Planning with Spatial-Temporal Abstraction from Point Clouds for Deformable Object Manipulation

Abstract: Effective planning of long-horizon deformable object manipulation requires suitable abstractions at both the spatial and temporal levels. Previous methods typically either focus on short-horizon tasks or make the strong assumption that full-state information is available. However, full states of deformable objects are often unavailable. In this paper, we propose PlAnning with Spatial and Temporal Abstraction (PASTA), which incorporates both spatial abstraction (reasoning about objects and their relations to each other) and temporal abstraction (reasoning over skills instead of low-level actions). Our framework maps high-dimension 3D point clouds into a set of latent vectors and plans skill sequences with the latent set representation. Our method can solve challenging, novel sequential deformable object manipulation tasks in the real world, which require combining multiple tool-use skills such as cutting with a knife, pushing with a pusher, and spreading dough with a roller. Additional materials can be found on our project website.