A Differentiable Recipe for Learning Visual Non-Prehensile Planar Manipulation

November 08, 2021

Abstract

Specifying tasks with videos is a powerful technique towards acquiring novel and general robot skills. However, reasoning over mechanics and dexterous interactions can make it challenging to scale learning contact-rich manipulation. In this work, we focus on the problem of visual non-prehensile planar manipulation: given a video of an object in planar motion, find contact-aware robot actions that reproduce the same object motion. We propose a novel architecture, Differentiable Learning for Manipulation (DLM), that combines video decoding neural models with priors from contact mechanics by leveraging differentiable optimization and finite difference based simulation. Through extensive simulated experiments, we investigate the interplay between traditional model-based techniques and modern deep learning approaches. We find that our modular and fully differentiable architecture performs better than learning-only methods on unseen objects and motions. https://github.com/baceituno/dlm.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Bernardo Aceituno

Alberto Rodriguez

Shubham Tulsiani

Abhinav Gupta

Mustafa Mukadam

Publisher

CoRL

Research Topics

Robotics

Computer Vision

Related Publications

April 17, 2025

COMPUTER VISION

Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network

Daniel Bolya, Po-Yao Huang, Peize Sun, Jang Hyun Cho, Andrea Madotto, Chen Wei, Tengyu Ma, Jiale Zhi, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Hanoona Rasheed, Junke Wang, Marco Monteiro, Hu Xu, Shiyu Dong, Nikhila Ravi, Daniel Li (FAIR), Piotr Dollar, Christoph Feichtenhofer

April 17, 2025

Read the Paper

April 17, 2025

COMPUTER VISION

PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding

Jang Hyun Cho, Andrea Madotto, Effrosyni Mavroudi, Triantafyllos Afouras, Tushar Nagarajan, Muhammad Maaz, Yale Song, Tengyu Ma, Shuming Hu, Hanoona Rasheed, Peize Sun, Po-Yao Huang, Daniel Bolya, Suyog Jain, Miguel Martin, Huiyu Wang, Nikhila Ravi, Shashank Jain, Tammy Stark, Shane Moon, Babak Damavandi, Vivian Lee, Andrew Westbury, Salman Khan, Philipp Krähenbühl, Piotr Dollar, Lorenzo Torresani, Kristen Grauman, Christoph Feichtenhofer

April 17, 2025

Read the Paper

April 17, 2025

ROBOTICS

RESEARCH

Locate 3D: Real-World Object Localization via Self-Supervised Learning in 3D

Paul McVay, Sergio Arnaud, Ada Martin, Arjun Majumdar, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Phillip Thomas, Ruslan Partsey, Daniel Dugas, Abha Gejji, Alexander Sax, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Mikael Henaff, Ayush Jain, Ang Cao, Ishita Prasad, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Mike Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aravind Rajeswaran, Franziska Meier