Modelling and Learning Dynamics for Robotic Food-Cutting

Interaction dynamics are difficult to model analytically, making data-driven controllers preferable for contact-rich manipulation tasks. In this work, we approximate the intricate dynamics of food-cutting with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to apply a Model Predictive Controller (MPC). We propose a problem formulation that allows velocity-controlled robots to learn the interaction dynamics and tackle the difficulty of multi-step predictions by training the model with a horizon curriculum. We experimentally demonstrate that our approach leads to good predictive performance that scales for longer prediction horizons, generalizes to unseen object classes and results in controller behaviors with an understanding of the cutting dynamics.