X-Ray: Mechanical Search for an Occluded Object by Minimizing Support of Learned Occupancy Distributions

Understand

For applications in e-commerce, warehouses, healthcare, and home service, robots are often required to search through heaps of objects to grasp a specific target object.

• For mechanical search, we introduce X-Ray, an algorithm based on learned occupancy distributions.
• We train a neural network using a synthetic dataset of RGBD heap images labeled for a set of standard bounding box targets with varying aspect ratios.
• X-Ray minimizes support of the learned distribution as part of a mechanical search policy in both simulated and real environments.