Recent robotic manipulation competitions have highlighted that sophisticated robots still struggle to achieve fast and reliable perception of task-relevant objects in complex, realistic scenarios. To improve these systems' perceptive speed and robustness, we present SegICP, a novel integrated solution to object recognition and pose estimation. SegICP couples convolutional neural networks and multi-hypothesis point cloud registration to achieve both robust pixel-wise semantic segmentation as well as accurate and real-time 6-DOF pose estimation for relevant objects.Our architecture achieves 1 cm position error and < 5 • angle error in real time without an initial seed. We evaluate and benchmark SegICP against an annotated dataset generated by motion capture.

The ability to communicate intention enables decentralized multi-agent robots to collaborate while performing physical tasks. In this work, we present spatial intention maps, a new intention representation for multi-agent vision-based deep reinforcement learning that improves coordination between decentralized mobile manipulators. In this representation, each agent's intention is provided to other agents, and rendered into an overhead 2D map aligned with visual observations. This synergizes with the recently proposed spatial action maps framework, in which state and action representations are spatially aligned, providing inductive biases that encourage emergent cooperative behaviors requiring spatial coordination, such as passing objects to each other or avoiding collisions. Experiments across a variety of multi-agent environments, including heterogeneous robot teams with different abilities (lifting, pushing, or throwing), show that incorporating spatial intention maps improves performance for different mobile manipulation tasks while significantly enhancing cooperative behaviors.

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In this work, we introduce pose interpreter networks for 6-DoF object pose estimation. In contrast to other CNN-based approaches to pose estimation that require expensively annotated object pose data, our pose interpreter network is trained entirely on synthetic pose data. We use object masks as an intermediate representation to bridge real and synthetic. We show that when combined with a segmentation model trained on RGB images, our synthetically trained pose interpreter network is able to generalize to real data. Our endto-end system for object pose estimation runs in real-time (20 Hz) on live RGB data, without using depth information or ICP refinement.