Let's Push Things Forward: A Survey on Robot Pushing

As robots make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion primitive that dramatically extends a robot's manipul...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jochen Stüber, Claudio Zito, Rustam Stolkin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-02-01
Series:Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frobt.2020.00008/full
Description
Summary:As robots make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion primitive that dramatically extends a robot's manipulation repertoire. In this work, we review the robotic pushing literature. While focusing on work concerned with predicting the motion of pushed objects, we also cover relevant applications of pushing for planning and control. Beginning with analytical approaches, under which we also subsume physics engines, we then proceed to discuss work on learning models from data. In doing so, we dedicate a separate section to deep learning approaches which have seen a recent upsurge in the literature. Concluding remarks and further research perspectives are given at the end of the paper.
ISSN:2296-9144