Abstract:

Building general-purpose robots to perform a diverse range of tasks in a large variety of environments in the physical world at the human level is extremely challenging. It requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable, compositional, and incremental. In this work, we introduce a systematic learning framework called SAGCI-system towards achieving these above four requirements. Our system first takes the raw point clouds gathered by the camera mounted on the robot's wrist as the inputs and produces initial modeling of the surrounding environment represented as a file of Unified Robot Description Format (URDF). Our system adopts a learning-augmented differentiable simulation that loads the URDF. The robot then utilizes the interactive perception to interact with the environment to online verify and modify the URDF. Leveraging the differentiable simulation, we propose a model-based learning algorithm combining object-centric and robot-centric stages to efficiently produce policies to accomplish manipulation tasks. We apply our system to perform articulated object manipulation tasks, both in the simulation and the real world. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning framework. Supplemental materials and videos are available on the project website.

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{lv2022sagci,

    title={SAGCI-System: Towards Sample-Efficient, Generalizable, Compositional, and Incremental Robot Learning},

    author={Lv, Jun and Yu, Qiaojun and Shao, Lin and Liu, Wenhai and Xu, Wenqiang and Lu, Cewu},

    booktitle={2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},

    year={2022},

    organization={IEEE}}

Note that we do not use the default visualization provided by the nimble. We implement our own visualization module, which we will release later.

Supplementary Material: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S3140czuBEtiXXmprJheqe_OPUyVmSuV/view?usp=sharing