In this thesis, a complete software pipeline integrated with a set of novel robotic manipulation techniques for simple gripping devices is devised and implemented. This work has been motivated by a variety of applications in industrial product packaging scenarios, which require picking objects of small thickness from unstructured piles placed on a flat supporting ground and proceeding to other subsequent tasks such as carton folding and packaging after picking. Desirable robotic solutions is expected to be robust, stable and easily deployable with minimalistic hardware settings applicable. The challenge of the effective solution to these tasks relates to design complete end-to-end software architecture that appropriately integrate multiple components incorporating both perception a...[ Read more ]

In this thesis, a complete software pipeline integrated with a set of novel robotic manipulation techniques for simple gripping devices is devised and implemented. This work has been motivated by a variety of applications in industrial product packaging scenarios, which require picking objects of small thickness from unstructured piles placed on a flat supporting ground and proceeding to other subsequent tasks such as carton folding and packaging after picking. Desirable robotic solutions is expected to be robust, stable and easily deployable with minimalistic hardware settings applicable. The challenge of the effective solution to these tasks relates to design complete end-to-end software architecture that appropriately integrate multiple components incorporating both perception and execution.

This work proposes an end-to-end pipeline for addressing a range of packaging-related tasks, which is implemented by a simple conventional parallel-jaw gripper installed on industrial robot arms with multiple sensing modalities. The robotic techniques include key manipulation primitives featuring in-hand manipulation that we call tilt-and-pivot manipulation and other non-prehensile manipulation. The result is an autonomous integrated system for (1) picking thin objects from unordered bin, (2) performing other relevant object handling tasks, which constitutes complete and complex manipulation tasks, (3) performing collision check in simulation environment; which are validated with extensive verification through experiments.