Learning Fabric Manipulation in the Real World
with Human Videos
Robert Lee, Jad Abou-Chakra, Fangyi Zhang, Peter Corke
Preprint Available at: arXiv
Embedded Files
Human Demos
Learned Behaviour
Fabric manipulation is a long standing challenge in robotics due to the enormous state space and complex dynamics. Learning approaches stand out as promising for this domain as they allow us to learn behaviours directly from data. Most prior methods however rely heavily on simulation, which is still limited by the large sim-to-real gap of deformable objects, or rely on large datasets. A promising alternative is to learn fabric manipulation directly from watching humans perform the task. In this work, we explore how demonstrations for fabric manipulation tasks can be collected directly by human hands, providing an extremely natural and fast data collection pipeline. Then, using only a handful of such demonstrations, we show how a sample-efficient pick-and-place policy can be learned and deployed on a real robot, without any robot data collection at all. We demonstrate our approach on a fabric folding task, showing that our policy can reliably reach folded states from crumpled initial configurations.
Unseen Fabric (Wash Cloth)
Unseen Cloth + Human Perturbations
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