2023-12-02-liu23b.md

title	section	openreview	abstract	layout	series	publisher	issn	id	month	tex_title	firstpage	lastpage	page	order	cycles	bibtex_author	author	date	address	container-title	volume	genre	issued	pdf	extras
Learning to Design and Use Tools for Robotic Manipulation	Poster	xgrZkRHliXR	When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional capabilities through tool use. Recent techniques for jointly optimizing morphology and control via deep learning are effective at designing locomotion agents. But while outputting a single morphology makes sense for locomotion, manipulation involves a variety of strategies depending on the task goals at hand. A manipulation agent must be capable of rapidly prototyping specialized tools for different goals. Therefore, we propose learning a designer policy, rather than a single design. A designer policy is conditioned on task information and outputs a tool design that helps solve the task. A design-conditioned controller policy can then perform manipulation using these tools. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by introducing a reinforcement learning framework for jointly learning these policies. Through simulated manipulation tasks, we show that this framework is more sample efficient than prior methods in multi-goal or multi-variant settings, can perform zero-shot interpolation or fine-tuning to tackle previously unseen goals, and allows tradeoffs between the complexity of design and control policies under practical constraints. Finally, we deploy our learned policies onto a real robot. Please see our supplementary video and website at https://robotic-tool-design.github.io/ for visualizations.	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	liu23b	0	Learning to Design and Use Tools for Robotic Manipulation	887	905	887-905	887	false	Liu, Ziang and Tian, Stephen and Guo, Michelle and Liu, Karen and Wu, Jiajun	given family Ziang Liu given family Stephen Tian given family Michelle Guo given family Karen Liu given family Jiajun Wu	2023-12-02		Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot Learning	229	inproceedings	date-parts 2023 12 2	https://proceedings.mlr.press/v229/liu23b/liu23b.pdf