ScissorBot: Learning Generalizable Scissor Skill for Paper Cutting via Simulation, Imitation, and Sim2Real

This paper tackles the challenging robotic task of generalizable paper cutting using scissors. In this task, scissors attached to a robot arm are driven to accurately cut curves drawn on the paper, which is hung with the top edge fixed. Due to the frequent paper-scissor contact and consequent fracture, the paper features continual deformation and changing topology, which is diffult for accurate modeling. To ensure effective execution, we customize an action primitive sequence for imitation learning to constrain its action space, thus alleviating potential compounding errors. Finally, by integrating sim-to-real techniques to bridge the gap between simulation and reality, our policy can be effectively deployed on the real robot. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses all baselines in both simulation and real-world benchmarks and achieves performance comparable to human operation with a single hand under the same conditions.

Towards Robust Probabilistic Modeling on SO(3) via Rotation Laplace Distribution

Estimating the 3DoF rotation from a single RGB image is an important yet challenging problem. As a popular approach, probabilistic rotation modeling additionally carries prediction uncertainty information, compared to single-prediction rotation regression. For modeling probabilistic distribution over SO(3), it is natural to use Gaussian-like Bingham distribution and matrix Fisher, however they are shown to be sensitive to outlier predictions, e.g. $180^\circ$ error and thus are unlikely to converge with optimal performance. In this paper, we draw inspiration from multivariate Laplace distribution and propose a novel rotation Laplace distribution on SO(3). Our rotation Laplace distribution is robust to the disturbance of outliers and enforces much gradient to the low-error region that it can improve. In addition, we show that our method also exhibits robustness to small noises and thus tolerates imperfect annotations. With this benefit, we demonstrate its advantages in semi-supervised rotation regression, where the pseudo labels are noisy. To further capture the multi-modal rotation solution space for symmetric objects, we extend our distribution to rotation Laplace mixture model and demonstrate its effectiveness. Our extensive experiments show that our proposed distribution and the mixture model achieve state-of-the-art performance in all the rotation regression experiments over both probabilistic and non-probabilistic baselines.