Title
Learning Robotic Manipulation of Granular Media.
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the problem of robotic manipulation of granular media. We evaluate multiple predictive models used to infer the dynamics of scooping and dumping actions. These models are evaluated on a task that involves manipulating the media in order to deform it into a desired shape. Our best performing model is based on a highly-tailored convolutional network architecture with domain-specific optimizations, which we show accurately models the physical interaction of the robotic scoop with the underlying media. We empirically demonstrate that explicitly predicting physical mechanics results in a policy that out-performs both a hand-crafted dynamics baseline, and a value-network, which must otherwise implicitly predict the same mechanics in order to produce accurate value estimates.
Year
Venue
DocType
2017
CoRL
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1709.02833
1
0.37
References 
Authors
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Connor Schenck1825.67
Jonathan Tompson273932.92
Sergey Levine33377182.21
Dieter Fox4123061289.74