Feature-Driven Next View Planning for Cutting Path Generation in Robotic Metal Scrap Recycling

Metal recycling in scrapyards, where workers cut decommissioned structures using gas torches, is labor-intensive, difficult, and dangerous. As global metal scrap recycling demands are rising, robotics and automation technologies could play a significant role to address this demand. However, the unstructured nature of the scrap cutting problem—due to highly variable object shapes and environments—poses significant challenges to integrate robotic solutions. We propose a novel collaborative workflow for robotic metal cutting that combines worker expertise with robot autonomy. In this workflow, the skilled worker studies the scene, determines an appropriate cutting reference, and marks it on the object with spray paint. The robot, then, autonomously explores the surface of the object for identifying and reconstructing the drawn reference, converts it to a cutting trajectory, and finally executes the cut. This paper focuses on the surface exploration and cutting reference reconstruction tasks, which require appropriate next view planning (NVP) algorithms. We devise three NVP algorithms enabling the robot to explore and extract desired features from the scene, i.e., the drawn reference, without requiring any a priori object model. Contrasting with global or feature-agnostic NVP algorithms, our approaches guide the robot via desired local features to increase the efficiency of the exploration. We evaluate our NVP algorithms against six categories of objects both in simulation and in physical experiments. Note to Practitioners—This work is motivated by the need of extracting a desired cutting reference determined and drawn on the object by scrap yard workers. From the robot’s perspective, it must explore and reconstruct the drawing, starting from an unknown scene containing an unknown object featuring an unknown drawing. We assume that an RGB-D camera is attached to the tool-tip of the robot, and the color of the drawn path is significantly different from the object’s color. The goal of the robotic system is to explore the object surface to uncover the drawn path entirely without colliding with the object. The exploration algorithm must overcome complex object shapes and must be fast enough for practical use in scrap yards. This means conventional exploration (active vision) techniques are insufficient since they focus on exploring the entirety of the object, which is unnecessary for our task and is time-consuming. Our methods exploit the drawing information to guide the exploration for quickly determining a suitable viewpoint, which results in an efficient extraction of the entire cutting reference, without needing to explore the entire object’s surface. Our algorithms are robust against adversarial features such as discontinuous, non-smooth, or self-occluded object surfaces. Our feature-driven strategies are not limited to robotic scrap cutting as they are applicable to any viewpoint planning problem requiring high performance while extracting the local features in the scene.