EasyInsert: A Data-Efficient and Generalizable Insertion Policy

TL;DR

EasyInsert is a data-efficient, generalizable visual policy for robotic insertion that achieves high success rates on unseen objects in cluttered environments with minimal human supervision.

Contribution

It introduces a delta-pose regression approach for insertion, enabling scalable data collection and zero-shot generalization without reliance on CAD models or digital twins.

Findings

Over 90% success rate on 13 out of 15 unseen objects

Robust zero-shot performance in cluttered environments

Fast adaptation with minimal manual resets

Abstract

Robotic insertion is a highly challenging task that requires exceptional precision in cluttered environments. Existing methods often have poor generalization capabilities. They typically function in restricted and structured environments, and frequently fail when the plug and socket are far apart, when the scene is densely cluttered, or when handling novel objects. They also rely on strong assumptions such as access to CAD models or a digital twin in simulation. To address these limitations, we propose EasyInsert. Inspired by human intuition, it formulates insertion as a delta-pose regression problem, which unlocks an efficient, highly scalable data collection pipeline with minimal human labor to train an end-to-end visual policy. During execution, the visual policy predicts the relative pose between plug and socket to drive a multi-phase, coarse-to-fine insertion process. EasyInsert demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization capability for unseen objects in cluttered environments, robustly handling cases with significant initial pose deviations. In real-world experiments, by leveraging just 1 hour of human teleoperation data to bootstrap a large-scale automated data collection process, EasyInsert achieves an over 90% success rate in zero-shot insertion for 13 out of 15 unseen novel objects, including challenging objects like Type-C cables, HDMI cables, and Ethernet cables. Furthermore, requiring only a single manual reset, EasyInsert allows for fast adaptation to novel test objects through automated data collection and fine-tuning, achieving an over 90% success rate across all 15 objects.