TechTalk – Autonomous Excavation: Manipulation and Perception of Granular Materials
Autonomous excavators are an essential part of the goal of “building the robots that build the world”. One unique problem in autonomous excavation is how to deal with the granular materials like soils and sands, which is seldom studied in robotics. In this talk, Dr. Pan will present his team’s recent work about how to achieve efficient manipulation of soils by optimizing the trajectory of the excavator’s bucket, and how to enable the excavator to be aware of the objects buried in the soils by using a proximity sensing mechanism based on jamming in granular materials.