We address the issue of domain gap when making use of synthetic data to train a scene-specific object detector and pose estimator. While previous works have shown that the constraints of learning a scene-specific model can be leveraged to create geometrically and photometrically consistent synthetic data, care must be taken to design synthetic content which is as close as possible to the real-world data distribution. In this work, we propose to solve domain gap through the use of appearance randomization to generate a wide range of synthetic objects to span the space of realistic images for training. An ablation study of our results is presented to delineate the individual contribution of different components in the randomization process. We evaluate our method on VIRAT, UA-DETRAC, EPFL-Car datasets, where we demonstrate that using scene specific domain randomized synthetic data is better than fine-tuning off-the-shelf models on limited real data.
@cite_24 used domain randomization to fly a quadrotor through indoor environments. @cite_9 trained an agent to play Doom and generalize to unseen game levels. @cite_16 , @cite_25 , @cite_26 , @cite_14 used domain randomization for grasping objects. Tremblay performed car detection with domain randomization @cite_17 . @cite_18 proposed object orientation estimation for industrial part shapes that is solely trained on synthetic views rendered from a 3D model. They used domain randomization to reduce the gap between synthetic data and real data.
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_24 @cite_16 @cite_25 @cite_17
2952188290 2766614170 2767050701 2952578114 2565902248 2605102758 2725320964 2796981088
We propose a real-time RGB-based pipeline for object detection and 6D pose estimation. Our novel 3D orientation estimation is based on a variant of the Denoising Autoencoder that is trained on simulated views of a 3D model using Domain Randomization. This so-called Augmented Autoencoder has several advantages over existing methods: It does not require real, pose-annotated training data, generalizes to various test sensors and inherently handles object and view symmetries. Instead of learning an explicit mapping from input images to object poses, it provides an implicit representation of object orientations defined by samples in a latent space. Experiments on the T-LESS and LineMOD datasets show that our method outperforms similar model-based approaches and competes with state-of-the art approaches that require real pose-annotated images. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which has sparked significant interest in learning control policies using a physics simulator. While several recent works have shown promising results in transferring policies trained in simulation to the real world, they often do not fully utilize the advantage of working with a simulator. In this work, we exploit the full state observability in the simulator to train better policies which take as input only partial observations (RGBD images). We do this by employing an actor-critic training algorithm in which the critic is trained on full states while the actor (or policy) gets rendered images as input. We show experimentally on a range of simulated tasks that using these asymmetric inputs significantly improves performance. Finally, we combine this method with domain randomization and show real robot experiments for several tasks like picking, pushing, and moving a block. We achieve this simulation to real world transfer without training on any real world data. Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often specific to the characteristics of the simulator. Due to modeling error, strategies that are successful in simulation may not transfer to their real world counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple method to bridge this "reality gap." By randomizing the dynamics of the simulator during training, we are able to develop policies that are capable of adapting to very different dynamics, including ones that differ significantly from the dynamics on which the policies were trained. This adaptivity enables the policies to generalize to the dynamics of the real world without any training on the physical system. Our approach is demonstrated on an object pushing task using a robotic arm. Despite being trained exclusively in simulation, our policies are able to maintain a similar level of performance when deployed on a real robot, reliably moving an object to a desired location from random initial configurations. We explore the impact of various design decisions and show that the resulting policies are robust to significant calibration error. We present an approach to sensorimotor control in immersive environments. Our approach utilizes a high-dimensional sensory stream and a lower-dimensional measurement stream. The cotemporal structure of these streams provides a rich supervisory signal, which enables training a sensorimotor control model by interacting with the environment. The model is trained using supervised learning techniques, but without extraneous supervision. It learns to act based on raw sensory input from a complex three-dimensional environment. The presented formulation enables learning without a fixed goal at training time, and pursuing dynamically changing goals at test time. We conduct extensive experiments in three-dimensional simulations based on the classical first-person game Doom. The results demonstrate that the presented approach outperforms sophisticated prior formulations, particularly on challenging tasks. The results also show that trained models successfully generalize across environments and goals. A model trained using the presented approach won the Full Deathmatch track of the Visual Doom AI Competition, which was held in previously unseen environments. Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising and powerful technique for automatically acquiring control policies that can process raw sensory inputs, such as images, and perform complex behaviors. However, extending deep RL to real-world robotic tasks has proven challenging, particularly in safety-critical domains such as autonomous flight, where a trial-and-error learning process is often impractical. In this paper, we explore the following question: can we train vision-based navigation policies entirely in simulation, and then transfer them into the real world to achieve real-world flight without a single real training image? We propose a learning method that we call CAD @math RL, which can be used to perform collision-free indoor flight in the real world while being trained entirely on 3D CAD models. Our method uses single RGB images from a monocular camera, without needing to explicitly reconstruct the 3D geometry of the environment or perform explicit motion planning. Our learned collision avoidance policy is represented by a deep convolutional neural network that directly processes raw monocular images and outputs velocity commands. This policy is trained entirely on simulated images, with a Monte Carlo policy evaluation algorithm that directly optimizes the network's ability to produce collision-free flight. By highly randomizing the rendering settings for our simulated training set, we show that we can train a policy that generalizes to the real world, without requiring the simulator to be particularly realistic or high-fidelity. We evaluate our method by flying a real quadrotor through indoor environments, and further evaluate the design choices in our simulator through a series of ablation studies on depth prediction. For supplementary video see: this https URL Bridging the ‘reality gap’ that separates simulated robotics from experiments on hardware could accelerate robotic research through improved data availability. This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models on simulated images that transfer to real images by randomizing rendering in the simulator. With enough variability in the simulator, the real world may appear to the model as just another variation. We focus on the task of object localization, which is a stepping stone to general robotic manipulation skills. We find that it is possible to train a real-world object detector that is accurate to 1.5 cm and robust to distractors and partial occlusions using only data from a simulator with non-realistic random textures. To demonstrate the capabilities of our detectors, we show they can be used to perform grasping in a cluttered environment. To our knowledge, this is the first successful transfer of a deep neural network trained only on simulated RGB images (without pre-training on real images) to the real world for the purpose of robotic control. End-to-end control for robot manipulation and grasping is emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional pipelined approaches. However, end-to-end methods tend to either be slow to train, exhibit little or no generalisability, or lack the ability to accomplish long-horizon or multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we show how two simple techniques can lead to end-to-end (image to velocity) execution of a multi-stage task, which is analogous to a simple tidying routine, without having seen a single real image. This involves locating, reaching for, and grasping a cube, then locating a basket and dropping the cube inside. To achieve this, robot trajectories are computed in a simulator, to collect a series of control velocities which accomplish the task. Then, a CNN is trained to map observed images to velocities, using domain randomisation to enable generalisation to real world images. Results show that we are able to successfully accomplish the task in the real world with the ability to generalise to novel environments, including those with dynamic lighting conditions, distractor objects, and moving objects, including the basket itself. We believe our approach to be simple, highly scalable, and capable of learning long-horizon tasks that have until now not been shown with the state-of-the-art in end-to-end robot control. We present a system for training deep neural networks for object detection using synthetic images. To handle the variability in real-world data, the system relies upon the technique of domain randomization, in which the parameters of the simulator @math such as lighting, pose, object textures, etc. @math are randomized in non-realistic ways to force the neural network to learn the essential features of the object of interest. We explore the importance of these parameters, showing that it is possible to produce a network with compelling performance using only non-artistically-generated synthetic data. With additional fine-tuning on real data, the network yields better performance than using real data alone. This result opens up the possibility of using inexpensive synthetic data for training neural networks while avoiding the need to collect large amounts of hand-annotated real-world data or to generate high-fidelity synthetic worlds @math both of which remain bottlenecks for many applications. The approach is evaluated on bounding box detection of cars on the KITTI dataset.