Robotics: Science and Systems XVII

Ab Initio Particle-based Object Manipulation

Siwei Chen, Xiao Ma, Yunfan Lu, David Hsu

Abstract:

This paper presents Particle-based Object Manipulation (PROMPT); a new approach to robot manipulation of novel objects ab initio; without prior object models or pre-training on a large object data set. The key element of PROMPT is a particle-based object representation; in which each particle represents a point in the object; the local geometric; physical; and other features of the point; and also its relation with other particles. Like the model-based analytic approaches to manipulation; the particle representation enables the robot to reason about the object's geometry and dynamics in order to choose suitable manipulation actions. Like the data-driven approaches; the particle representation is inferred online in real-time from visual sensor input; specifically; multi-view RGB images. The particle representation thus connects visual perception with robot control. PROMPT combines the benefits of both model-based reasoning and data-driven learning. We show empirically that PROMPT successfully handles a variety of everyday objects; some of which are transparent. It handles various manipulation tasks; including grasping; pushing; etc;. Our experiments also show that PROMPT outperforms a state-of-the-art data-driven grasping method on the daily objects; even though it does not use any offline training data.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{ChenS-RSS-21, 
    AUTHOR    = {Siwei Chen AND Xiao Ma AND Yunfan Lu AND David Hsu}, 
    TITLE     = {{Ab Initio Particle-based Object Manipulation}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2021}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Virtual}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2021.XVII.071} 
}