Put a Lid on It! A Learning-Free Method to Cap a Container via Physical Simulations

Putting a lid on a container is a very common and crucial task in daily life. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-free method for robots to ‘imagine’ the matching of unseen open containers and lids via physical simulation. After reconstructing the objects with the Gaussian process distance field, open container imagination is conducted initially to generate the footprint. The footprint is analyzed to determine the relative pose between the container and lid. Then the optimal matching pose is identified by carrying out matching imagination. Experiments were conducted in real-world scenarios. Our method outperforms an LLM-based method, reaching a success rate of $\mathbf{9 1. 1 \%}$ when the robot autonomously puts lids on containers. The code is available on our GitHub page³3GitHub repo: https://github.com/Su-Wan-00/MatchingImagination..