RF Grasp: The robot that finds its way through clutter

Robots are not capable of handling tasks as simple as restocking grocery store shelves as they cannot perceive the environment as good as humans. What if we could give robots radio perception to search for items that are not in their sight Such an ability will give them superhuman power to work in warehouses, stores, and our homes. The Signal Kinetics research group present the design, implementation, and evaluation of RFGrasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. Unlike prior systems that are constrained by the lineofsight perception of vision and infrared sensors, RFGrasp employs RF (Radio Frequency) perception to identify and locate target objects throughocclusions, and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in nonlineofsight settings. RFGrasp relies on an eyeinhand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. It introduces two main innovations: (1) an RFvisual servoing controller that use