从预测到行动:学习可变形线性物体操作中的物理上下文
From Prediction to Action: Learning Physical Context for Deformable Linear Object Manipulation
Chengxiao Dong, Alessio Caporali, Hongyu Lan, Gianluca Palli
AI 速读 基于摘要
论文研究可变形线性物体形状控制中预测效用与决策效用的区别,提出几何指针流策略并比较不同物理上下文表示对预测和控制的影响。
cs.RO
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A representation that accurately predicts a deformable object's response is not necessarily the one most useful for choosing manipulation actions. We study this distinction between predictive utility and decision utility in planar single-grasp shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs). As a common decision backbone, we introduce Geometry-Pointer-Flow (GPF), a geometry-grounded policy that separates grasp-location selection from grasp-conditioned motion generation. Its geometry-only variant reduces one-step executed shape error by 32.8% relative to a DLO-specific diffusion policy, while using 18.7 times fewer parameters and achieving approximately 193 times faster inference. On this backbone, we compare physical context represented by ground-truth parameters, estimated parameters, and learned interaction-history representations, for both forward prediction and executed control. For prediction, ground-truth physical parameters reduce next-shape error by 15.8% over geometry alone, and estimated parameters are slightly more predictive than interaction history. This ordering does not carry over to control: estimated parameters provide no detectable one-step control gain, whereas history-conditioned GPF reduces executed error by 9.9% relative to geometry-only GPF across 470 paired simulation trials. In closed loop, interaction history improves strict-threshold attainment in simulation and yields the strongest zero-shot performance on hardware. All policies are trained exclusively in simulation and transferred to the physical robot without real-world training or fine-tuning. These results show that physical context should be evaluated by the decisions it supports rather than by predictive accuracy alone. Code will be released upon acceptance.