ScanComplete: Large-Scale Scene Completion and Semantic Segmentation for 3D Scans

We introduce ScanComplete, a novel data-driven approach for taking an incomplete 3D scan of a scene as input and predicting a complete 3D model along with per-voxel semantic labels. The key contribution of our method is its ability to handle large scenes with varying spatial extent, managing the cubic growth in data size as scene size increases. To this end, we devise a fully-convolutional generative 3D CNN model whose filter kernels are invariant to the overall scene size. The model can be trained on scene subvolumes but deployed on arbitrarily large scenes at test time. In addition, we propose a coarse-to-fine inference strategy in order to produce high-resolution output while also leveraging large input context sizes. In an extensive series of experiments, we carefully evaluate different model design choices, considering both deterministic and probabilistic models for completion and semantic inference. Our results show that we outperform other methods not only in the size of the environments handled and processing efficiency, but also with regard to completion quality and semantic segmentation performance by a significant margin.Comment: Video: https://youtu.be/5s5s8iH0NF

ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics

Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.Comment: In submission to ICRA 2019. Supplemental Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWD4iGIsB4 Project Page: https://github.com/yuanming-hu/ChainQuee