Robotic Arm Uses Complex Reasoning to Find Hidden Objects
'FuseBot' is a new robotic system developed by MIT researchers that combines computer vision and RF signals to find hidden items with speed and precision.
“What this paper shows, for the first time, is that the mere presence of an RFID-tagged item in the environment makes it much easier for you to achieve other tasks in a more efficient manner. We were able to do this because we added multimodal reasoning to the system — FuseBot can reason about both vision and RF to understand a pile of items,” says Fadel Adib , associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Transcript
00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] PRESENTER: A new robotic system, developed by a team at MIT, can locate and retrieve almost any hidden object buried in a pile regardless of shape, color, or size. The system, known as Fuse Bot, uses radio frequency signals, computer vision, and complex reasoning to efficiently find hidden items. With Fuse Bot, a robotic arm uses an attached video camera and an antenna to retrieve a target from a pile. If some of the items in the pile have RFID tags,
00:00:32 the system becomes more efficient, even if the target item is untagged. As the robotic arm moves, the system scans the pile with its camera to create a 3D model of the environment. Simultaneously, it sends signals from its antenna to locate RFID tags. These radio waves can pass through most solid surfaces, so the robot can see deep into the pile. Using the information collected from the camera
00:00:59 and the antenna, Fuse Bot reasons about the probable location and orientation of objects under the pile then finds the most efficient way to remove obstructing objects and extract the target item. The researchers say Fuse Bot could be applied in a variety of settings because the software that performs its complex reasoning can be implemented on any computer. It just needs to communicate with a robotic arm that has a camera and an RFID reader.
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