In this paper, we examine the problem of robotic manipulation of granular media. We evaluate multiple predictive models used to infer the dynamics of scooping and dumping actions. These models are evaluated on a task that involves manipulating the media in order to deform it into a desired shape. Our best performing model is based on a highly-tailored convolutional network architecture with domain-specific optimizations, which we show accurately models the physical interaction of the robotic scoop with the underlying media. We empirically demonstrate that explicitly predicting physical mechanics results in a policy that out-performs both a hand-crafted dynamics baseline, and a "value-network", which must otherwise implicitly predict the same mechanics in order to produce accurate value estimates.
 We introduce SE3-Nets, which are deep networks designed to model rigid body motion from raw point cloud data. Based only on pairs of depth images along with an action vector and point wise data associations, SE3-Nets learn to segment effected object parts and predict their motion resulting from the applied force. Rather than learning point wise flow vectors, SE3-Nets predict SE3 transformations for different parts of the scene. Using simulated depth data of a table top scene and a robot manipulator, we show that the structure underlying SE3-Nets enables them to generate a far more consistent prediction of object motion than traditional flow based networks. Wooden blocks are a common toy for infants, allowing them to develop motor skills and gain intuition about the physical behavior of the world. In this paper, we explore the ability of deep feed-forward models to learn such intuitive physics. Using a 3D game engine, we create small towers of wooden blocks whose stability is randomized and render them collapsing (or remaining upright). This data allows us to train large convolutional network models which can accurately predict the outcome, as well as estimating the block trajectories. The models are also able to generalize in two important ways: (i) to new physical scenarios, e.g. towers with an additional block and (ii) to images of real wooden blocks, where it obtains a performance comparable to human subjects. Recent advances in AI and robotics have claimed many incredible results with deep learning, yet no work to date has applied deep learning to the problem of liquid perception and reasoning. In this paper, we apply fully-convolutional deep neural networks to the tasks of detecting and tracking liquids. We evaluate three models: a single-frame network, multi-frame network, and a LSTM recurrent network. Our results show that the best liquid detection results are achieved when aggregating data over multiple frames and that the LSTM network outperforms the other two in both tasks. This suggests that LSTM-based neural networks have the potential to be a key component for enabling robots to handle liquids using robust, closed-loop controllers.  Pouring a specific amount of liquid is a challenging task. In this paper we develop methods for robots to use visual feedback to perform closed-loop control for pouring liquids. We propose both a model-based and a model-free method utilizing deep learning for estimating the volume of liquid in a container. Our results show that the model-free method is better able to estimate the volume. We combine this with a simple PID controller to pour specific amounts of liquid, and show that the robot is able to achieve an average 38ml deviation from the target amount. To our knowledge, this is the first use of raw visual feedback to pour liquids in robotics. We present the Neural Physics Engine (NPE), a framework for learning simulators of intuitive physics that naturally generalize across variable object count and different scene configurations. We propose a factorization of a physical scene into composable object-based representations and a neural network architecture whose compositional structure factorizes object dynamics into pairwise interactions. Like a symbolic physics engine, the NPE is endowed with generic notions of objects and their interactions; realized as a neural network, it can be trained via stochastic gradient descent to adapt to specific object properties and dynamics of different worlds. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on simple rigid body dynamics in two-dimensional worlds. By comparing to less structured architectures, we show that the NPE's compositional representation of the structure in physical interactions improves its ability to predict movement, generalize across variable object count and different scene configurations, and infer latent properties of objects such as mass.