Unifying Physics and Deep Learning with TossingBot

Though considerable progress has been made in enabling robots to grasp objects efficiently, visually self adapt or even learn from real-world experiences, robotic operations still require careful consideration in how they pick up, handle, and place various objects -- especially in unstructured settings. Consider for example, this picking robot which took 1st place in the stowing task of the Amazon Robotics Challenge:
It's an impressive system, built with many design features that kinematically prevent it from dropping objects due to unforeseen dynamics: from its steady and deliberate movements, to its gripper fingers that mechanically constrain the momentum of the object so that it doesn't slip.

This robot, like many others, is designed to tolerate the dynamics of the unstructured world. But instead of just tolerating dynamics, can robots learn to use them advantageously, developing an "intuition" of physics that would allow them to complete tasks more efficiently? Perhaps in doing so, robots can improve their capabilities and acquire complex athletic skills like tossing, sliding, spinning, swinging, or catching, potentially leading to many useful applications, such as more efficient debris clearing robots in disaster response scenarios -- where time is of the essence.

To explore this concept, we worked with researchers at Princeton, Columbia, and MIT to develop TossingBot: a picking robot for our real, random world that learns to grasp and throw objects into selected boxes outside its natural range. We find that by learning to throw, TossingBot is capable of achieving picking speeds that are twice as fast as previous systems, with twice the effective placing range. TossingBot jointly learns grasping and throwing policies using an end-to-end neural network that maps from visual observations (RGB-D images) to control parameters for motion primitives. Using overhead cameras to track where objects land, TossingBot improves itself over time through self-supervision. More technical details are available in an early preprint on arXiv.
The Challenges
Throwing is a particularly difficult task as it depends on many factors: from how the object is picked up (i.e., "pre-throw conditions"), to the object's physical properties like mass, friction, aerodynamics, etc. For example, if you grasp a screwdriver by the handle near the center of mass and throw it, it would land much closer than if you had grasped it from the metal tip, which would swing forward and land much farther away. Regardless of how you grasped it though, tossing a screwdriver is incredibly different from tossing a ping pong ball, which would land closer due to air resistance. Manually designing a solution that explicitly handles these factors for every random object is nearly impossible.

Throwing depends on many factors: from how you picked it up, to object properties and dynamics.

Through deep learning, however, our robots can learn from experience rather than rely on manual case-by-case engineering. Previously we've shown that our robots can learn to push and grasp a large variety of objects, but accurately throwing objects requires a larger understanding of projectile physics. Acquiring this knowledge from scratch with only trial-and-error is not only time consuming and expensive, but also generally doesn't work outside of very specific, and carefully set up training scenarios.

Unifying Physics and Deep Learning
A fundamental component of TossingBot is that it learns to throw by integrating simple physics and deep learning, which enables it to train quickly and generalize to new scenarios. Physics provides prior models of how the world works, and we can leverage these models to develop initial controllers for our robots. In the case of throwing, for example, we can use projectile ballistics to provide an estimate for the throwing velocity that is needed to get an object to land at a target location. We can then use neural networks to predict adjustments on top of that estimate from physics, in order to compensate for unknown dynamics as well as the noise and variability of the real world. We call this hybrid formulation Residual Physics, and it enables TossingBot to achieve throwing accuracies of 85%.
At the start of training with randomly initialized weights, TossingBot repeatedly attempts bad grasps. Over time, however, TossingBot learns better ways to grasp objects and simultaneously improves its ability to throw. Occasionally the robot randomly explores what happens if it throws an object at a velocity that it hasn't tried before. When the bin is emptied, TossingBot lifts the boxes to allow objects to slide back into the bin. This way, human intervention is kept at a minimum during training. By 10,000 grasp and throw attempts (or 14 hours of training time), it is capable of achieving throwing accuracies of 85%, with a grasping reliability of 87% in clutter.

TossingBot starts out performing poorly (left), but progressively learns to grasp and toss overnight (right).

Generalizing to New Scenarios
By integrating physics and deep learning, TossingBot is capable of rapidly adapting to never-before-seen throwing locations and objects. For example, after training on objects with simple shapes like wooden blocks, balls, and markers, it can perform reasonably well on new objects such as fake fruit, decorative items, and office objects. On new objects, TossingBot starts out with lower performance, but quickly adapts within a few hundred training steps (i.e., an hour or two) to achieve similar performance as with training objects. We've found that combining physics and deep learning with Residual Physics yields better performance than baseline alternatives (e.g. deep learning without physics). We even tried this task ourselves, and we were pleasantly surprised to learn that TossingBot is more accurate than any of us engineers! Though take that with a grain of salt, as we've yet to test TossingBot against anyone with any actual athletic talent.

TossingBot can generalize to new objects, and is more accurate at throwing than the average Googler.

We also test our policies on their ability to generalize to new target locations previously unseen in training. To this end, we train on a set of boxes, then later test on a different set of boxes with entirely different landing areas. In this setting, we find that Residual Physics for throwing helps significantly, since the initial estimates of throwing velocities from projectile ballistics easily generalize to new target locations, while the residuals help make adjustments on top of those estimates to compensate for varying object properties in the real world. This is in contrast to the baseline alternative of using deep learning without physics, which can only handle target locations seen during training.

TossingBot uses Residual Physics to throw objects to unforeseen locations.

Emerging Semantics from Interaction
To explore what TossingBot learns, we place several objects in the bin, capture images, and feed them into TossingBot's trained neural network to extract intermediate pixel-wise deep features. By clustering these features based on similarity and visualizing nearest neighbors as a heatmap (hotter regions indicate more similarity in feature space), we can localize all ping pong balls in the scene. Even though the orange block shares a similar color with the ping pong balls, its features are different enough for TossingBot to make a distinction. Likewise, we can also use the extracted features to localize all marker pens, which share similar shape and mass, but do not share color. These observations suggest that TossingBot likely learns to rely more on geometric cues (e.g. shape) to learn grasping and throwing. It is also possible that the learned features reflect second-order attributes such as physical properties, which can influence how the objects should be thrown.

TossingBot learns deep features that distinguish object categories without explicit supervision.

These emerging features were learned implicitly from scratch without any explicit supervision beyond task-level grasping and throwing. Yet, they seem to be sufficient for enabling the system to distinguish between object categories (i.e., ping pong balls and marker pens). As such, this experiment speaks out to a broader concept related to machine vision: how should robots learn the semantics of the visual world? From the perspective of classic computer vision, semantics are often pre-defined using human-fabricated image datasets and manually constructed class categories. However, our experiment suggests that it is possible to implicitly learn such object-level semantics from physical interactions alone, as long as they matter for the task at hand. The more complex these interactions, the higher the resolution of the semantics. Towards more generally intelligent robots -- perhaps it is sufficient for them to develop their own notion of semantics through interaction, without requiring any human intervention.

Limitations and Future Work
Although TossingBot's results are promising, it does have its limitations. For example, it assumes that objects are robust enough to withstand landing collisions after being thrown -- further work is required to learn throws that account for fragile objects, or possibly train other robots to catch objects in ways that cushion the landing. Furthermore, TossingBot infers control parameters only from visual data -- exploring additional senses (e.g. force-torque or tactile) may enable the system to better react to new objects.

The combination of physics and deep learning that made TossingBot possible naturally leads to an interesting question: what else could benefit from Residual Physics? Investigating how the idea generalizes to other types of tasks and interactions is a promising direction for future research.

You can learn more about this work in the summary video below.
Acknowledgements
This research was done by Andy Zeng, Shuran Song (faculty at Columbia University), Johnny Lee, Alberto Rodriguez (faculty at MIT), and Thomas Funkhouser (faculty at Princeton University), with special thanks to Ryan Hickman for valuable managerial support, Ivan Krasin and Stefan Welker for fruitful technical discussions, Brandon Hurd and Julian Salazar and Sean Snyder for hardware support, Chad Richards and Jason Freidenfelds for helpful feedback on writing, Erwin Coumans for advice on PyBullet, Laura Graesser for video narration, and Regina Hickman for photography. An early preprint is available on arXiv.