Implicit Physics-aware Policy for Dynamic Manipulation of Rigid Objects via Soft Body Tools

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Implicit Physics-aware policy enabling soft tools to manipulate rigid objects effectively in unknown environments, advancing robotic manipulation capabilities with a focus on dynamic, one-shot tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel IPA policy that performs system identification and goal-conditioned actions for soft tool use in dynamic manipulation tasks.

Findings

Effective identification of physical properties

Accurate prediction of goal-directed actions

Successful generalization to real-world scenarios

Abstract

Recent advancements in robot tool use have unlocked their usage for novel tasks, yet the predominant focus is on rigid-body tools, while the investigation of soft-body tools and their dynamic interaction with rigid bodies remains unexplored. This paper takes a pioneering step towards dynamic one-shot soft tool use for manipulating rigid objects, a challenging problem posed by complex interactions and unobservable physical properties. To address these problems, we propose the Implicit Physics-aware (IPA) policy, designed to facilitate effective soft tool use across various environmental configurations. The IPA policy conducts system identification to implicitly identify physics information and predict goal-conditioned, one-shot actions accordingly. We validate our approach through a challenging task, i.e., transporting rigid objects using soft tools such as ropes to distant target positions in a single attempt under unknown environment physics parameters. Our experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our method in efficiently identifying physical properties, accurately predicting actions, and smoothly generalizing to real-world environments. The related video is available at: https://youtu.be/4hPrUDTc4Rg?si=WUZrT2vjLMt8qRWA