Title
Symbolic State Estimation with Predicates for Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks
Abstract
Manipulation tasks often require a robot to adjust its sensorimotor skills based on the state it finds itself in. Taking peg-in-hole as an example: once the peg is aligned with the hole, the robot should push the peg downwards. While high level execution frameworks such as state machines and behavior trees are commonly used to formalize such decision-making problems, these frameworks require a mechanism to detect the high-level symbolic state. Handcrafting heuristics to identify symbolic states can be brittle, and using data-driven methods can produce noisy predictions, particularly when working with limited datasets, as is common in real-world robotic scenarios. This paper proposes a Bayesian state estimation method to predict symbolic states with predicate classifiers. This method requires little training data and allows fusing noisy observations from multiple sensor modalities. We evaluate our framework on a set of real-world peg-in-hole and connector-socket insertion tasks, demonstrating its ability to classify symbolic states and to generalize to unseen tasks, outperforming baseline methods. We also demonstrate the ability of our method to improve the robustness of manipulation policies on a real robot.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811675
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
2022
1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Toki Migimatsu100.34
Wenzhao Lian200.34
Jeannette Bohg327530.60
Stefan Schaal46081530.10