Guest Lecture by Dr. Karthik Desingh (UMN) CS 6301 Robotics Fall 2024

Title: Object Assembly: A Spatial-Geometric Reasoning Pathway to Physical Intelligence
Abstract: In this talk, I will introduce object assembly as a spatial-geometric reasoning challenge within robot manipulation learning. I aim to convince you that every object-object interaction task humans perform can be viewed as a form of object assembly, underscoring the critical need for research in this domain to advance physical intelligence. I will discuss our efforts to design spatial-geometric reasoning tasks and examine the limitations of pre-trained visual representations revealed in our experiments. These experiments also include a robustness study of high-precision assembly tasks, offering insights into grasp-induced complexities and failure modes during the contact-rich phases of object assembly. In the latter part of the talk, I will present our visuo-tactile representation learning approach, “AugInsert,” which achieves robust performance during contact-rich assembly phases by leveraging online data augmentation to address perturbations and distributional shifts during inference. Finally, I will share key findings and highlight open challenges in the field of object assembly.
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