Hierarchical and Modular Network on Non-prehensile Manipulation in General Environments
This addresses the challenge of robotic manipulation in general environments like households, where objects may be ungraspable, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck rather than incremental progress.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to perform non-prehensile manipulation (e.g., toppling, rolling) in diverse real-world environments by developing a modular network architecture that adapts to varying geometric constraints, achieving zero-shot transfer to novel real-world scenes and objects with training only in simulation.
For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile manipulation cannot yet generalize across environments with diverse geometries. The main challenge lies in adapting to varying environmental constraints: within a cabinet, the robot must avoid walls and ceilings; to lift objects to the top of a step, the robot must account for the step's pose and extent. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive success in non-prehensile manipulation, accounting for such variability presents a challenge for the generalist policy, as it must learn diverse strategies for each new combination of constraints. To address this, we propose a modular and reconfigurable architecture that adaptively reconfigures network modules based on task requirements. To capture the geometric variability in environments, we extend the contact-based object representation (CORN) to environment geometries, and propose a procedural algorithm for generating diverse environments to train our agent. Taken together, the resulting policy can zero-shot transfer to novel real-world environments and objects despite training entirely within a simulator. We additionally release a simulation-based benchmark featuring nine digital twins of real-world scenes with 353 objects to facilitate non-prehensile manipulation research in realistic domains.