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Time Reversal as Self-Supervision (arxiv.org)
2 points by headalgorithm on May 30, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The robot explores outward from finished goals and learns to run those moves backward, giving it a plan toward any goal without needing demonstrations. It then assembled Tetris-style blocks on a real robot from a plain camera and handled block pairs it had never seen.

Abstract

A longstanding challenge in robot learning for manipulation tasks has been the ability to generalize to varying initial conditions, diverse objects, and changing objectives. Learning based approaches have shown promise in producing robust policies, but require heavy supervision to efficiently learn precise control, especially from visual inputs. We propose a novel self-supervision technique that uses time-reversal to learn goals and provide a high level plan to reach them. In particular, we introduce the time-reversal model (TRM), a self-supervised model which explores outward from a set of goal states and learns to predict these trajectories in reverse. This provides a high level plan towards goals, allowing us to learn complex manipulation tasks with no demonstrations or exploration at test time. We test our method on the domain of assembly, specifically the mating of tetris-style block pairs. Using our method operating atop visual model predictive control, we are able to assemble tetris blocks on a physical robot using only uncalibrated RGB camera input, and generalize to unseen block pairs. sites.google.com/view/time-reversal

Suraj Nair, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, Vikash Kumar
arXiv:1810.01128 · cs.RO, cs.AI · submitted Oct 2, 2018 · updated May 22, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · 7 pages, 10 figures

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