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Register a new userLearning Efficient Constraint Graph Sampling for Robotic Sequential Manipulation
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Added by
Joaquim Ortiz-Haro
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Efficient sampling from constraint manifolds, and thereby generating a diverse set of solutions for feasibility problems, is a fundamental challenge. We consider the case where a problem is factored, that is, the underlying nonlinear program is decomposed into differentiable equality and inequality constraints, each of which depends only on some variables. Such problems are at the core of efficient and robust sequential robot manipulation planning. Naive sequential conditional sampling of individual variables, as well as fully joint sampling of all variables at once (e.g., leveraging optimization methods), can be highly inefficient and non-robust. We propose a novel framework to learn how to break the overall problem into smaller sequential sampling problems. Specifically, we leverage Monte-Carlo Tree Search to learn assignment orders for the variable-subsets, in order to minimize the computation time to generate feasible full samples. This strategy allows us to efficiently compute a set of diverse valid robot configurations for mode-switches within sequential manipulation tasks, which are waypoints for subsequent trajectory optimization or sampling-based motion planning algorithms. We show that the learning method quickly converges to the best sampling strategy for a given problem, and outperforms user-defined orderings or fully joint optimization, while providing a higher sample diversity.
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Despite the success of reinforcement learning methods, they have yet to have their breakthrough moment when applied to a broad range of robotic manipulation tasks. This is partly due to the fact that reinforcement learning algorithms are notoriously difficult and time consuming to train, which is exacerbated when training from images rather than full-state inputs. As humans perform manipulation tasks, our eyes closely monitor every step of the process with our gaze focusing sequentially on the objects being manipulated. With this in mind, we present our Attention-driven Robotic Manipulation (ARM) algorithm, which is a general manipulation algorithm that can be applied to a range of sparse-rewarded tasks, given only a small number of demonstrations. ARM splits the complex task of manipulation into a 3 stage pipeline: (1) a Q-attention agent extracts interesting pixel locations from RGB and point cloud inputs, (2) a next-best pose agent that accepts crops from the Q-attention agent and outputs poses, and (3) a control agent that takes the goal pose and outputs joint actions. We show that current learning algorithms fail on a range of RLBench tasks, whilst ARM is successful.
Reflecting on the last few years, the biggest breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have been in the discrete action domain. Robotic manipulation, however, is inherently a continuous control environment, but these continuous control reinforcement learning algorithms often depend on actor-critic methods that are sample-inefficient and inherently difficult to train, due to the joint optimisation of the actor and critic. To that end, we explore how we can bring the stability of discrete action RL algorithms to the robot manipulation domain. We extend the recently released ARM algorithm, by replacing the continuous next-best pose agent with a discrete next-best pose agent. Discretisation of rotation is trivial given its bounded nature, while translation is inherently unbounded, making discretisation difficult. We formulate the translation prediction as the voxel prediction problem by discretising the 3D space; however, voxelisation of a large workspace is memory intensive and would not work with a high density of voxels, crucial to obtaining the resolution needed for robotic manipulation. We therefore propose to apply this voxel prediction in a coarse-to-fine manner by gradually increasing the resolution. In each step, we extract the highest valued voxel as the predicted location, which is then used as the centre of the higher-resolution voxelisation in the next step. This coarse-to-fine prediction is applied over several steps, giving a near-lossless prediction of the translation. We show that our new coarse-to-fine algorithm is able to accomplish RLBench tasks much more efficiently than the continuous control equivalent, and even train some real-world tasks, tabular rasa, in less than 7 minutes, with only 3 demonstrations. Moreover, we show that by moving to a voxel representation, we are able to easily incorporate observations from multiple cameras.
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated its potential to learn complex robotic manipulation tasks. However, RL still requires the robot to collect a large amount of real-world experience. To address this problem, recent works have proposed learning from expert demonstrations (LfD), particularly via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), given its ability to achieve robust performance with only a small number of expert demonstrations. Nevertheless, deploying IRL on real robots is still challenging due to the large number of robot experiences it requires. This paper aims to address this scalability challenge with a robust, sample-efficient, and general meta-IRL algorithm, SQUIRL, that performs a new but related long-horizon task robustly given only a single video demonstration. First, this algorithm bootstraps the learning of a task encoder and a task-conditioned policy using behavioral cloning (BC). It then collects real-robot experiences and bypasses reward learning by directly recovering a Q-function from the combined robot and expert trajectories. Next, this algorithm uses the Q-function to re-evaluate all cumulative experiences collected by the robot to improve the policy quickly. In the end, the policy performs more robustly (90%+ success) than BC on new tasks while requiring no trial-and-errors at test time. Finally, our real-robot and simulated experiments demonstrate our algorithms generality across different state spaces, action spaces, and vision-based manipulation tasks, e.g., pick-pour-place and pick-carry-drop.
We present DeepClaw as a reconfigurable benchmark of robotic hardware and task hierarchy for robot learning. The DeepClaw benchmark aims at a mechatronics perspective of the robot learning problem, which features a minimum design of robot cell that can be easily reconfigured to host robot hardware from various vendors, including manipulators, grippers, cameras, desks, and objects, aiming at a streamlined collection of physical manipulation data and evaluation of the learned skills for hardware benchmarking. We provide a detailed design of the robot cell with readily available parts to build the experiment environment that can host a wide range of robotic hardware commonly adopted for robot learning. We also propose a hierarchical pipeline of software integration, including localization, recognition, grasp planning, and motion planning, to streamline learning-based robot control, data collection, and experiment validation towards shareability and reproducibility. We present benchmarking results of the DeepClaw system for a baseline Tic-Tac-Toe task, a bin-clearing task, and a jigsaw puzzle task using three sets of standard robotic hardware. Our results show that tasks defined in DeepClaw can be easily reproduced on three robot cells. Under the same task setup, the differences in robotic hardware used will present a non-negligible impact on the performance metrics of robot learning. All design layouts and codes are hosted on Github for open access.
Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in both domestic and industrial domains, the objects of interest can be soft, or deformable, and hard to model analytically. For such cases, we posit that a data-driven modelling approach is more suitable. In recent years, progress in deep generative models has produced methods that learn to `imagine plausible images from data. Building on the recent Causal InfoGAN generative model, in this work we learn to imagine goal-directed object manipulation directly from raw image data of self-supervised interaction of the robot with the object. After learning, given a goal observation of the system, our model can generate an imagined plan -- a sequence of images that transition the object into the desired goal. To execute the plan, we use it as a reference trajectory to track with a visual servoing controller, which we also learn from the data as an inverse dynamics model. In a simulated manipulation task, we show that separating the problem into visual planning and visual tracking control is more sample efficient and more interpretable than alternative data-driven approaches. We further demonstrate our approach on learning to imagine and execute in 3 environments, the final of which is deformable rope manipulation on a PR2 robot.
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