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

Abstract:

Near-ground bimanual manipulation is seldom studied, even though a variety of household items require ground interaction with two arms. Most robots in this domain must move their entire body to view the relevant scene, which makes tasks such as environment reconstruction much slower. To fill these gaps, we present a fully integrated perception system for near-ground bimanual mobile manipulation, consisting of a novel bimanual holonomic robot equipped with dual Intel RealSense depth cameras and a small LIDAR. Unlike other near-ground and bimanual robots, MR. CRABS is equipped with a pan-and-tilt bottom RealSense, which we show improves mapping and search tasks. MR. CRABS can also perform a proof-of-concept bimanual task for demonstration collection, alleviating the need for teleoperation.

Note: * denotes equal contribution.