cclauss / craves.ai

CRAVES: Controlling Robotic Arm with a Vision-based, Economic System

CRAVES: Controlling Robotic Arm with a Vision-based, Economic System

The craves.ai project controls a toy robotic arm (OWI-535) with a single RGB camera. Please see the system pipeline and how it works in docs/README.md first before trying the code. The following animation shows the arm controlling by a mounted camera to reach a goal without relying on any other sensors.

Dataset Download

We created three datasets for this project, namely synthetic, lab and youtube.

Download the datasets from here.

For the usage of these datasets, please refer to here

Pose Estimation

1. Download the checkpoint for the pretrained model here and put it into a folder, e.g. ./checkpoint/checkpoint.pth.tar.

2. Create a folder for result saving, e.g. ./saved_results.

3. Open ./scripts/val_arm_reall.sh. Make sure --data-dir, --resume and --save-result-dir match with the folder where you put the datasets, the pre-train model and the saved result, respectively. For example, --data-dir ../data/test_20181024 --resume ../checkpoint/checkpoint.pth.tar --save-result-dir ../saved_results

4. cd ./scripts then run sh val_arm_reall.sh and you can see the accuracy on the real lab dataset.

Other shell scripts you may want to try:

• train_arm.sh and train_arm_concat.sh: train a model from scratch with synthetic dataset only and with multiple datasets, respectively.
• val_arm_syn.sh: evaluate model on synthetic dataset
• val_arm_reall_with_3D: evaluate model on synthetic dataset, giving both 2D and 3D output.
• val_arm_youtube.sh and val_arm_youtube_vis_only.sh: evaluate model on youtube dataset, with all keypoints and only visible keypoints, respectively.

Dependencies: pytorch with version 0.4.1 or higher, OpenCV

Data Generation from Simulator

Download the linux binary from here (tested in Ubuntu 16.04).

Unzip and run ./LinuxNoEditor/ArmUE4.sh.

Run the following script to generate images and ground truth

pip install unrealcv imageio
python demo_capture.py frame.png

Control System

The control module of CRAVES is hosted in another repo, https://github.com/zfw1226/craves_control.

Please see this repo for hardware drivers, pose estimator, a PID-like controller, and a RL-based controller.

Citation

If you found CRAVES useful, please consider citing:

@article{zuo2019craves,
  title={CRAVES: Controlling Robotic Arm with a Vision-based, Economic System},
  author={Zuo, Yiming and Qiu, Weichao and Xie, Lingxi and Zhong, Fangwei and Wang, Yizhou and Yuille, Alan L},
  journal={CVPR},
  year={2019}
}

Contact

If you have any question or suggestions, please open an issue in this repo. Thanks.