Learning Bimanual Scooping Policies for Food Acquisition

Understand

A robotic feeding system must be able to acquire a variety of foods.

• Prior bite acquisition works consider single-arm spoon scooping or fork skewering, which do not generalize to foods with complex geometries and deformabilities.
• For example, when acquiring a group of peas, skewering could smoosh the peas while scooping without a barrier could result in chasing the peas on the plate.
• In order to acquire foods with such diverse properties, we propose stabilizing food items during scooping using a second arm, for example, by pushing peas against the spoon with a flat surface to prevent dispersion.