Playing with Food: Learning Food Item Representations through Interactive Exploration

November 2021

Playing with Food: Learning Food Item Representations through Interactive Exploration

Authors:

Amrita Sawhney, Steven Lee, Kevin Zhang, Manuela Veloso, and Oliver Kroemer

Abstract:

A key challenge in robotic food manipulation is modeling the material properties of diverse and deformable food items. We propose using a multimodal sensory approach to interact and play with food that facilitates the ability to distinguish these properties across food items. First, we use a robotic arm and an array of sensors, which are synchronized using ROS, to collect a diverse dataset consisting of 21 unique food items with varying slices and properties. Afterwards, we learn visual embedding networks that utilize a combination of proprioceptive, audio, and visual data to encode similarities among food items using a triplet loss formulation. Our evaluations show that embeddings learned through interactions can successfully increase performance in a wide range of material and shape classification tasks. We envision that these learned embeddings can be utilized as a basis for planning and selecting optimal parameters for more material-aware robotic food manipulation skills. Furthermore, we hope to stimulate further innovations in the field of food robotics by sharing this food playing dataset with the research community.
@conference{Sawhney-2021-125867,
author = {Amrita Sawhney And Steven Lee And Kevin Zhang And Manuela Veloso And Oliver Kroemer},
title = {Playing with Food: Learning Food Item Representations through Interactive Exploration},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 17th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '20)},
year = {2021},
month = {November},
publisher = {Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics (SPAR)},
keywords = {Manipulation, Food, Embedding},
}
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