/00166]

Today modern industry systems are almost fully automated. The high requirements regarding speed, flexibility, precision and reliability makes it in some cases very difficult to create. One of the most willingly researched solution to solve many processes without human influence is bin-picking. Bin picking is a very complex process which integrates devices such as: robotic grasping arm, vision system, collision avoidance algorithms and many others. This paper describes the creation of a vision system - the most important part of the whole bin-picking system. Authors propose a model-based solution for estimating a best pick-up candidate position and orientation. In this method database is created from 3D CAD model, compared with processed image from the 3D scanner. Paper widely describes database creation from 3D STL model, Sick IVP 3D scanner configuration and creation of the comparing algorithm based on autocorrelation function and morphological operators. The results shows that proposed solution is universal, time efficient, robust and gives opportunities for further work. / +4915782529118