We introduce a scalable approach for object pose estimation trained on simulated RGB views of multiple 3D models together. We learn an encoding of object views that does not only describe an implicit orientation of all objects seen during training, but can also relate views of untrained objects. Our single-encoder-multi-decoder network is trained using a technique we denote ”multi-path learning”: While the encoder is shared by all objects, each decoder only reconstructs views of a single object. Consequently, views of different instances do not have to be separated in the latent space and can share common features. The resulting encoder generalizes well from synthetic to real data and across various instances, categories, model types and datasets. We systematically investigate the learned encodings, their generalization, and iterative refinement strategies on the ModelNet40 and T-LESS dataset. Despite training jointly on multiple objects, our 6D Object Detection pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on T-LESS at much lower runtimes than competing approaches.

We present KOVIS, a novel learning-based, calibration-free visual servoing method for fine robotic manipulation tasks with eye-in-hand stereo camera system. We train the deep neural network only in the simulated environment; and the trained model could be directly used for real-world visual servoing tasks. KOVIS consists of two networks. The first keypoint network learns the keypoint representation from the image using with an autoencoder. Then the visual servoing network learns the motion based on keypoints extracted from the camera image. The two networks are trained end-to-end in the simulated environment by self-supervised learning without manual data labeling. After training with data augmentation, domain randomization, and adversarial examples, we are able to achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to real-world robotic manipulation tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both simulated environment and real-world experiment with different robotic manipulation tasks, including grasping, peg-in-hole insertion with 4mm clearance, and M13 screw insertion. The demo video is available at: http://youtube/gfBJBR2tDzA.

One of the main challenges in sampling-based motion planners is to find an efficient sampling strategy. While methods such as Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) have shown to be more reliable in complex environments than optimization-based methods, they often require longer planning times, which reduces their usability for real-time applications. Recently, biased sampling methods have shown to remedy this issue. For example Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) have been used to sample more efficiently in feasible regions of the configuration space. Once the GMM is learned, however, this approach does not adapt its biases to individual planning scene during inference. Hence, we propose in this work a more efficient sampling strategy to further bias the GMM based on visual input upon query. We employ an autoencoder trained entirely in simulation to extract features from depth images and use the latent representation to adjust the weights of each mixture components in the GMM. We show empirically that this improves the sampling efficiency of an RRT motion planner in both real and simulated scenes.