Robotics project: 6 DOF arm manipulation, utilizing knowledge-based reasoning, BDI and HTN planning

Means-end, practical reasoning using Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture.

Demo: https://youtu.be/lO22-RkgV2Y

Presentation: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AgM7aH_rFcPzgrdkwJNIGvczvEBOaQ

Goal

Create a succeeding and a failing scenario, for a:

• Robotic arm manipulator.
• Carrying objects from a desk to a container.

Questions & Answers [BSSL19]:

Q: What is the robot doing? A: ACTION or FAILED

Q: Why is it doing it? A: GOAL

Q: How well is it doing it? A: STATUS & REMAINING PLAN

Q: What else could it have been doing instead? A: ALTERNATIVE PLANS

Robotic arm

LewanSoul LeArm (60 gram servos, serial I/O):

• 6 degrees of freedom.
• Primitive control: servo positions in [500, 2500].

Communication

Wi-Fi 2.4GHz with ESP32 (Arduino compatible micro-controller):

• Restful API (GET/PUT) for servo position, speed and delay.
• Average Round Trip Time (RTT): 1-2ms (warmed, after 2 packets).

Perception

Logitech C920 camera for computer vision:

• 1920 x 1080 max resolution (3 MP), 30 max frames per second.

Computer Vision

Object position detection (centimeter-level 3D detection of QR code) with partial obscuring (Python library: OpenCV):

• Oriented far and Rotated Brief (ORB) [RRKB11] feature detection.
• Fast Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors (FLANN) [MM11] feature matching and homography perspective transformation.
• Pixels-to-XYZ: RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) [FB02].

World Model (now & history):

• JSON in-memory nested data-structure for fast I/O.

Planner

• Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) [EHN94, GNT16]. Python library: pyhop.

Control

• Arm: Forward and Inverse kinematic model.
• Gripper opening control: From centimeters 2 [0:5; 6:0] to servo value [500; 2500].
• Trajectories: Discretization of start and target position of end-effector.
• Collision avoidance: Knowledge-based on target object location, dimensions & action (i.e moveTo, moveUp, moveAbove etc).

Monitoring

• Events: From sensor percepts , to event firing.

Task Model [BSSL19]

Real-Time Clock (RTC) & Multi-Agent support:

BDI uses the Smart Python Agent Development Environment (SPADE) library:

• Real-time, behaviour-based agent model platform.
• Multi-Agent Instant Messaging (IM) and presence notification via:
  • Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
  • Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) metadata and the Agent Communication Language (ACL).
• Asynchronous IO.

References

[BHW07] Rafael H. Bordini, Jomi Fred Hubner, and Michael Wooldridge. Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. 2007.

[BIP88] Michael E. Bratman, David J. Israel, and Martha E. Pollack. Plans and resource and bounded practical reasoning. Computational Intelligence, 1988.

[BSSL19] Herman Bruyninckx, Christian Schlegel, Dennis Stampfer, and Alex Lotz. Composable, explainable and verifiable robotics and cyber-physical systems-of-systems: best practices and knowledge-based meta models for resilient holonic architectures. 2019.

[EHN94] Kutluhan Erol, James Hendler, and Dana S. Nau. Semantics for Hierarchical Task-Network Planning. Technical report, 1994.

[FB02] Martin A. Fischler and Robert C. Bolles. Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography. Communications of the ACM, 2002.

[GNT16] Malik Ghallab, Dana Nau, and Paolo Traverso. Automated Planning and Acting. 2016.

[GPP+07] Michael Georgeff, Barney Pell, Martha Pollack, Milind Tambe, and Michael Wooldridge. The Belief-Desire-Intention Model of Agency. 2007.

[MM11] David G. Lowe Marius Muja. FAST APPROXIMATE NEAREST NEIGHBORS WITH AUTOMATIC ALGORITHM CONFIGURATION. 2011.

[RG97] Anand S. Rao Rao and Michael P. Georgeff. Modeling rational agents within a BDI-architecture. Readings in agents, 1997.

[RRKB11] Ethan Rublee, Vincent Rabaud, Kurt Konolige, and Gary Bradski. ORB: An efficient alternative to SIFT or SURF. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, 2011.

[Wei] Gerhard Weiss. Multiagent systems.

[Woo02] M. Wooldridge. Introduction to MultiAgent Systems. Information Retrieval, 2002.

LICENSE

Robotic Arm Copyright (c) 2018, Konstantinos Theodorakos (email: [email protected]). All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.