Title
Manipulation of Granular Materials by Learning Particle Interactions
Abstract
Manipulation of granular materials such as sand or rice remains an unsolved problem due to challenges such as the difficulty of defining their configuration or modeling the materials and their particles interactions. Current approaches tend to simplify the material dynamics and omit the interactions between the particles. In this letter, we propose to use a graph-based representation to model the interaction dynamics of the material and rigid bodies manipulating it. This allows the planning of manipulation trajectories to reach a desired configuration of the material. We use a graph neural network (GNN) to model the particle interactions via message-passing. To plan manipulation trajectories, we propose to minimise the Wasserstein distance between a predicted distribution of granular particles and their desired configuration. We demonstrate that the proposed method is able to pour granular materials into the desired configuration both in simulated and real scenarios.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/LRA.2022.3158382
IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Deep learning in grasping and manipulation, machine learning for robot control, manipulation planning
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
2377-3766
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Neea Tuomainen100.34
David Blanco-Mulero200.34
V. Kyrki365261.79