Halid Abdulrahim Kadi

Halid Abdulrahim Kadi, Jose Alex Chandy, Luis Figueredo et al.

Comparing robotic cloth-manipulation systems in a real-world setup is challenging. The fidelity gap between simulation-trained cloth neural controllers and real-world operation hinders the reliable deployment of these methods in physical trials. Inconsistent experimental setups and hardware limitations among different approaches obstruct objective evaluations. This study demonstrates a reliable real-world comparison of different simulation-trained neural controllers on both flattening and folding tasks with different types of fabrics varying in material, size, and colour. We introduce the DRAPER framework to enable this comprehensive study, which reliably reflects the true capabilities of these neural controllers. It specifically addresses real-world grasping errors, such as misgrasping and multilayer grasping, through real-world adaptations of the simulation environment to provide data trajectories that closely reflect real-world grasping scenarios. It also employs a special set of vision processing techniques to close the simulation-to-reality gap in the perception. Furthermore, it achieves robust grasping by adopting a tweezer-extended gripper and a grasping procedure. We demonstrate DRAPER's generalisability across different deep-learning methods and robotic platforms, offering valuable insights to the cloth manipulation research community.

Halid Abdulrahim Kadi, Kasim Terzic

Why do Recurrent State Space Models such as PlaNet fail at cloth manipulation tasks? Recent work has attributed this to the blurry prediction of the observation, which makes it difficult to plan directly in the latent space. This paper explores the reasons behind this by applying PlaNet in the pick-and-place fabric-flattening domain. We find that the sharp discontinuity of the transition function on the contour of the fabric makes it difficult to learn an accurate latent dynamic model, causing the MPC planner to produce pick actions slightly outside of the article. By limiting picking space on the cloth mask and training on specially engineered trajectories, our mesh-free PlaNet-ClothPick surpasses visual planning and policy learning methods on principal metrics in simulation, achieving similar performance as state-of-the-art mesh-based planning approaches. Notably, our model exhibits a faster action inference and requires fewer transitional model parameters than the state-of-the-art robotic systems in this domain. Other supplementary materials are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/planet-clothpick.

Halid Abdulrahim Kadi, Kasim Terzić

Robotic research is inherently challenging, requiring expertise in diverse environments and control algorithms. Adapting algorithms to new environments often poses significant difficulties, compounded by the need for extensive hyper-parameter tuning in data-driven methods. To address these challenges, we present Agent-Arena, a Python framework designed to streamline the integration, replication, development, and testing of decision-making policies across a wide range of benchmark environments. Unlike existing frameworks, Agent-Arena is uniquely generalised to support all types of control algorithms and is adaptable to both simulation and real-robot scenarios. Please see our GitHub repository https://github.com/halid1020/agent-arena-v0.