ProbRobScene: A Probabilistic Specification Language for 3D Robotic Manipulation Environments
This work addresses the need for efficient environment specification in robotic simulation, which is incremental as it builds on existing probabilistic programming and convex geometry methods.
The authors tackled the problem of specifying a range of environments for robotic manipulation tasks by introducing ProbRobScene, a probabilistic specification language that automatically generates scenes conforming to user-defined relational constraints, and demonstrated its utility in debugging a robotic controller in a tabletop manipulation setting.
Robotic control tasks are often first run in simulation for the purposes of verification, debugging and data augmentation. Many methods exist to specify what task a robot must complete, but few exist to specify what range of environments a user expects such tasks to be achieved in. ProbRobScene is a probabilistic specification language for describing robotic manipulation environments. Using the language, a user need only specify the relational constraints that must hold between objects in a scene. ProbRobScene will then automatically generate scenes which conform to this specification. By combining aspects of probabilistic programming languages and convex geometry, we provide a method for sampling this space of possible environments efficiently. We demonstrate the usefulness of our language by using it to debug a robotic controller in a tabletop robot manipulation environment.