Ab Initio Particle-based Object Manipulation

Understand

This paper presents Particle-based Object Manipulation (Prompt), a new approach to robot manipulation of novel objects ab initio, without prior object models or pre-training on a large object data set.

• The key element of Prompt is a particle-based object representation, in which each particle represents a point in the object, the local geometric, physical, and other features of the point, and also its relation with other particles.
• Like the model-based analytic approaches to manipulation, the particle representation enables the robot to reason about the object's geometry and dynamics in order to choose suitable manipulation actions.
• Like the data-driven approaches, the particle representation is learned online in real-time from visual sensor input, specifically, multi-view RGB images.