Ce Hao

Qiaojun Yu, Junbo Wang, Wenhai Liu et al.

Articulated objects like cabinets and doors are widespread in daily life. However, directly manipulating 3D articulated objects is challenging because they have diverse geometrical shapes, semantic categories, and kinetic constraints. Prior works mostly focused on recognizing and manipulating articulated objects with specific joint types. They can either estimate the joint parameters or distinguish suitable grasp poses to facilitate trajectory planning. Although these approaches have succeeded in certain types of articulated objects, they lack generalizability to unseen objects, which significantly impedes their application in broader scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Generalizable Articulation Modeling and Manipulating for Articulated Objects (GAMMA), which learns both articulation modeling and grasp pose affordance from diverse articulated objects with different categories. In addition, GAMMA adopts adaptive manipulation to iteratively reduce the modeling errors and enhance manipulation performance. We train GAMMA with the PartNet-Mobility dataset and evaluate with comprehensive experiments in SAPIEN simulation and real-world Franka robot. Results show that GAMMA significantly outperforms SOTA articulation modeling and manipulation algorithms in unseen and cross-category articulated objects. We will open-source all codes and datasets in both simulation and real robots for reproduction in the final version. Images and videos are published on the project website at: http://sites.google.com/view/gamma-articulation

Qiaojun Yu, Ce Hao, Junbo Wang et al.

Robotic manipulation in everyday scenarios, especially in unstructured environments, requires skills in pose-aware object manipulation (POM), which adapts robots' grasping and handling according to an object's 6D pose. Recognizing an object's position and orientation is crucial for effective manipulation. For example, if a mug is lying on its side, it's more effective to grasp it by the rim rather than the handle. Despite its importance, research in POM skills remains limited, because learning manipulation skills requires pose-varying simulation environments and datasets. This paper introduces ManiPose, a pioneering benchmark designed to advance the study of pose-varying manipulation tasks. ManiPose encompasses: 1) Simulation environments for POM feature tasks ranging from 6D pose-specific pick-and-place of single objects to cluttered scenes, further including interactions with articulated objects. 2) A comprehensive dataset featuring geometrically consistent and manipulation-oriented 6D pose labels for 2936 real-world scanned rigid objects and 100 articulated objects across 59 categories. 3) A baseline for POM, leveraging the inferencing abilities of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) to analyze the relationship between 6D pose and task-specific requirements, offers enhanced pose-aware grasp prediction and motion planning capabilities. Our benchmark demonstrates notable advancements in pose estimation, pose-aware manipulation, and real-robot skill transfer, setting new standards for POM research. We will open-source the ManiPose benchmark with the final version paper, inviting the community to engage with our resources, available at our website:https://sites.google.com/view/manipose.

Qiaojun Yu, Ce Hao, Xibin Yuan et al.

Manipulating articulated objects with robotic arms is challenging due to the complex kinematic structure, which requires precise part segmentation for efficient manipulation. In this work, we introduce a novel superpoint-based perception method designed to improve part segmentation in 3D point clouds of articulated objects. We propose a learnable, part-aware superpoint generation technique that efficiently groups points based on their geometric and semantic similarities, resulting in clearer part boundaries. Furthermore, by leveraging the segmentation capabilities of the 2D foundation model SAM, we identify the centers of pixel regions and select corresponding superpoints as candidate query points. Integrating a query-based transformer decoder further enhances our method's ability to achieve precise part segmentation. Experimental results on the GAPartNet dataset show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in cross-category part segmentation, achieving AP50 scores of 77.9% for seen categories (4.4% improvement) and $39.3\%$ for unseen categories (11.6% improvement), with superior results in 5 out of 9 part categories for seen objects and outperforming all previous methods across all part categories for unseen objects.