Beyond Pick-and-Place: Tackling Robotic Stacking of Diverse Shapes

Alex X. Lee, Coline Manon Devin, Yuxiang Zhou, Thomas Lampe, Konstantinos Bousmalis, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Arunkumar Byravan, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Nimrod Gileadi, David Khosid, Claudio Fantacci, Jose Enrique Chen, Akhil Raju, Rae Jeong, Michael Neunert, Antoine Laurens, Stefano Saliceti, Federico Casarini, Martin Riedmiller, raia hadsell et al. (1 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: sim-to-real, offline RL, manipulation, stacking, robot learning

Abstract: We study the problem of robotic stacking with objects of complex geometry. We propose a challenging and diverse set of such objects that was carefully designed to require strategies beyond a simple “pick-and-place” solution. Our method is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach combined with vision-based interactive policy distillation and simulation-to-reality transfer. Our learned policies can efficiently handle multiple object combinations in the real world and exhibit a large variety of stacking skills. In a large experimental study, we investigate what choices matter for learning such general vision-based agents in simulation, and what affects optimal transfer to the real robot. We then leverage data collected by such policies and improve upon them with offline RL. A video and a blog post of our work are provided as supplementary material.