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This work proposes a robotic pipeline for picking and constrained placement of objects without geometric shape priors. Compared to recent efforts developed for similar tasks, where every object was assumed to be novel, the proposed system recognizes previously manipulated objects and performs online model reconstruction and reuse. Over a lifelong manipulation process, the system keeps learning features of objects it has interacted with and updates their reconstructed models. Whenever an instance of a previously manipulated object reappears, the system aims to first recognize it and then register its previously reconstructed model given the current observation. This step greatly reduces object shape uncertainty allowing the system to even reason for parts of objects, which are currently not observable. This also results in better manipulation efficiency as it reduces the need for active perception of the target object during manipulation. To get a reusable reconstructed model, the proposed pipeline adopts: i) TSDF for object representation, and ii) a variant of the standard particle filter algorithm for pose estimation and tracking of the partial object model. Furthermore, an effective way to construct and maintain a dataset of manipulated objects is presented. A sequence of real-world manipulation experiments is performed. They show how future manipulation tasks become more effective and efficient by reusing reconstructed models of previously manipulated objects, which were generated during their prior manipulation, instead of treating objects as novel every time. 

This paper introduces key machine learning operations that allow the realization of robust, joint 6D pose estimation of multiple instances of objects either densely packed or in unstructured piles from RGB-D data. The first objective is to learn semantic and instance-boundary detectors without manual labeling. An adversarial training framework in conjunction with physics-based simulation is used to achieve detectors that behave similarly in synthetic and real data. Given the stochastic output of such detectors, candidates for object poses are sampled. The second objective is to automatically learn a single score for each pose candidate that represents its quality in terms of explaining the entire scene via a gradient boosted tree. The proposed method uses features derived from surface and boundary alignment between the observed scene and the object model placed at hypothesized poses. Scene-level, multi-instance pose estimation is then achieved by an integer linear programming process that selects hypotheses that maximize the sum of the learned individual scores, while respecting constraints, such as avoiding collisions. To evaluate this method, a dataset of densely packed objects with challenging setups for state-of-the-art approaches is collected. Experiments on this dataset and a public one show that the method significantly outperforms alternatives in terms of 6D pose accuracy while trained only with synthetic datasets. 

This paper focuses on vision-based pose estimation for multiple rigid objects placed in clutter, especially in cases involving occlusions and objects resting on each other. Progress has been achieved recently in object recognition given advancements in deep learning. Nevertheless, such tools typically require a large amount of training data and significant manual effort to label objects. This limits their applicability in robotics, where solutions must scale to a large number of objects and variety of conditions. Moreover, the combinatorial nature of the scenes that could arise from the placement of multiple objects is hard to capture in the training dataset. Thus, the learned models might not produce the desired level of precision required for tasks, such as robotic manipulation. This work proposes an autonomous process for pose estimation that spans from data generation to scene-level reasoning and self-learning. In particular, the proposed framework first generates a labeled dataset for training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for object detection in clutter. These detections are used to guide a scene-level optimization process, which considers the interactions between the different objects present in the clutter to output pose estimates of high precision. Furthermore, confident estimates are used to label online real images from multiple views and re-train the process in a self-learning pipeline. Experimental results indicate that this process is quickly able to identify in cluttered scenes physically-consistent object poses that are more precise than the ones found by reasoning over individual instances of objects. Furthermore, the quality of pose estimates increases over time given the self-learning process. 

Accurate pose estimation is often a requirement for robust robotic grasping and manipulation of objects placed in cluttered, tight environments, such as a shelf with multiple objects. When deep learning approaches are employed to perform this task, they typically require a large amount of training data. However, obtaining precise 6 degrees of freedom for ground-truth can be prohibitively expensive. This work therefore proposes an architecture and a training process to solve this issue. More precisely, we present a weak object detector that enables localizing objects and estimating their 6D poses in cluttered and occluded scenes. To minimize the human labor required for annotations, the proposed detector is trained with a combination of synthetic and a few weakly annotated real images (as little as 10 images per object), for which a human provides only a list of objects present in each image (no time-consuming annotations, such as bounding boxes, segmentation masks and object poses). To close the gap between real and synthetic images, we use multiple domain classifiers trained adversarially. During the inference phase, the resulting class-specific heatmaps of the weak detector are used to guide the search of 6D poses of objects. Our proposed approach is evaluated on several publicly available datasets for pose estimation. We also evaluated our model on classification and localization in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. The results clearly indicate that this approach could provide an efficient way toward fully automating the training process of computer vision models used in robotics.