Abstract
Flexible pick-and-place is a fundamental yet challenging task within robotics, in particular due to the need of an object model for a simple target pose definition. In this work, the robot instead learns to pick-and-place objects using planar manipulation according to a single, demonstrated goal state. Our primary contribution lies within combining robot learning of primitives, commonly estimated by fully-convolutional neural networks, with one-shot imitation learning. Therefore, we define the place reward as a contrastive loss between real-world measurements and a task-specific noise distribution. Furthermore, we design our system to learn in a self-supervised manner, enabling real-world experiments with up to 25000 pick-and-place actions. Then, our robot is able to place trained objects with an average placement error of 2.7 (0.2) mm and 2.6 (0.8){\deg}. As our approach does not require an object model, the robot is able to generalize to unknown objects while keeping a precision of 5.9 (1.1) mm and 4.1 (1.2){\deg}. We further show a range of emerging behaviors: The robot naturally learns to select the correct object in the presence of multiple object types, precisely inserts objects within a peg game, picks screws out of dense clutter, and infers multiple pick-and-place actions from a single goal state.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 4828 - 4835 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters |
Volume | 5 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 19 Jun 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2020 |
Bibliographical note
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTWe would like to thank Tamim Asfour for his helpful suggestions and discussions.
Keywords
- reinforcement learning
- Deep learning in grasping and manipulation
- imitation learning