ClutterGen: A Cluttered Scene Generator for Robot Learning

TL;DR

ClutterGen is a reinforcement learning-based simulation scene generator that creates diverse, physically plausible cluttered scenes for robot learning, enabling improved training and real-world application.

Contribution

We present ClutterGen, a novel RL method for generating diverse, stable cluttered scenes adhering to physical laws, reducing manual engineering effort.

Findings

Generates cluttered scenes with up to ten objects on tables.

Explicitly encourages diversity in scene generation.

Effective in real-world robot clutter rearrangement tasks.

Abstract

We introduce ClutterGen, a physically compliant simulation scene generator capable of producing highly diverse, cluttered, and stable scenes for robot learning. Generating such scenes is challenging as each object must adhere to physical laws like gravity and collision. As the number of objects increases, finding valid poses becomes more difficult, necessitating significant human engineering effort, which limits the diversity of the scenes. To overcome these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning method that can be trained with physics-based reward signals provided by the simulator. Our experiments demonstrate that ClutterGen can generate cluttered object layouts with up to ten objects on confined table surfaces. Additionally, our policy design explicitly encourages the diversity of the generated scenes for open-ended generation. Our real-world robot results show that ClutterGen can be directly used for clutter rearrangement and stable placement policy training.