One-Shot Observation Learning Using Visual Activity Features

Observation learning is the process of learning a task by observing an expert demonstrator. Our principal contribution is a one-shot learning method for robot manipulation tasks in which only a single demonstration is required. The key idea is to encode the demonstration in an activity space defined as part of a previously trained activity classifier. The distance between this encoding and equivalent encodings from trials of a robot performing the same task provides a reward function supporting iterative learning of task completion by the robotic manipulator. We use reinforcement learning for experiments with a simulated robotic manipulator, and stochastic trajectory optimisation for experiments with a real robotic manipulator. We show that the proposed method can be used to learn tasks from a single demonstration under varying viewpoint of observation, object properties, scene background and morphology of the manipulator. Videos of all results, including demonstrations, can be found on: https://tinyurl.com/s2l-stage

High-level Reasoning and Low-level Learning for Grasping: A Probabilistic Logic Pipeline

While grasps must satisfy the grasping stability criteria, good grasps depend on the specific manipulation scenario: the object, its properties and functionalities, as well as the task and grasp constraints. In this paper, we consider such information for robot grasping by leveraging manifolds and symbolic object parts. Specifically, we introduce a new probabilistic logic module to first semantically reason about pre-grasp configurations with respect to the intended tasks. Further, a mapping is learned from part-related visual features to good grasping points. The probabilistic logic module makes use of object-task affordances and object/task ontologies to encode rules that generalize over similar object parts and object/task categories. The use of probabilistic logic for task-dependent grasping contrasts with current approaches that usually learn direct mappings from visual perceptions to task-dependent grasping points. We show the benefits of the full probabilistic logic pipeline experimentally and on a real robot

Inferring 3D Shapes of Unknown Rigid Objects in Clutter through Inverse Physics Reasoning

We present a probabilistic approach for building, on the fly, 3-D models of unknown objects while being manipulated by a robot. We specifically consider manipulation tasks in piles of clutter that contain previously unseen objects. Most manipulation algorithms for performing such tasks require known geometric models of the objects in order to grasp or rearrange them robustly. One of the novel aspects of this work is the utilization of a physics engine for verifying hypothesized geometries in simulation. The evidence provided by physics simulations is used in a probabilistic framework that accounts for the fact that mechanical properties of the objects are uncertain. We present an efficient algorithm for inferring occluded parts of objects based on their observed motions and mutual interactions. Experiments using a robot show that this approach is efficient for constructing physically realistic 3-D models, which can be useful for manipulation planning. Experiments also show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms alternative approaches in terms of shape accuracy

Annotation Scaffolds for Object Modeling and Manipulation

We present and evaluate an approach for human-in-the-loop specification of shape reconstruction with annotations for basic robot-object interactions. Our method is based on the idea of model annotation: the addition of simple cues to an underlying object model to specify shape and delineate a simple task. The goal is to explore reducing the complexity of CAD-like interfaces so that novice users can quickly recover an object's shape and describe a manipulation task that is then carried out by a robot. The object modeling and interaction annotation capabilities are tested with a user study and compared against results obtained using existing approaches. The approach has been analyzed using a variety of shape comparison, grasping, and manipulation metrics, and tested with the PR2 robot platform, where it was shown to be successful.Comment: 31 pages, 46 Figure

PointNetGPD: Detecting Grasp Configurations from Point Sets

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end grasp evaluation model to address the challenging problem of localizing robot grasp configurations directly from the point cloud. Compared to recent grasp evaluation metrics that are based on handcrafted depth features and a convolutional neural network (CNN), our proposed PointNetGPD is lightweight and can directly process the 3D point cloud that locates within the gripper for grasp evaluation. Taking the raw point cloud as input, our proposed grasp evaluation network can capture the complex geometric structure of the contact area between the gripper and the object even if the point cloud is very sparse. To further improve our proposed model, we generate a larger-scale grasp dataset with 350k real point cloud and grasps with the YCB object set for training. The performance of the proposed model is quantitatively measured both in simulation and on robotic hardware. Experiments on object grasping and clutter removal show that our proposed model generalizes well to novel objects and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and video are available at \href{https://lianghongzhuo.github.io/PointNetGPD}{https://lianghongzhuo.github.io/PointNetGPD}Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2019. Hongzhuo Liang and Xiaojian Ma contributed equally to this wor

Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning

Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping can help displace objects to make pushing movements more precise and collision-free. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to discover and learn these synergies from scratch through model-free deep reinforcement learning. Our method involves training two fully convolutional networks that map from visual observations to actions: one infers the utility of pushes for a dense pixel-wise sampling of end effector orientations and locations, while the other does the same for grasping. Both networks are trained jointly in a Q-learning framework and are entirely self-supervised by trial and error, where rewards are provided from successful grasps. In this way, our policy learns pushing motions that enable future grasps, while learning grasps that can leverage past pushes. During picking experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios, we find that our system quickly learns complex behaviors amid challenging cases of clutter, and achieves better grasping success rates and picking efficiencies than baseline alternatives after only a few hours of training. We further demonstrate that our method is capable of generalizing to novel objects. Qualitative results (videos), code, pre-trained models, and simulation environments are available at http://vpg.cs.princeton.eduComment: To appear at the International Conference On Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2018. Project webpage: http://vpg.cs.princeton.edu Summary video: https://youtu.be/-OkyX7Zlhi

Support Relation Analysis for Objects in Multiple View RGB-D Images

Understanding physical relations between objects, especially their support relations, is crucial for robotic manipulation. There has been work on reasoning about support relations and structural stability of simple configurations in RGB-D images. In this paper, we propose a method for extracting more detailed physical knowledge from a set of RGB-D images taken from the same scene but from different views using qualitative reasoning and intuitive physical models. Rather than providing a simple contact relation graph and approximating stability over convex shapes, our method is able to provide a detailed supporting relation analysis based on a volumetric representation. Specifically, true supporting relations between objects (e.g., if an object supports another object by touching it on the side or if the object above contributes to the stability of the object below) are identified. We apply our method to real-world structures captured in warehouse scenarios and show our method works as desired

Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional inputs, these algorithms are generally intractable to deploy on real robots due to sample complexity. We use self-supervision to learn a compact and multimodal representation of our sensory inputs, which can then be used to improve the sample efficiency of our policy learning. We evaluate our method on a peg insertion task, generalizing over different geometry, configurations, and clearances, while being robust to external perturbations. Results for simulated and real robot experiments are presented.Comment: ICRA 201

Improved Adversarial Systems for 3D Object Generation and Reconstruction

This paper describes a new approach for training generative adversarial networks (GAN) to understand the detailed 3D shape of objects. While GANs have been used in this domain previously, they are notoriously hard to train, especially for the complex joint data distribution over 3D objects of many categories and orientations. Our method extends previous work by employing the Wasserstein distance normalized with gradient penalization as a training objective. This enables improved generation from the joint object shape distribution. Our system can also reconstruct 3D shape from 2D images and perform shape completion from occluded 2.5D range scans. We achieve notable quantitative improvements in comparison to existing baselinesComment: 10 pages, accepted at CORL. Figures are best view in color, and details only appear when zoomed i

RevealNet: Seeing Behind Objects in RGB-D Scans

During 3D reconstruction, it is often the case that people cannot scan each individual object from all views, resulting in missing geometry in the captured scan. This missing geometry can be fundamentally limiting for many applications, e.g., a robot needs to know the unseen geometry to perform a precise grasp on an object. Thus, we introduce the task of semantic instance completion: from an incomplete RGB-D scan of a scene, we aim to detect the individual object instances and infer their complete object geometry. This will open up new possibilities for interactions with objects in a scene, for instance for virtual or robotic agents. We tackle this problem by introducing RevealNet, a new data-driven approach that jointly detects object instances and predicts their complete geometry. This enables a semantically meaningful decomposition of a scanned scene into individual, complete 3D objects, including hidden and unobserved object parts. RevealNet is an end-to-end 3D neural network architecture that leverages joint color and geometry feature learning. The fully-convolutional nature of our 3D network enables efficient inference of semantic instance completion for 3D scans at scale of large indoor environments in a single forward pass. We show that predicting complete object geometry improves both 3D detection and instance segmentation performance. We evaluate on both real and synthetic scan benchmark data for the new task, where we outperform state-of-the-art approaches by over 15 in [email protected] on ScanNet, and over 18 in [email protected] on SUNCG.Comment: CVPR 202