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We introduce Visual Inverse Kinematics (VIK), which finds kinematically feasible joint configurations that satisfy vision-based constraints, bridging the gap between inverse kinematics (IK) and visual servoing (VS). Unlike IK, no explicit end-effector pose is given, and unlike VS, exact image measurements may not be available. In this work, we develop a formulation of the VIK problem with a field of view (FoV) constraint, enforcing the visibility of an object from a camera on the robot. Our proposed solution introduces a virtual kinematic chain that connects the physical robot and the object, transforming the FoV constraint into a joint angle kinematic constraint. Along the way, we introduce multiple vision-based cost functions to fulfill different objectives. We solve this formulation of the VIK problem using a method that involves a semidefinite program (SDP) constraint followed by a rank minimization algorithm. The performance of this method for solving the VIK problem is validated through simulations. 

Inverse kinematics (IK) is an important problem in robot control and motion planning; however, the nonlinearity of the map from joint angles to robot configurations makes the problem nonconvex. In this paper, we propose an inverse kinematics solver that works in the space of rotation matrices of the link reference frames rather than joint angles. To overcome the nonlinearity of the manifold of rotation matrices $$\mathbf{SO}(3)$$, we propose a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the kinematic constraints followed by a fixed-trace rank minimization via maximization of a convex function. Along the way, we show that the feasible set of an IK problem is exactly the intersection of a convex set and fixed-trace rank-1 matrices. Thanks to the use of matrices with fixed trace, our algorithm to obtain rank-1 solutions has guaranteed local convergence. Unlike some traditional solvers, our method does not require an initial guess, and can be applied to robots with closed kinematic chains without ad-hoc modifications such as splitting the kinematic chain. Compared to other work that performs SDP relaxation for IK problems, our formulation is simpler, and uses variables with smaller sizes. We validate our approach via simulations on a closed kinematic chain constituted by two robotic arms holding a box, comparing against a standard IK method. 

Deep learning methods are widely used in robotic applications. By learning from prior experience, the robot can abstract knowledge of the environment, and use this knowledge to accomplish different goals, such as object search, frontier exploration, or scene understanding, with a smaller amount of resources than might be needed without that knowledge. Most existing methods typically require a significant amount of sensing, which in turn has significant costs in terms of power consumption for acquisition and processing, and typically focus on models that are tuned for each specific goal, leading to the need to train, store and run each one separately. These issues are particularly important in a resource-constrained setting, such as with small-scale robots or during long-duration missions. We propose a single, multi-task deep learning architecture that takes advantage of the structure of the partial environment to predict different abstractions of the environment (thus reducing the need for rich sensing), and to leverage these predictions to simultaneously achieve different high-level goals (thus sharing computation between goals). As an example application of the proposed architecture, we consider the specific example of a robot equipped with a 2-D laser scanner and an object detector, tasked with searching for an object (such as an exit) in a residential building while constructing a topological map that can be used for future missions. The prior knowledge of the environment is encoded using a U-Net deep network architecture. In this context, our work leads to an object search algorithm that is complete, and that outperforms a more traditional frontier-based approach. The topological map we produce uses scene trees to qualitatively represent the environment as a graph at a fraction of the cost of existing SLAM-based solutions. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to extract multi-task semantic information that is useful for navigation and mapping directly from bare-bone, non-semantic measurements.