- Andy Zeng
- Shuran Song
- Stefan Welker
- Johnny Lee
- Alberto Rodriguez
- Thomas Funkhouser
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2018)
Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping can help displace objects to make pushing movements more precise and collision-free. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to discover and learn these synergies from scratch by combining visual affordance-based manipulation with model-free deep reinforcement learning. Our method is sample efficient and generalizes to novel objects and scenarios.
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