Accurate Vision-based Manipulation through Contact Reasoning

© 2020 IEEE. Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing contact-based tasks often suffers from low accu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bauza, Maria, Wu, Jiajun, Tenenbaum, Joshua B, Rodriguez, Alberto
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138353.2
Description
Summary:© 2020 IEEE. Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing contact-based tasks often suffers from low accuracy. We present an approach that addresses these two challenges for the problem of vision-based manipulation. First, we propose to disentangle contact from motion optimization. Thereby, we improve planning efficiency by focusing computation on promising contact locations. Second, we use a hybrid approach for perception and state estimation that combines neural networks with a physically meaningful state representation. In simulation and real-world experiments on the task of planar pushing, we show that our method is more efficient and achieves a higher manipulation accuracy than previous vision-based approaches.