MANIP: A Modular Architecture for Integrating Interactive Perception for Robot Manipulation

We propose a modular systems architecture, MANIP, that can facilitate the design and development of robot manipulation systems by systematically combining learned subpolicies with well-established procedural algorithmic primitives such as Inverse Kinematics, Kalman Filters, RANSAC outlier rejection, PID modules, etc. (aka "Good Old Fashioned Engineering (GOFE)"). The MANIP architecture grew from our lab’s experience developing robot systems for folding clothes, routing cables, and untangling knots. To address failure modes, MANIP can facilitate inclusion of "interactive perception" subpolicies that execute robot actions to modify system state to bring the system into alignment with the training distribution and / or to disambiguate system state when system state confidence is low. We demonstrate how MANIP can be applied with 3 case studies and then describe a detailed case study in cable tracing with experiments that suggest MANIP can improve performance by up to 88%. Code and details are available at: https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/MANIP/