Automated Creation of Digital Cousins for Robust Policy Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dai, Tianyuan, Wong, Josiah, Jiang, Yunfan, Wang, Chen, Gokmen, Cem, Zhang, Ruohan, Wu, Jiajun, Fei-Fei, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dai, Tianyuan
Wong, Josiah
Jiang, Yunfan
Wang, Chen
Gokmen, Cem
Zhang, Ruohan
Wu, Jiajun
Fei-Fei, Li
author_facet Dai, Tianyuan
Wong, Josiah
Jiang, Yunfan
Wang, Chen
Gokmen, Cem
Zhang, Ruohan
Wu, Jiajun
Fei-Fei, Li
contents Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07408
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Creation of Digital Cousins for Robust Policy Learning
Dai, Tianyuan
Wong, Josiah
Jiang, Yunfan
Wang, Chen
Gokmen, Cem
Zhang, Ruohan
Wu, Jiajun
Fei-Fei, Li
Robotics
Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.
title Automated Creation of Digital Cousins for Robust Policy Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07408