This paper introduces Spatial Diagrammatic Instructions (SDIs), an approach for human operators to specify objectives and constraints that are related to spatial regions in the working environment. Human operators are enabled to sketch out regions directly on camera images that correspond to the objectives and constraints. These sketches are projected to 3D spatial coordinates, and continuous Spatial Instruction Maps (SIMs) are learned upon them. These maps can then be integrated into optimization problems for tasks of robots. In particular, we demonstrate how Spatial Diagrammatic Instructions can be applied to solve the Base Placement Problem of mobile manipulators, which concerns the best place to put the manipulator to facilitate a certain task. Human operators can specify, via sketch, spatial regions of interest for a manipulation task and permissible regions for the mobile manipulator to be at. Then, an optimization problem that maximizes the manipulator's reachability, or coverage, over the designated regions of interest while remaining in the permissible regions is solved. We provide extensive empirical evaluations, and show that our formulation of Spatial Instruction Maps provides accurate representations of user-specified diagrammatic instructions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our diagrammatic approach to the Mobile Base Placement Problem enables higher quality solutions and faster run-time.

翻译：本文引入空间图式指令（SDI）方法，使操作员能够通过草图指定工作环境中与空间区域相关的目标与约束。该方法允许操作员直接在相机图像上绘制代表目标与约束的区域，并将这些草图投影到三维空间坐标中，进而学习得到连续的空间指令图（SIM）。这些指令图可集成到机器人任务的优化问题中。具体而言，我们展示了如何将空间图式指令应用于移动机械臂的基座定位问题——该问题旨在确定机械臂执行特定任务的最佳位置。操作员可通过草图指定操作任务中感兴趣的空间区域，以及移动机械臂的允许活动区域。随后，我们求解一个优化问题，使机械臂在指定感兴趣区域内的可达性（或覆盖率）最大化，同时确保机械臂始终位于允许区域内。广泛实验表明，我们提出的空间指令图公式能够准确表征用户指定的图式指令。此外，我们的图式方法在解决移动基座定位问题时，能够获得更优解方案并实现更快的运行时间。