Learning 3D Part Assembly from a Single Image
This work addresses the underexplored task specification problem in autonomous robot assembly, focusing on furniture assembly from a single image, which is an incremental advancement in robotics.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D part assembly from a single image, specifically for furniture, by introducing a learning-based solution that addresses challenges like part ambiguity and 3D pose prediction, and demonstrates effectiveness in synthetic experiments compared to baselines.
Autonomous assembly is a crucial capability for robots in many applications. For this task, several problems such as obstacle avoidance, motion planning, and actuator control have been extensively studied in robotics. However, when it comes to task specification, the space of possibilities remains underexplored. Towards this end, we introduce a novel problem, single-image-guided 3D part assembly, along with a learningbased solution. We study this problem in the setting of furniture assembly from a given complete set of parts and a single image depicting the entire assembled object. Multiple challenges exist in this setting, including handling ambiguity among parts (e.g., slats in a chair back and leg stretchers) and 3D pose prediction for parts and part subassemblies, whether visible or occluded. We address these issues by proposing a two-module pipeline that leverages strong 2D-3D correspondences and assembly-oriented graph message-passing to infer part relationships. In experiments with a PartNet-based synthetic benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as compared with three baseline approaches.