Title: Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning,
Abstract: Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between
non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing
can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers;
likewise, grasping can help displace objects to make pushing movements more
precise and collision-free. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to
discover and learn these synergies from scratch through model-free deep
reinforcement learning. Our method involves training two fully convolutional
networks that map from visual observations to actions: one infers the utility
of pushes for a dense pixel-wise sampling of end effector orientations and
locations, while the other does the same for grasping. Both networks are
trained jointly in a Q-learning framework and are entirely self-supervised by
trial and error, where rewards are provided from successful grasps. In this
way, our policy learns pushing motions that enable future grasps, while
learning grasps that can leverage past pushes. During picking experiments in
both simulation and real-world scenarios, we find that our system quickly
learns complex behaviors amid challenging cases of clutter, and achieves better
grasping success rates and picking efficiencies than baseline alternatives
after only a few hours of training. We further demonstrate that our method is
capable of generalizing to novel objects. Qualitative results (videos), code,
pre-trained models, and simulation environments are available at
this http URL