Learning Latent Dynamics for Autonomous Shape Control of Deformable Object

Abstract

In recent years, the methods of loading and transporting rigid objects have become more and more perfect. However, in the process of transportation, the shape control of deformable objects has attracted extensive attention because deformable objects have been widely used in intelligent tasks such as packing and sorting cables before transportation. Restricted by the super-degrees of freedom and nonlinear dynamic models of deformable objects, planning the action trajectories to control the shape of deformable objects is a challenging task. In this work, we use contrastive learning to solve the shape control problem of deformable objects. The method jointly optimizes the visual representation model and dynamic model of deformable objects, maps the target nonlinear state to linear latent space which avoids model inference for deformable objects in infinite-dimensional configuration spaces. Furthermore, to extract effective information in the latent space, we construct an encoder with a multi-branch topology to improve the representation ability of the model. Experimentally, we collect dynamic trajectory data for random shape control task involving cloth or rope in a simulated environment. Then we apply it to train the proposed offline method to obtain latent dynamic models for shape control of deformable objects. In comparison with other baseline methods, our proposed method achieves substantial performance improvements.