Search for: All records

The task of “relative placement” is to predict the placement of one object in relation to another, e.g. placing a mug onto a mug rack. Through explicit object-centric geometric reasoning, recent methods for relative placement have made tremendous progress towards data-efficient learning for robot manipulation while generalizing to unseen task variations. However, they have yet to represent deformable transformations, despite the ubiquity of non-rigid bodies in real world settings. As a first step towards bridging this gap, we propose “cross-displacement” - an extension of the principles of relative placement to geometric relationships between deformable objects - and present a novel vision-based method to learn cross-displacement through dense diffusion. To this end, we demonstrate our method’s ability to generalize to unseen object instances, out- of-distribution scene configurations, and multimodal goals on multiple highly deformable tasks (both in simulation and in the real world) beyond the scope of prior works. 

We introduce a novel approach to manipulate articulated objects with ambiguities, such as opening a door, in which multi-modality and occlusions create ambiguities about the opening side and direction. Multi-modality occurs when the method to open a fully closed door (push, pull, slide) is uncertain, or the side from which it should be opened is uncertain. Occlusions further obscure the door’s shape from certain angles, creating further ambiguities during the occlusion. To tackle these challenges, we propose a history-aware diffusion network that models the multi-modal distribution of the articulated object and uses history to disambiguate actions and make stable predictions under occlusions. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the state-of-art performance of our method and specifically improvements in ambiguity-caused failure modes. Our project website is available at https://flowbothd.github.io/.