Learning Language-Conditioned Deformable Object Manipulation with Graph Dynamics

Vision-based deformable object manipulation is a challenging problem in robotic manipulation, requiring a robot to infer a sequence of manipulation actions leading to the desired state from solely visual observations. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way and adapt the goal image to specify a task, which is not practical or efficient. Thus, we adapted natural language specification and proposed a language-conditioned deformable object manipulation policy learning framework. We first design a unified Transformer-based architecture to understand multi-modal data and output picking and placing action. Besides, we have introduced the visible connectivity graph to tackle nonlinear dynamics and complex configuration of the deformable object in the manipulation process. Both simulated and real experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method is general and effective in language-conditioned deformable object manipulation policy learning. Our method achieves much higher success rates on various language-conditioned deformable object manipulation tasks (87.3% on average) than the state-of-the-art method in simulation experiments. Besides, our method is much lighter and has a 75.6% shorter inference time than state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate that our method performs well in real-world applications. Supplementary videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/language-deformable.