68 research outputs found
Machine Learning Meets Advanced Robotic Manipulation
Automated industries lead to high quality production, lower manufacturing
cost and better utilization of human resources. Robotic manipulator arms have
major role in the automation process. However, for complex manipulation tasks,
hard coding efficient and safe trajectories is challenging and time consuming.
Machine learning methods have the potential to learn such controllers based on
expert demonstrations. Despite promising advances, better approaches must be
developed to improve safety, reliability, and efficiency of ML methods in both
training and deployment phases. This survey aims to review cutting edge
technologies and recent trends on ML methods applied to real-world manipulation
tasks. After reviewing the related background on ML, the rest of the paper is
devoted to ML applications in different domains such as industry, healthcare,
agriculture, space, military, and search and rescue. The paper is closed with
important research directions for future works
A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks
There has been an emerging paradigm shift from the era of "internet AI" to
"embodied AI", where AI algorithms and agents no longer learn from datasets of
images, videos or text curated primarily from the internet. Instead, they learn
through interactions with their environments from an egocentric perception
similar to humans. Consequently, there has been substantial growth in the
demand for embodied AI simulators to support various embodied AI research
tasks. This growing interest in embodied AI is beneficial to the greater
pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but there has not been a
contemporary and comprehensive survey of this field. This paper aims to provide
an encyclopedic survey for the field of embodied AI, from its simulators to its
research. By evaluating nine current embodied AI simulators with our proposed
seven features, this paper aims to understand the simulators in their provision
for use in embodied AI research and their limitations. Lastly, this paper
surveys the three main research tasks in embodied AI -- visual exploration,
visual navigation and embodied question answering (QA), covering the
state-of-the-art approaches, evaluation metrics and datasets. Finally, with the
new insights revealed through surveying the field, the paper will provide
suggestions for simulator-for-task selections and recommendations for the
future directions of the field.Comment: Under Review for IEEE TETC
Robotic Manipulation Datasets for Offline Compositional Reinforcement Learning
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction that allows RL
agents to pre-train on large datasets, avoiding the recurrence of expensive
data collection. To advance the field, it is crucial to generate large-scale
datasets. Compositional RL is particularly appealing for generating such large
datasets, since 1) it permits creating many tasks from few components, 2) the
task structure may enable trained agents to solve new tasks by combining
relevant learned components, and 3) the compositional dimensions provide a
notion of task relatedness. This paper provides four offline RL datasets for
simulated robotic manipulation created using the 256 tasks from CompoSuite
[Mendez et al., 2022a]. Each dataset is collected from an agent with a
different degree of performance, and consists of 256 million transitions. We
provide training and evaluation settings for assessing an agent's ability to
learn compositional task policies. Our benchmarking experiments on each setting
show that current offline RL methods can learn the training tasks to some
extent and that compositional methods significantly outperform
non-compositional methods. However, current methods are still unable to extract
the tasks' compositional structure to generalize to unseen tasks, showing a
need for further research in offline compositional RL
Data-driven robotic manipulation of cloth-like deformable objects : the present, challenges and future prospects
Manipulating cloth-like deformable objects (CDOs) is a long-standing problem in the robotics community. CDOs are flexible (non-rigid) objects that do not show a detectable level of compression strength while two points on the article are pushed towards each other and include objects such as ropes (1D), fabrics (2D) and bags (3D). In general, CDOs’ many degrees of freedom (DoF) introduce severe self-occlusion and complex state–action dynamics as significant obstacles to perception and manipulation systems. These challenges exacerbate existing issues of modern robotic control methods such as imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL). This review focuses on the application details of data-driven control methods on four major task families in this domain: cloth shaping, knot tying/untying, dressing and bag manipulation. Furthermore, we identify specific inductive biases in these four domains that present challenges for more general IL and RL algorithms.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
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