SAGCI-System: Towards Sample-Efficient, Generalizable, Compositional, and Incremental Robot Learning

Building general-purpose robots to perform an enormous amount of tasks in a large variety of environments at the human level is notoriously complicated. According to [1], it requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable, compositional, and incremental. In this work, we introduce a systematic learning framework called SAGCI-system towards achieving these above four requirements. Our system first takes the raw point clouds gathered by the camera mounted on the robot’s wrist as the inputs and produces initial modeling of the surrounding environment represented as a URDF. Our system adopts a learning-augmented differentiable simulation that loads the URDF. The robot then utilizes the interactive perception to interact with the environments to online verify and modify the URDF. Leveraging the simulation, we propose a new model-based RL algorithm combining object-centric and robot-centric approaches to efficiently produce policies to accomplish manipulation tasks. We apply our system to perform articulated object manipulation, both in the simulation and the real world. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning framework. Supplemental materials and videos are available on our project webpage https://sites.google.com/view/egci