Towards Robotic Tree Manipulation: Leveraging Graph Representations

May 2024

Towards Robotic Tree Manipulation: Leveraging Graph Representations

Conference Paper
Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Abstract:

There is growing interest in automating agricultural tasks that require intricate and precise interaction with specialty crops, such as trees and vines. However, developing robotic solutions for crop manipulation remains a difficult challenge due to complexities involved in modeling their deformable behavior. In this study, we present a framework for learning the deformation behavior of tree-like crops under contact interaction. Our proposed method involves encoding the state of a spring-damper modeled tree crop as a graph. This representation allows us to employ graph networks to learn both a forward model for predicting resulting deformations, and a contact policy for inferring actions to manipulate tree crops. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments in a simulated environment and demonstrate generalizability of our method on previously unseen trees. Videos can be found on the project website: https://kantor-lab.github.io/tree_gnn
@conference{Kim-2024-140274,
author = {Chung Hee Kim And Moonyoung Lee And Oliver Kroemer And George Kantor},
title = {Towards Robotic Tree Manipulation: Leveraging Graph Representations},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2024},
month = {May},
keywords = {Agricultural Robotics, Manipulation, Graph Neural Networks},
}
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.