Keypoint-Based Bimanual Shaping of Deformable Linear Objects under Environmental Constraints using Hierarchical Action Planning
This addresses the challenge of contact-based manipulation of flexible objects in robotics, which is incremental as it builds on existing hierarchical planning approaches.
This paper tackles the problem of manipulating deformable linear objects (DLOs) into desired shapes using a dual-arm robotic system under environmental constraints, achieving high performance in state representation and robustness to uncertainties.
This paper addresses the problem of contact-based manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) towards desired shapes with a dual-arm robotic system. To alleviate the burden of high-dimensional continuous state-action spaces, we model the DLO as a kinematic multibody system via our proposed keypoint detection network. This new perception network is trained on a synthetic labeled image dataset and transferred to real manipulation scenarios without conducting any manual annotations. Our goal-conditioned policy can efficiently learn to rearrange the configuration of the DLO based on the detected keypoints. The proposed hierarchical action framework tackles the manipulation problem in a coarse-to-fine manner (with high-level task planning and low-level motion control) by leveraging on two action primitives. The identification of deformation properties is avoided since the algorithm replans its motion after each bimanual execution. The conducted experimental results reveal that our method achieves high performance in state representation of the DLO, and is robust to uncertain environmental constraints.