Learning Goal-Directed Object Pushing in Cluttered Scenes with Location-Based Attention




Authors:

N. Dengler, J. Del Aguila Ferrandis, J. Moura, S. Vijayakumar, M. Bennewitz

Type:

Conference Proceeding

Published in:

arXiv preprint

Year:

2024

Links:

PreprintVideo

BibTex String

@article{dengler2024learning,
title={Learning Goal-Directed Object Pushing in Cluttered Scenes with Location-Based Attention},
author={Dengler, Nils and Ferrandis, Juan Del Aguila and Moura, Jo{\~a}o and Vijayakumar, Sethu and Bennewitz, Maren},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.17667},
year={2024}
}

Topic

Abstract:

Non-prehensile planar pushing is a challenging task due to its underactuated nature with hybrid-dynamics, where a robot needs to reason about an object's long-term behaviour and contact-switching, while being robust to contact uncertainty. The presence of clutter in the environment further complicates this task, introducing the need to include more sophisticated spatial analysis to avoid collisions. Building upon prior work on reinforcement learning (RL) with multimodal categorical exploration for planar pushing, in this paper we incorporate location-based attention to enable robust navigation through clutter. Unlike previous RL literature addressing this obstacle avoidance pushing task, our framework requires no predefined global paths and considers the target orientation of the manipulated object. Our results demonstrate that the learned policies successfully navigate through a wide range of complex obstacle configurations, including dynamic obstacles, with smooth motions, achieving the desired target object pose. We also validate the transferability of the learned policies to robotic hardware using the KUKA iiwa robot arm.