Jim Mainprice

Research Scientist

Autonomous Motion

Office: N2.019
Max-Planck-Ring 4
72076 Tübingen
Germany

07071 601 1738

Overview
Publications

Jim Mainprice received his M.S. from Polytech' Montpellier, France, and his Ph.D. in robotics and computer science from the University of Toulouse, France, in 2009 and 2012 respectively. His research interests include motion planning, machine learning, human-robot interaction and human movement understanding. While completing his Ph.D. at LAAS-CNRS, he took part in the European community's 7th framework program projects Dexmart and Saphari. From January 2013 to December 2014, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Autonomous Robotic Collaboration Lab at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA, where he participated in the DARPA Robotic Challenge with the DRCHubo team. Since January 2015, he is affiliated with the Autonomous Motion Department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. Since April 2017, he leads the Humans to Robots Motion (HRM) research group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

3 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2018

Real-time Perception meets Reactive Motion Generation

(Best Systems Paper Finalists - Amazon Robotics Best Paper Awards in Manipulation)

Kappler, D., Meier, F., Issac, J., Mainprice, J., Garcia Cifuentes, C., Wüthrich, M., Berenz, V., Schaal, S., Ratliff, N., Bohg, J.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(3):1864-1871, July 2018 (article)

Abstract

We address the challenging problem of robotic grasping and manipulation in the presence of uncertainty. This uncertainty is due to noisy sensing, inaccurate models and hard-to-predict environment dynamics. Our approach emphasizes the importance of continuous, real-time perception and its tight integration with reactive motion generation methods. We present a fully integrated system where real-time object and robot tracking as well as ambient world modeling provides the necessary input to feedback controllers and continuous motion optimizers. Specifically, they provide attractive and repulsive potentials based on which the controllers and motion optimizer can online compute movement policies at different time intervals. We extensively evaluate the proposed system on a real robotic platform in four scenarios that exhibit either challenging workspace geometry or a dynamic environment. We compare the proposed integrated system with a more traditional sense-plan-act approach that is still widely used. In 333 experiments, we show the robustness and accuracy of the proposed system.

arxiv video video link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]