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Manipulating an articulated object requires perceiving its kinematic hierarchy: its parts, how each can move, and how those motions are coupled. Previous work has explored perception for kinematics, but none infers a complete kinematic hierarchy on never-before-seen object instances, without relying on a schema or template. We present a novel perception system that achieves this goal. Our system infers the moving parts of an object and the kinematic couplings that relate them. To infer parts, it uses a point cloud instance segmentation neural network and to infer kinematic hierarchies, it uses a graph neural network to predict the existence, direction, and type of edges (i.e. joints) that relate the inferred parts. We train these networks using simulated scans of synthetic 3D models. We evaluate our system on simulated scans of 3D objects, and we demonstrate a proof-of-concept use of our system to drive real-world robotic manipulation.
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VAT-Mart: Learning Visual Action Trajectory Proposals for Manipulating 3D ARTiculated Objects
Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects (e.g., cabinets, doors) in human environments is an important yet challenging task for future home-assistant robots. The space of 3D articulated objects is exceptionally rich in their myriad semantic categories, diverse shape geometry, and complicated part functionality. Previous works mostly abstract kinematic structure with estimated joint parameters and part poses as the visual representations for manipulating 3D articulated objects. In this paper, we propose object-centric actionable visual priors as a novel perception-interaction handshaking point that the perception system outputs more actionable guidance than kinematic structure estimation, by predicting dense geometry-aware, interaction-aware, and task-aware visual action affordance and trajectory proposals. We design an interaction-for-perception framework VAT-Mart to learn such actionable visual representations by simultaneously training a curiosity-driven reinforcement learning policy exploring diverse interaction trajectories and a perception module summarizing and generalizing the explored knowledge for pointwise predictions among diverse shapes. Experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach using the large-scale PartNet-Mobility dataset in SAPIEN environment and show promising generalization capabilities to novel test shapes, unseen object categories, and real-world data.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1763268
- PAR ID:
- 10381764
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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