AutoMate: Specialist and Generalist Assembly Policies over Diverse Geometries

Bingjie Tang; Iretiayo Akinola; Jie Xu; Bowen Wen; Ankur Handa; Karl Van Wyk; Dieter Fox; Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Fabio Ramos; Yashraj Narang

arXiv · 2407.08028

AutoMate: Specialist and Generalist Assembly Policies over Diverse Geometries

Bingjie Tang·Iretiayo Akinola·Jie Xu·Bowen Wen·Ankur Handa·Karl Van Wyk·Dieter Fox·Gaurav S. Sukhatme·Fabio Ramos·Yashraj Narang

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Abstract

Robotic assembly for high-mixture settings requires adaptivity to diverse parts and poses, which is an open challenge. Meanwhile, in other areas of robotics, large models and sim-to-real have led to tremendous progress. Inspired by such work, we present AutoMate, a learning framework and system that consists of 4 parts: 1) a dataset of 100 assemblies compatible with simulation and the real world, along with parallelized simulation environments for policy learning, 2) a novel simulation-based approach for learning specialist (i.e., part-specific) policies and generalist (i.e., unified) assembly policies, 3) demonstrations of specialist policies that individually solve 80 assemblies with 80% or higher success rates in simulation, as well as a generalist policy that jointly solves 20 assemblies with an 80%+ success rate, and 4) zero-shot sim-to-real transfer that achieves similar (or better) performance than simulation, including on perception-initialized assembly. The key methodological takeaway is that a union of diverse algorithms from manufacturing engineering, character animation, and time-series analysis provides a generic and robust solution for a diverse range of robotic assembly problems. To our knowledge, AutoMate provides the first simulation-based framework for learning specialist and generalist policies over a wide range of assemblies, as well as the first system demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer over such a range. For videos and additional details, please see our project website: https://bingjietang718.github.io/automate/

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Bingjie Tang, Iretiayo Akinola, Jie Xu, Bowen Wen, Ankur Handa, Karl Van Wyk, Dieter Fox, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Fabio Ramos, Yashraj Narang. 2024-08-01. AutoMate: Specialist and Generalist Assembly Policies over Diverse Geometries. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08028

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