Fixing Malfunctional Objects With Learned Physical Simulation and Functional Prediction
This addresses the challenge of repairing poorly-designed 3D objects for applications in robotics and design, representing a novel domain-specific approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of fixing malfunctional 3D objects by proposing FixNet, a framework that integrates perception, physical dynamics simulation, and functionality prediction, which outperforms baseline models by a large margin and generalizes well to similar interaction types.
This paper studies the problem of fixing malfunctional 3D objects. While previous works focus on building passive perception models to learn the functionality from static 3D objects, we argue that functionality is reckoned with respect to the physical interactions between the object and the user. Given a malfunctional object, humans can perform mental simulations to reason about its functionality and figure out how to fix it. Inspired by this, we propose FixIt, a dataset that contains about 5k poorly-designed 3D physical objects paired with choices to fix them. To mimic humans' mental simulation process, we present FixNet, a novel framework that seamlessly incorporates perception and physical dynamics. Specifically, FixNet consists of a perception module to extract the structured representation from the 3D point cloud, a physical dynamics prediction module to simulate the results of interactions on 3D objects, and a functionality prediction module to evaluate the functionality and choose the correct fix. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms baseline models by a large margin, and can generalize well to objects with similar interaction types.