Geometric Affordance Perception: Leveraging Deep 3D Saliency With the Interaction Tensor

Agents that need to act on their surroundings can significantly benefit from the perception of their interaction possibilities or affordances. In this paper we combine the benefits of the Interaction Tensor, a straight-forward geometrical representation that captures multiple object-scene interactions, with deep learning saliency for fast parsing of affordances in the environment. Our approach works with visually perceived 3D pointclouds and enables to query a 3D scene for locations that support affordances such as sitting or riding, as well as interactions for everyday objects like the where to hang an umbrella or place a mug. Crucially, the nature of the interaction description exhibits one-shot generalization. Experiments with numerous synthetic and real RGB-D scenes and validated by human subjects, show that the representation enables the prediction of affordance candidate locations in novel environments from a single training example. The approach also allows for a highly parallelizable, multiple-affordance representation, and works at fast rates. The combination of the deep neural network that learns to estimate scene saliency with the one-shot geometric representation aligns well with the expectation that computational models for affordance estimation should be perceptually direct and economical.

Skill Learning by Autonomous Robotic Playing Using Active Learning and Exploratory Behavior Composition

We consider the problem of autonomous acquisition of manipulation skills where problem-solving strategies are initially available only for a narrow range of situations. We propose to extend the range of solvable situations by autonomous play with the object. By applying previously-trained skills and behaviors, the robot learns how to prepare situations for which a successful strategy is already known. The information gathered during autonomous play is additionally used to train an environment model. This model is exploited for active learning and the generation of novel preparatory behaviors compositions. We apply our approach to a wide range of different manipulation tasks, e.g., book grasping, grasping of objects of different sizes by selecting different grasping strategies, placement on shelves, and tower disassembly. We show that the composite behavior generation mechanism enables the robot to solve previously-unsolvable tasks, e.g., tower disassembly. We use success statistics gained during real-world experiments to simulate the convergence behavior of our system. Simulation experiments show that the learning speed can be improved by around 30% by using active learning.