Orienting objects is a critical component in the automation of many packing and assembly tasks. We present an algorithm to orient novel objects given a depth image of the object in its current and desired orientation. We formulate a self-supervised objective for this problem and train a deep neural network to estimate the 3D rotation as parameterized by a quaternion, between these current and desired depth images. We then use the trained network in a proportional controller to re-orient objects based on the estimated rotation between the two depth images. Results suggest that in simulation we can rotate unseen objects with unknown geometries by up to 30{deg} with a median angle error of 1.47{deg} over 100 random initial/desired orientations each for 22 novel objects. Experiments on physical objects suggest that the controller can achieve a median angle error of 4.2{deg} over 10 random initial/desired orientations each for 5 objects.
In industrial part kitting, 3D objects are inserted into cavities for transportation or subsequent assembly. Kitting is a critical step as it can decrease downstream processing and handling times and enable lower storage and shipping costs. We present Kit-Net, a framework for kitting previously unseen 3D objects into cavities given depth images of both the target cavity and an object held by a gripper in an unknown initial orientation. Kit-Net uses self-supervised deep learning and data augmentation to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to robustly estimate 3D rotations between objects and matching concave or convex cavities using a large training dataset of simulated depth images pairs. Kit-Net then uses the trained CNN to implement a controller to orient and position novel objects for insertion into novel prismatic and conformal 3D cavities. Experiments in simulation suggest that Kit-Net can orient objects to have a 98.9% average intersection volume between the object mesh and that of the target cavity. Physical experiments with industrial objects succeed in 18% of trials using a baseline method and in 63% of trials with Kit-Net. Video, code, and data are available at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/Kit-Net.
Humans learn to imitate by observing others. However, robot imitation learning generally requires expert demonstrations in the first-person view (FPV). Collecting such FPV videos for every robot could be very expensive. Third-person imitation learning (TPIL) is the concept of learning action policies by observing other agents in a third-person view (TPV), similar to what humans do. This ultimately allows utilizing human and robot demonstration videos in TPV from many different data sources, for the policy learning. In this paper, we present a TPIL approach for robot tasks with egomotion. Although many robot tasks with ground/aerial mobility often involve actions with camera egomotion, study on TPIL for such tasks has been limited. Here, FPV and TPV observations are visually very different; FPV shows egomotion while the agent appearance is only observable in TPV. To enable better state learning for TPIL, we propose our disentangled representation learning method. We use a dual auto-encoder structure plus representation permutation loss and time-contrastive loss to ensure the state and viewpoint representations are well disentangled. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.
While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors. Instead of learning a large collection of skills individually, can we instead enable a robot to propose and practice its own behaviors automatically, learning about the affordances and behaviors that it can perform in its environment, such that it can then repurpose this knowledge once a new task is commanded by the user? In this paper, we study this question in the context of self-supervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. A central challenge in this learning regime is the problem of goal setting: in order to practice useful skills, the robot must be able to autonomously set goals that are feasible but diverse. When the robots environment and available objects vary, as they do in most open-world settings, the robot must propose to itself only those goals that it can accomplish in its present setting with the objects that are at hand. Previous work only studies self-supervised goal-conditioned RL in a single-environment setting, where goal proposals come from the robots past experience or a generative model are sufficient. In more diverse settings, this frequently leads to impossible goals and, as we show experimentally, prevents effective learning. We propose a conditional goal-setting model that aims to propose goals that are feasible from the robots current state. We demonstrate that this enables self-supervised goal-conditioned off-policy learning with raw image observations in the real world, enabling a robot to manipulate a variety of objects and generalize to new objects that were not seen during training.
Human environments contain numerous objects configured in a variety of arrangements. Our goal is to enable robots to repose previously unseen objects according to learned semantic relationships in novel environments. We break this problem down into two parts: (1) finding physically valid locations for the objects and (2) determining if those poses satisfy learned, high-level semantic relationships. We build our models and training from the ground up to be tightly integrated with our proposed planning algorithm for semantic placement of unknown objects. We train our models purely in simulation, with no fine-tuning needed for use in the real world. Our approach enables motion planning for semantic rearrangement of unknown objects in scenes with varying geometry from only RGB-D sensing. Our experiments through a set of simulated ablations demonstrate that using a relational classifier alone is not sufficient for reliable planning. We further demonstrate the ability of our planner to generate and execute diverse manipulation plans through a set of real-world experiments with a variety of objects.
Machine learning analysis of longitudinal neuroimaging data is typically based on supervised learning, which requires a large number of ground-truth labels to be informative. As ground-truth labels are often missing or expensive to obtain in neuroscience, we avoid them in our analysis by combing factor disentanglement with self-supervised learning to identify changes and consistencies across the multiple MRIs acquired of each individual over time. Specifically, we propose a new definition of disentanglement by formulating a multivariate mapping between factors (e.g., brain age) associated with an MRI and a latent image representation. Then, factors that evolve across acquisitions of longitudinal sequences are disentangled from that mapping by self-supervised learning in such a way that changes in a single factor induce change along one direction in the representation space. We implement this model, named Longitudinal Self-Supervised Learning (LSSL), via a standard autoencoding structure with a cosine loss to disentangle brain age from the image representation. We apply LSSL to two longitudinal neuroimaging studies to highlight its strength in extracting the brain-age information from MRI and revealing informative characteristics associated with neurodegenerative and neuropsychological disorders. Moreover, the representations learned by LSSL facilitate supervised classification by recording faster convergence and higher (or similar) prediction accuracy compared to several other representation learning techniques.