MIT News June 28, 2022
Researchers at MIT have built a prototype of a robotic system for RF-Visual mechanical search that leverages the mere existence of an RF-tagged item in the pile to benefit both tagged and untagged items. The two key innovations. RF-Visual Mapping, a technique that identifies and locates RF-tagged items in a pile and uses this information to construct an RF-Visual occupancy distribution map. The second innovation is RF-Visual Extraction, a policy formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the number of actions required to extract the target object. In over 180 real-world experimental trials FuseBot outperformed the state-of the-art vision-based system X-Ray’s efficiency by more than 40% in terms of the number of actions required for successful mechanical search. FuseBot achieved a success rate of 95% in retrieving untagged items, demonstrating that the benefits of RF perception extend beyond tagged objects in the mechanical search problem. Video https://youtu.be/TFqz263uPN0 …read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE