Towards Autonomous Wood-Log Grasping with a Forestry Crane: Simulator and Benchmarking

TL;DR

This paper presents a new simulator and benchmark for autonomous forestry crane manipulation using reinforcement learning, achieving high success rates in grasping heavy logs in realistic scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a realistic forestry crane simulator and an open-source benchmark for reinforcement learning in large-scale manipulation tasks.

Findings

96% success rate in grasping logs of various sizes

Effective curriculum strategy for reinforcement learning control

Open-source benchmark for forestry crane manipulation

Abstract

Forestry machines operated in forest production environments face challenges when performing manipulation tasks, especially regarding the complicated dynamics of underactuated crane systems and the heavy weight of logs to be grasped. This study investigates the feasibility of using reinforcement learning for forestry crane manipulators in grasping and lifting heavy wood logs autonomously. We first build a simulator using Mujoco physics engine to create realistic scenarios, including modeling a forestry crane with 8 degrees of freedom from CAD data and wood logs of different sizes. We further implement a velocity controller for autonomous log grasping with deep reinforcement learning using a curriculum strategy. Utilizing our new simulator, the proposed control strategy exhibits a success rate of 96% when grasping logs of different diameters and under random initial configurations of the forestry crane. In addition, reward functions and reinforcement learning baselines are implemented to provide an open-source benchmark for the community in large-scale manipulation tasks. A video with several demonstrations can be seen at https://www.acin.tuwien.ac.at/en/d18a/