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Takumi Hachimine

Publications and source records attributed to Takumi Hachimine.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

DecompGrind: A Decomposition Framework for Robotic Grinding via Cutting-Surface Planning and Contact-Force Adaptation

Robotic grinding is widely used for shaping workpieces in manufacturing, but it remains difficult to automate this process efficiently. In particular, efficiently grinding workpieces of different shapes and material hardness is challenging because removal resistance varies with local contact conditions. Moreover, it is difficult to achieve accurate estimation of removal resistance and analytical modeling of shape transition, and learning-based approaches often require large amounts of training data to cover diverse processing conditions. To address these challenges, we decompose robotic grinding into two components: removal-shape planning and contact-force adaptation. Based on this formulation, we propose DecompGrind, a framework that combines Global Cutting-Surface Planning (GCSP) and Local Contact-Force Adaptation (LCFA). GCSP determines removal shapes through geometric analysis of the current and target shapes without learning, while LCFA learns a contact-force adaptation policy using bilateral control-based imitation learning during the grinding of each removal shape. This decomposition restricts learning to local contact-force adaptation, allowing the policy to be learned from a small number of demonstrations, while handling global shape transition geometrically. Experiments using a robotic grinding system and 3D-printed workpieces demonstrate efficient robotic grinding of workpieces having different shapes and material hardness while maintaining safe levels of contact force.

cs.RO↗

Task-Relevant and Irrelevant Region-Aware Augmentation for Generalizable Vision-Based Imitation Learning in Agricultural Manipulation

Vision-based imitation learning has shown promise for robotic manipulation; however, its generalization remains limited in practical agricultural tasks. This limitation stems from scarce demonstration data and substantial visual domain gaps caused by i) crop-specific appearance diversity and ii) background variations. To address this limitation, we propose Dual-Region Augmentation for Imitation Learning (DRAIL), a region-aware augmentation framework designed for generalizable vision-based imitation learning in agricultural manipulation. DRAIL explicitly separates visual observations into task-relevant and task-irrelevant regions. The task-relevant region is augmented in a domain-knowledge-driven manner to preserve essential visual characteristics, while the task-irrelevant region is aggressively randomized to suppress spurious background correlations. By jointly handling both sources of visual variation, DRAIL promotes learning policies that rely on task-essential features rather than incidental visual cues. We evaluate DRAIL on diffusion policy-based visuomotor controllers through robot experiments on artificial vegetable harvesting and real lettuce defective leaf picking preparation tasks. The results show consistent improvements in success rates under unseen visual conditions compared to baseline methods. Further attention analysis and representation generalization metrics indicate that the learned policies rely more on task-essential visual features, resulting in enhanced robustness and generalization.

cs.RO↗

VoxelDiffusionCut: Non-destructive Internal-part Extraction via Iterative Cutting and Structure Estimation

Non-destructive extraction of the target internal part, such as batteries and motors, by cutting surrounding structures is crucial at recycling and disposal sites. However, the diversity of products and the lack of information on disassembly procedures make it challenging to decide where to cut. This study explores a method for non-destructive extraction of a target internal part that iteratively estimates the internal structure from observed cutting surfaces and formulates cutting plans based on the estimation results. A key requirement is to estimate the probability of the target part's presence from partial observations. However, learning conditional generative models for this task is challenging: The high dimensionality of 3D shape representations makes learning difficult, and conventional models (e.g., conditional variational autoencoders) often fail to capture multi-modal predictive uncertainty due to mode collapse, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address these issues, we propose VoxelDiffusionCut, which iteratively estimates the internal structure represented as voxels using a diffusion model and plans cuts for non-destructive extraction of the target internal part based on the estimation results. Voxel representation allows the model to predict only attributes at fixed grid positions, i.e., types of constituent parts, making learning more tractable. The diffusion model completes the voxel representation conditioned on observed cutting surfaces, capturing uncertainty in unobserved regions to avoid erroneous cuts. Experimental results in simulation suggest that the proposed method can estimate internal structures from observed cutting surfaces and enable non-destructive extraction of the target internal part by leveraging the estimated uncertainty.

cs.CV↗

Robotic System for Chemical Experiment Automation with Dual Demonstration of End-effector and Jig Operations

While robotic automation has demonstrated remarkable performance, such as executing hundreds of experiments continuously over several days, designing synchronized motions between the robot and experimental jigs remains challenging, especially for flexible experimental automation. This challenge stems from the fact that even minor changes in experimental conditions often require extensive reprogramming of both robot motions and jig control commands. Previous systems lack the flexibility to accommodate frequent updates, limiting their practical utility in actual laboratories. To update robotic automation systems flexibly by chemists, we propose a concept that enables the automation of experiments by utilizing dual demonstrations of robot motions and jig operations by chemists. To verify this concept, we developed a chemical-experiment-automation system consisting of jigs to assist the robot in experiments, a motion-demonstration interface, a jig-control interface, and a mobile manipulator. We validate the concept through polymer-synthesis experiments, focusing on critical liquid-handling tasks such as pipetting and dilution. The experimental results indicate high reproducibility of the demonstrated motions and robust task-success rates. This comprehensive concept not only simplifies the robot programming process for chemists but also provides a flexible and efficient solution to accommodate a wide range of experimental conditions, providing a practical framework for intuitive and adaptable robotic laboratory automation. Our project page is available at: https://sasakihikaru.github.io/Chemical-Experiment-Automation-with-Dual-Demonstration/.

cs.RO↗

Cutting Sequence Diffuser: Sim-to-Real Transferable Planning for Object Shaping by Grinding

Automating object shaping by grinding with a robot is a crucial industrial process that involves removing material with a rotating grinding belt. This process generates removal resistance depending on such process conditions as material type, removal volume, and robot grinding posture, all of which complicate the analytical modeling of shape transitions. Additionally, a data-driven approach based on real-world data is challenging due to high data collection costs and the irreversible nature of the process. This paper proposes a Cutting Sequence Diffuser (CSD) for object shaping by grinding. The CSD, which only requires simple simulation data for model learning, offers an efficient way to plan long-horizon action sequences transferable to the real world. Our method designs a smooth action space with constrained small removal volumes to suppress the complexity of the shape transitions caused by removal resistance, thus reducing the reality gap in simulations. Moreover, by using a diffusion model to generate long-horizon action sequences, our approach reduces the planning time and allows for grinding the target shape while adhering to the constraints of a small removal volume per step. Through evaluations in both simulation and real robot experiments, we confirmed that our CSD was effective for grinding to different materials and various target shapes in a short time.

cs.RO↗

Learning to Shape by Grinding: Cutting-surface-aware Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Object shaping by grinding is a crucial industrial process in which a rotating grinding belt removes material. Object-shape transition models are essential to achieving automation by robots; however, learning such a complex model that depends on process conditions is challenging because it requires a significant amount of data, and the irreversible nature of the removal process makes data collection expensive. This paper proposes a cutting-surface-aware Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) method for robotic grinding. Our method employs a cutting-surface-aware model as the object's shape transition model, which in turn is composed of a geometric cutting model and a cutting-surface-deviation model, based on the assumption that the robot action can specify the cutting surface made by the tool. Furthermore, according to the grinding resistance theory, the cutting-surface-deviation model does not require raw shape information, making the model's dimensions smaller and easier to learn than a naive shape transition model directly mapping the shapes. Through evaluation and comparison by simulation and real robot experiments, we confirm that our MBRL method can achieve high data efficiency for learning object shaping by grinding and also provide generalization capability for initial and target shapes that differ from the training data.

cs.RO↗