PhyRoGen: Synthetic Generation of Physical Robot Manipulation Puzzles Using Procedural Content Generation
This addresses the need for large training datasets in robot manipulation puzzle learning by automating puzzle generation, though it is an incremental application of PCG to a specific domain.
PhyRoGen uses procedural content generation to automatically create synthetic datasets of physical robot manipulation puzzles, generating 24 puzzles solvable in 1-300 seconds and manipulatable by a KUKA robot in simulation.
Robot manipulation of physical puzzles is important for automatic assembly and disassembly tasks. However, to enable robots to solve physical puzzles, manipulation skills need to be learned, which requires large training datasets, the generation of which is often time consuming and tedious. To overcome this problem, we propose the Physical Robot Manipulation Puzzle Generation framework (PhyRoGen), which leverages procedural content generation (PCG) for automated generation of synthetic datasets of manipulation puzzles. PhyRoGen is a general-purpose puzzle generator, which can generate physical puzzles with interlocking object dependencies, where one articulated object must be manipulated before another can be moved. Based upon PhyRoGen, we define six concrete generators which we use to generate 24 physical puzzles. By using a benchmarking framework, we are able to solve all puzzles in 1 to 300 seconds using sampling-based planning algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate that every generated puzzle is manipulatable by using a KUKA LBR iiwa robot in a physical simulation. This shows that our framework is able to procedurally generate unique, solvable robot manipulation puzzles, which is a crucial ingredient to benchmark manipulation algorithms and to develop robust foundation models.