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Learning to fold real garments: A case study in cloud-based robotics research (arxiv.org)
1 point by pramodbiligiri on Apr 25, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Using a cloud platform that runs robot control remotely, they tested eight ways to fold a crumpled T-shirt with one arm, with no hands-on access to the robot. The best mix of learning from human examples and hand-designed steps reached 84% of human performance.

Abstract · Learning to Fold Real Garments with One Arm: A Case Study in Cloud-Based Robotics Research

Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution of control policies on physical robots, we present the first systematic benchmarking of fabric manipulation algorithms on physical hardware. We develop 4 novel learning-based algorithms that model expert actions, keypoints, reward functions, and dynamic motions, and we compare these against 4 learning-free and inverse dynamics algorithms on the task of folding a crumpled T-shirt with a single robot arm. The entire lifecycle of data collection, model training, and policy evaluation is performed remotely without physical access to the robot workcell. Results suggest a new algorithm combining imitation learning with analytic methods achieves 84% of human-level performance on the folding task. See https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/cloudfolding for all data, code, models, and supplemental material.

Ryan Hoque, Kaushik Shivakumar, Shrey Aeron, Gabriel Deza, Aditya Ganapathi, Adrian Wong, Johnny Lee, Andy Zeng, Vincent Vanhoucke, Ken Goldberg
arXiv:2204.10297 · cs.RO, cs.AI · submitted Apr 21, 2022
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