A new AI technique enables a robot to develop complex plans for manipulating an object using its entire hand, not just fingertips. This model can generate effective plans in about a minute using a standard laptop.
Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it on top of your forearms and balance it against your chest, using your whole body to manipulate the box.
While still in its early days, this method could potentially enable factories to use smaller, mobile robots that can manipulate objects with their entire arms or bodies, rather than large robotic arms that can only grasp using fingertips. This may help reduce energy consumption and drive down costs.
But because there may be billions of potential contact points that a robot must reason about when determining how to use its fingers, hands, arms, and body to interact with an object, this trial-and-error approach requires a great deal of computation. Yet physics-based approaches aren't as effective as reinforcement learning when it comes to contact-rich manipulation planning -- Suh and Pang wondered why.
Even though smoothing greatly simplifies the decisions, searching through the remaining decisions can still be a difficult problem. So, the researchers combined their model with an algorithm that can rapidly and efficiently search through all possible decisions the robot could make.They first tested their approach in simulations where robotic hands were given tasks like moving a pen to a desired configuration, opening a door, or picking up a plate.
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