RF-guided exploration for robotic manipulation

This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of RVExp, a system that leverages radio perception to design efficient exploration controllers in highly occluded and non-line-of-sight settings. RVExp relies on eye-in-hand vision sensor and battery-less RFID tags attached to the object of interest. Since RF (radio frequency) signals can traverse everyday occlusions, RVExp uses the RFIDs' signals to locate an object through occlusions. At the heart of RVExp's design is a novel radio-visual planner that uses the RFID's location to semantically explore the environment and plan an efficient trajectory toward an occluded target object. The controller can efficiently discover obstacles by biasing a Gaussian belief space planner using the RFID's location. I have built RVExp end-to-end and evaluated its performance in challenging real-world environments. The results show the feasibility of RF-guided exploration and its superiority over standard exploration.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Leng, Junshan.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Fadel Adib.

• Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130211

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130211