Reactive Exploration of Unknown Environments for Redundant Robots using Virtual Model Control

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

The exploration of confined, occluded, and partially known spaces poses significant challenges in robotic manipulation. The overall pose of the robotic arm must be carefully controlled to respect tight geometric constraints while avoiding newly discovered obstacles. We address this problem by proposing an active exploration approach for redundant robotic arms with an eye-in-hand camera configuration. Our approach navigates and acquires information in real-time based on a novel scoring method that directly selects a target voxel from the unexplored space using the robot's current state and expected information gain. To move the robot safely toward the target voxel, we utilize Virtual Model Control, which guarantees compliance and enables whole-body reactive obstacle avoidance without the need for path replanning. Simulated and real-robot experiments in both confined and open environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving over $90\%$ mapping coverage across all tested environments in under $120$ seconds without colliding with obstacles.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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