SPONGE: Sequence Planning with Deformable-ON-Rigid Contact Prediction from Geometric Features

Planning robotic manipulation tasks, especially those that involve interaction between deformable and rigid objects, is challenging due to the complexity in predicting such interactions. We introduce SPONGE, a sequence planning pipeline powered by a deep learning-based contact prediction model for contacts between deformable and rigid bodies under interactions. The contact prediction model is trained on synthetic data generated by a developed simulation environ-ment to learn the mapping from point-cloud observation of a rigid target object and the pose of a deformable tool, to 3D representation of the contact points between the two bodies. We experimentally evaluated the proposed approach for a dish cleaning task both in simulation and on a real Franka Emika Panda with real-world objects. The experimental results demonstrate that in both scenarios the proposed planning pipeline is capable of generating high-quality trajectories that can accomplish the task by achieving more than 90% area coverage on different objects of varying sizes and curvatures while minimizing travel distance. Code and video are available at: https://irobotics.aalto.fi/sponge/.