TY - GEN
T1 - Decoupling Skill Learning from Robotic Control for Generalizable Object Manipulation
AU - Lu, Kai
AU - Yang, Bo
AU - Wang, Bing
AU - Markham, Andrew
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85168667746&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160332
DO - 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160332
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85168667746
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
SP - 864
EP - 870
BT - Proceedings - ICRA 2023
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2023
Y2 - 29 May 2023 through 2 June 2023
ER -