SculptBot: Pre-Trained Models for 3D Deformable Object Manipulation

Deformable object manipulation presents a unique set of challenges in robotic manipulation by exhibiting high degrees of freedom and severe self-occlusion. Choosing state representations for materials that exhibit plastic behavior, like modeling clay or bread dough, is also difficult because they permanently deform under stress and are constantly changing shape. In this work, we investigate each of these challenges using the task of robotic sculpting with a parallel gripper. We propose a system that uses point clouds as the state representation and leverages a pre-trained point cloud reconstruction transformer to learn a latent dynamics model to predict material deformations given a grasp action. We design a novel action sampling algorithm that reasons about geometrical differences between point clouds to further improve the efficiency of model-based planners. All data and experiments are conducted entirely in the real world. Our experiments show the proposed system is able to successfully capture the dynamics of clay, and is able to create a variety of simple shapes. Videos and additional figures are available on our project page at: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/sculptbot