Shiguang Sun

Shiguang Sun, Hanbo Zhang, Zeyang Liu et al.

Existing visual model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms with observation reconstruction often suffer from information conflicts, making it difficult to learn compact representations and hence result in less robust policies, especially in the presence of task-irrelevant visual distractions. In this paper, we first reveal that the information conflicts in current visual MBRL algorithms stem from visual representation learning and latent dynamics modeling with an information-theoretic perspective. Based on this finding, we present a new algorithm to resolve information conflicts for visual MBRL, named MInCo, which mitigates information conflicts by leveraging negative-free contrastive learning, aiding in learning invariant representation and robust policies despite noisy observations. To prevent the dominance of visual representation learning, we introduce time-varying reweighting to bias the learning towards dynamics modeling as training proceeds. We evaluate our method on several robotic control tasks with dynamic background distractions. Our experiments demonstrate that MInCo learns invariant representations against background noise and consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art visual MBRL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ShiguangSun/minco.

Hanbo Zhang, Jian Tang, Shiguang Sun et al.

Robotic Grasping has always been an active topic in robotics since grasping is one of the fundamental but most challenging skills of robots. It demands the coordination of robotic perception, planning, and control for robustness and intelligence. However, current solutions are still far behind humans, especially when confronting unstructured scenarios. In this paper, we survey the advances of robotic grasping, starting from the classical formulations and solutions to the modern ones. By reviewing the history of robotic grasping, we want to provide a complete view of this community, and perhaps inspire the combination and fusion of different ideas, which we think would be helpful to touch and explore the essence of robotic grasping problems. In detail, we firstly give an overview of the analytic methods for robotic grasping. After that, we provide a discussion on the recent state-of-the-art data-driven grasping approaches rising in recent years. With the development of computer vision, semantic grasping is being widely investigated and can be the basis of intelligent manipulation and skill learning for autonomous robotic systems in the future. Therefore, in our survey, we also briefly review the recent progress in this topic. Finally, we discuss the open problems and the future research directions that may be important for the human-level robustness, autonomy, and intelligence of robots.