To perform manipulation tasks in the real world, robots need to operate on objects with various shapes, sizes and without access to geometric models. To achieve this it is often infeasible to train monolithic neural network policies across such large variations in object properties. Towards this generalization challenge, we propose to learn modular task policies which compose object-centric task-axes controllers. These task-axes controllers are parameterized by properties associated with underlying objects in the scene. We infer these controller parameters directly from visual input using multi- view dense correspondence learning. Our overall approach provides a simple and yet powerful framework for learning manipulation tasks. We empirically evaluate our approach on 3 different manipulation tasks and show its ability to generalize to large variance in object size, shape and geometry.
Learning to Compose Hierarchical Object-Centric Controllers for Robotic Manipulation
Manipulation tasks can often be decomposed into multiple subtasks performed in parallel, e.g., sliding an object to a goal pose while maintaining con- tact with a table. Individual subtasks can be achieved by task-axis controllers defined relative to the objects being manipulated, and a set of object-centric controllers can be combined in an hierarchy. In prior works, such combinations are defined manually or learned from demonstrations. By contrast, we propose using reinforcement learning to dynamically compose hierarchical object-centric controllers for manipulation tasks. Experiments in both simulation and real world show how the proposed approach leads to improved sample efficiency, zero-shot generalization to novel test environments, and simulation-to-reality transfer with- out fine-tuning.
- Award ID(s):
- 1925130
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10293204
- Journal Name:
- Conference on Robot Learning
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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