PairwiseNet: Pairwise Collision Distance Learning for High-dof Robot Systems

Jihwan Kim, Frank C. Park

Keywords: Robot Collision, Collision Distance, Machine Learning

TL;DR: PairwiseNet is a novel method that estimates the pairwise collision distance between pairs of elements in a robot system, providing an alternative approach to data-driven methods that estimate the global collision distance.

Abstract: Motion planning for robot manipulation systems operating in complex environments remains a challenging problem. It requires the evaluation of both the collision distance and its derivative. Owing to its computational complexity, recent studies have attempted to utilize data-driven approaches to learn the collision distance. However, their performance degrades significantly for complicated high-dof systems, such as multi-arm robots. Additionally, the model must be retrained every time the environment undergoes even slight changes. In this paper, we propose PairwiseNet, a model that estimates the minimum distance between two geometric shapes and overcomes many of the limitations of current models. By dividing the problem of global collision distance learning into smaller pairwise sub-problems, PairwiseNet can be used to efficiently calculate the global collision distance. PairwiseNet can be deployed without further modifications or training for any system comprised of the same shape elements (as those in the training dataset). Experiments with multi-arm manipulation systems of various dof indicate that our model achieves significant performance improvements concerning several performance metrics, especially the false positive rate with the collision-free guaranteed threshold. Results further demonstrate that our single trained PairwiseNet model is applicable to all multi-arm systems used in the evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/kjh6526/PairwiseNet.

Student First Author: yes

Instructions: I have read the instructions for authors (https://corl2023.org/instructions-for-authors/)

Video: https://youtu.be/N5Q8ZXbB6Uc

Code: https://github.com/kjh6526/PairwiseNet