Learning to manipulate 3D objects in an interactive environment has been a challenging problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, it is hard to train a policy that can generalize over objects with different semantic categories, diverse shape geometry and versatile functionality. Recently, the technique of visual affordance has shown great prospects in providing object-centric information priors with effective actionable semantics. As such, an effective policy can be trained to open a door by knowing how to exert force on the handle. However, to learn the affordance, it often requires human-defined action primitives, which limits the range of applicable tasks. In this study, we take advantage of visual affordance by using the contact information generated during the RL training process to predict contact maps of interest. Such contact prediction process then leads to an end-to-end affordance learning framework that can generalize over different types of manipulation tasks. Surprisingly, the effectiveness of such framework holds even under the multi-stage and the multi-agent scenarios. We tested our method on eight types of manipulation tasks. Results showed that our methods outperform baseline algorithms, including visual-based affordance methods and RL methods, by a large margin on the success rate. The demonstration can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/rlafford/.

本研究使用视觉契合技术，通过预测关键点的接触信息，提出了一种端到端的控制策略学习框架，可以实现在不同类型的操纵任务中的泛化。结果显示，我们的算法在成功率上大大优于基线算法，包括基于视觉契合和强化学习方法。

机器人操作的端到端操作能力学习