Multi-Camera Coverage Of Deformable Contour Shapes

Perception of deformation is a key problem when dealing with autonomous manipulation of deformable objects. Particularly, this work is motivated by tasks where the manipulated object follows a prescribed known deformation with the goal of performing a desired coverage of the object's contour along its deformation. The main contribution is a simple yet effective novel perception system in which a team of robots equipped with limited field-of-view cameras covers the object's contour according to a prescribed visibility objective. In order to define a feasible visibility objective, we propose a new method for obtaining the maximum achievable visibility of a contour from a circumference around its centroid. Then, we define a constrained optimization problem and we solve it iteratively to compute the minimum number of cameras and their near-optimal positions around the object that guarantee the visibility objective, over the entire deformation process.