Decoupling Skill Learning from Robotic Control for Generalizable Object Manipulation

Kai Lu, Bo Yang, Bing Wang, Andrew Markham

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to unseen objects. We conjecture that this is due to the high-dimensional action space for joint control. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and separate the task of learning 'what to do' from 'how to do it' i.e., whole-body control. We pose the RL problem as one of determining the skill dynamics for a disembodied virtual manipulator interacting with articulated objects. The whole-body robotic kinematic control is optimized to execute the high-dimensional joint motion to reach the goals in the workspace. It does so by solving a quadratic programming (QP) model with robotic singularity and kinematic constraints. Our experiments on manipulating complex articulated objects show that the proposed approach is more generalizable to unseen objects with large intra-class variations, outperforming previous approaches. The evaluation results indicate that our approach generates more compliant robotic motion and outperforms the pure RL and IL baselines in task success rates. Additional information and videos are available at https://kl-research.github.io/decoupskill.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - ICRA 2023
Subtitle of host publicationIEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages864-870
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9798350323658
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2023 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 29 May 20232 Jun 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Volume2023-May
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period29/05/232/06/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence

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