17 research outputs found
Learning to Rearrange Deformable Cables, Fabrics, and Bags with Goal-Conditioned Transporter Networks
Rearranging and manipulating deformable objects such as cables, fabrics, and
bags is a long-standing challenge in robotic manipulation. The complex dynamics
and high-dimensional configuration spaces of deformables, compared to rigid
objects, make manipulation difficult not only for multi-step planning, but even
for goal specification. Goals cannot be as easily specified as rigid object
poses, and may involve complex relative spatial relations such as "place the
item inside the bag". In this work, we develop a suite of simulated benchmarks
with 1D, 2D, and 3D deformable structures, including tasks that involve
image-based goal-conditioning and multi-step deformable manipulation. We
propose embedding goal-conditioning into Transporter Networks, a recently
proposed model architecture for learning robotic manipulation that rearranges
deep features to infer displacements that can represent pick and place actions.
We demonstrate that goal-conditioned Transporter Networks enable agents to
manipulate deformable structures into flexibly specified configurations without
test-time visual anchors for target locations. We also significantly extend
prior results using Transporter Networks for manipulating deformable objects by
testing on tasks with 2D and 3D deformables. Supplementary material is
available at https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/bags/.Comment: See https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/bags/ for project website
and code; v2 corrects some BibTeX entries, v3 is ICRA 2021 version (minor
revisions
Robotic Table Tennis: A Case Study into a High Speed Learning System
We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in
previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with
a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets.
This system puts together a highly optimized perception subsystem, a high-speed
low-latency robot controller, a simulation paradigm that can prevent damage in
the real world and also train policies for zero-shot transfer, and automated
real world environment resets that enable autonomous training and evaluation on
physical robots. We complement a complete system description, including
numerous design decisions that are typically not widely disseminated, with a
collection of studies that clarify the importance of mitigating various sources
of latency, accounting for training and deployment distribution shifts,
robustness of the perception system, sensitivity to policy hyper-parameters,
and choice of action space. A video demonstrating the components of the system
and details of experimental results can be found at
https://youtu.be/uFcnWjB42I0.Comment: Published and presented at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS2023
Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles 2018 (MISEV2018):a position statement of the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles and update of the MISEV2014 guidelines
The last decade has seen a sharp increase in the number of scientific publications describing physiological and pathological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs), a collective term covering various subtypes of cell-released, membranous structures, called exosomes, microvesicles, microparticles, ectosomes, oncosomes, apoptotic bodies, and many other names. However, specific issues arise when working with these entities, whose size and amount often make them difficult to obtain as relatively pure preparations, and to characterize properly. The International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) proposed Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles (“MISEV”) guidelines for the field in 2014. We now update these “MISEV2014” guidelines based on evolution of the collective knowledge in the last four years. An important point to consider is that ascribing a specific function to EVs in general, or to subtypes of EVs, requires reporting of specific information beyond mere description of function in a crude, potentially contaminated, and heterogeneous preparation. For example, claims that exosomes are endowed with exquisite and specific activities remain difficult to support experimentally, given our still limited knowledge of their specific molecular machineries of biogenesis and release, as compared with other biophysically similar EVs. The MISEV2018 guidelines include tables and outlines of suggested protocols and steps to follow to document specific EV-associated functional activities. Finally, a checklist is provided with summaries of key points