Mobile Robot Manipulation using Pure Object Detection

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of mobile robot manipulation using object detection. Our approach uses detection and control as complimentary functions that learn from real-world interactions. We develop an end-to-end manipulation method based solely on detection and introduce Task-focused Few-shot Object Detection (TFOD) to learn new objects and settings. Our robot collects its own training data and automatically determines when to retrain detection to improve performance across various subtasks (e.g., grasping). Notably, detection training is low-cost, and our robot learns to manipulate new objects using as few as four clicks of annotation. In physical experiments, our robot learns visual control from a single click of annotation and a novel update formulation, manipulates new objects in clutter and other mobile settings, and achieves state-of-the-art results on an existing visual servo control and depth estimation benchmark. Finally, we develop a TFOD Benchmark to support future object detection research for robotics: https://github.com/griffbr/tfod.