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RoboNet: Large-Scale Multi-Robot Learning (arxiv.org)
4 points by sel1 on Oct 25, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: RoboNet shares 15 million video frames from 7 robot types to pre-train camera-guided robot-arm controllers before adapting them to a new robot. Pre-training on it let a new robot outperform one trained only on its own data, which needed 4 to 20 times more.

Abstract

Robot learning has emerged as a promising tool for taming the complexity and diversity of the real world. Methods based on high-capacity models, such as deep networks, hold the promise of providing effective generalization to a wide range of open-world environments. However, these same methods typically require large amounts of diverse training data to generalize effectively. In contrast, most robotic learning experiments are small-scale, single-domain, and single-robot. This leads to a frequent tension in robotic learning: how can we learn generalizable robotic controllers without having to collect impractically large amounts of data for each separate experiment? In this paper, we propose RoboNet, an open database for sharing robotic experience, which provides an initial pool of 15 million video frames, from 7 different robot platforms, and study how it can be used to learn generalizable models for vision-based robotic manipulation. We combine the dataset with two different learning algorithms: visual foresight, which uses forward video prediction models, and supervised inverse models. Our experiments test the learned algorithms' ability to work across new objects, new tasks, new scenes, new camera viewpoints, new grippers, or even entirely new robots. In our final experiment, we find that by pre-training on RoboNet and fine-tuning on data from a held-out Franka or Kuka robot, we can exceed the performance of a robot-specific training approach that uses 4x-20x more data. For videos and data, see the project webpage: https://www.robonet.wiki/

Sudeep Dasari, Frederik Ebert, Stephen Tian, Suraj Nair, Bernadette Bucher, Karl Schmeckpeper, Siddharth Singh, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:1910.11215 · cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Oct 24, 2019 · updated Jan 2, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · accepted at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2019

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