Estimating Mass Distribution of Articulated Objects using Non-prehensile Manipulation

Understand

We explore the problem of estimating the mass distribution of an articulated object by an interactive robotic agent.

• Our method predicts the mass distribution of an object by using the limited sensing and actuating capabilities of a robotic agent that is interacting with the object.
• We are inspired by the role of exploratory play in human infants.
• We take the combined approach of supervised and reinforcement learning to train an agent that learns to strategically interact with the object to estimate the object's mass distribution.