FlowBot3D: Robotic Learning 3D Articulation Flow to Manipulate Articulated Objects - Technology Org

Understanding and manipulating articulated objects such as doors and drawers is a key skill for robots in human environments. However, it is difficult to train systems that generalize to variations of those objects. The sensory signal comes from an Azure Kinect depth camera, and the agent is a Sawyer BLACK robot. A novel per-point representation of the articulation structure of an object is proposed, called 3D Articulation Flow. A newly-developed 3D vision neural network architecture takes as input a static 3D point cloud and predicts the 3D Articulation Flow of the input under articulation motion.