Jikai Ye

Jikai Ye, Wanze Li, Shiraz Khan et al.

Cloth state estimation is an important problem in robotics. It is essential for the robot to know the accurate state to manipulate cloth and execute tasks such as robotic dressing, stitching, and covering/uncovering human beings. However, estimating cloth state accurately remains challenging due to its high flexibility and self-occlusion. This paper proposes a diffusion model-based pipeline that formulates the cloth state estimation as an image generation problem by representing the cloth state as an RGB image that describes the point-wise translation (translation map) between a pre-defined flattened mesh and the deformed mesh in a canonical space. Then we train a conditional diffusion-based image generation model to predict the translation map based on an observation. Experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate the performance of our method. Results indicate that our method outperforms two recent methods in both accuracy and speed.

Hongtao Wu, Jikai Ye, Xin Meng et al.

Rearrangement tasks have been identified as a crucial challenge for intelligent robotic manipulation, but few methods allow for precise construction of unseen structures. We propose a visual foresight model for pick-and-place rearrangement manipulation which is able to learn efficiently. In addition, we develop a multi-modal action proposal module which builds on the Goal-Conditioned Transporter Network, a state-of-the-art imitation learning method. Our image-based task planning method, Transporters with Visual Foresight, is able to learn from only a handful of data and generalize to multiple unseen tasks in a zero-shot manner. TVF is able to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art imitation learning method on unseen tasks in simulation and real robot experiments. In particular, the average success rate on unseen tasks improves from 55.4% to 78.5% in simulation experiments and from 30% to 63.3% in real robot experiments when given only tens of expert demonstrations. Video and code are available on our project website: https://chirikjianlab.github.io/tvf/