Robotic insertion tasks are characterized by contact and friction mechanics, making them challenging for conventional feedback control methods due to unmodeled physical effects. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning control policies in such settings. However, RL can be unsafe during exploration and might require a large amount of real-world training data, which is expensive to collect. In this paper, we study how to use meta-reinforcement learning to solve the bulk of the problem in simulation by solving a family of simulated industrial insertion tasks and then adapt policies quickly in the real world. We demonstrate our approach by training an agent to successfully perform challenging real-world insertion tasks using less than 20 trials of real-world experience. Videos and other material are available at https://pearl-insertion.github.io/
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Autodesk（欧特克）；Autodesk Research（欧特克研究院）
Industrial insertion tasks are often performed repetitively with parts that are subject to tight tolerances and prone to breakage. Learning an industrial insertion policy in real is challenging as the collision between the parts and the environment can cause slippage or breakage of the part. In this paper, we present a safe self-supervised method to learn a visuo-tactile insertion policy that is robust to grasp pose variations. The method reduces human input and collisions between the part and the receptacle. The method divides the insertion task into two phases. In the first align phase, a ta…
Siemens Corporation（西门子公司）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control methods often result in brittle and inaccurate controllers, which have to be manually tuned. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated to be capable of learning controllers in such environments from autonomous interaction with the environment, but running RL algorithms in the real world poses sample efficiency and safety challenges. Moreove…
Policy learning for delicate industrial insertion tasks (e.g., PC board assembly) is challenging. This paper considers two major problems: how to learn a diversified policy (instead of just one average policy) that can efficiently handle different workpieces with minimum amount of training data, and how to handle defects of workpieces during insertion. To address the problems, we propose tolerance-guided policy learning. To encourage transferability of the learned policy to different workpieces, we add a task embedding to the policy's input space using the insertion tolerance. Then we train th…
Learning-based methods in robotics hold the promise of generalization, but what can be done if a learned policy does not generalize to a new situation? In principle, if an agent can at least evaluate its own success (i.e., with a reward classifier that generalizes well even when the policy does not), it could actively practice the task and finetune the policy in this situation. We study this problem in the setting of industrial insertion tasks, such as inserting connectors in sockets and setting screws. Existing algorithms rely on precise localization of the connector or socket and carefully m…
Yaskawa India Pvt. Ltd.（安川印度私人有限公司）；Robert Bosch Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院罗伯特·博世信息物理系统中心）
Industrial robot manipulators are not able to match the precision and speed with which humans are able to execute contact rich tasks even to this day. Therefore, as a means overcome this gap, we demonstrate generative methods for imitating a peg-in-hole insertion task in a 6-DOF robot manipulator. In particular, generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) is used to successfully achieve this task with a 10 um, and a 6 um peg-hole clearance on the Yaskawa GP8 industrial robot. Experimental results show that the policy successfully learns within 20 episodes from a handful of human expert de…
Osaka University（大阪大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本产业技术综合研究所（AIST））
The Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm has been an essential tool for automating robotic tasks. Despite the advances in RL, it is still not widely adopted in the industry due to the need for an expensive large amount of robot interaction with its environment. Curriculum Learning (CL) has been proposed to expedite learning. However, most research works have been only evaluated in simulated environments, from video games to robotic toy tasks. This paper presents a study for accelerating robot learning of contact-rich manipulation tasks based on Curriculum Learning combined with Domain Randomiz…
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室）
We present the design of a learning-based compliance controller for assembly operations for industrial robots. We propose a solution within the general setting of learning from demonstration (LfD), where a nominal trajectory is provided through demonstration by an expert teacher. This can be used to learn a suitable representation of the skill that can be generalized to novel positions of one of the parts involved in the assembly, for example the hole in a peg-in-hole (PiH) insertion task. Under the expectation that this novel position might not be entirely accurately estimated by a vision or …
Osaka University（大阪大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本产业技术综合研究所）
Industrial robot manipulators are playing a more significant role in modern manufacturing industries. Though peg-in-hole assembly is a common industrial task which has been extensively researched, safely solving complex high precision assembly in an unstructured environment remains an open problem. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges, especially when using position-controlled manipulators. The ma…
LLMs as Adaptive Meta-Solvers: Strategy-Diverse RL for Industrial-Scale Optimization
Tokentide AI；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
IROSA: Interactive Robot Skill Adaptation using Natural Language
German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics (RMC)（德国航空航天中心（DLR）机器人与机电研究所）；School of Computation, Information and Technology (CIT), Technical University of Munich (TUM)（计算、信息与技术学院（CIT），慕尼黑技术大学）
UBMF: Uncertainty-Aware Bayesian Meta-Learning Framework for Fault Diagnosis with Imbalanced Industrial Data
Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州国际创新研究院）；Institute of Reliability Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学可靠性工程研究所）；Science & Technology on Reliability & Environmental Engineering Laboratory（可靠性与环境工程技术重点实验室）；School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学可靠性与系统工程学院）
A Contrastive Learning-Guided Confident Meta-learning for Zero Shot Anomaly Detection
Dept. of Engineering for Innovation Medicine, University of Verona（创新医学工程系，威尼斯大学）；Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana（计算机与信息科学系，卢布尔雅那大学）；Qualyco S.r.l.（Qualyco公司）
