Self-Supervised Learning for Robotic Manipulation in Unstructured Environments
Abstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments is a promising approach, as with SSL, robots can learn to manipulate autonomously through interaction and dependencies on large annotated datasets can be removed. As opposed to supervised learning, SSL uses raw sensory data—images, depth maps or tactile data—to learn meaningful representation by predicting transformations, reconstructing inputs, or maximizing mutual information. For example, contrastive learning, auto-encoders, and reinforcement learning are used to train the models on unlabelled data to improve generalization over diverse and even unpredictable real-world scenarios. Challenges involve how to cope with partial observability, different object dynamics, as well as noisy sensor inputs that require robust feature extraction and temporal consistency. Recent approaches incorporate the use of attention mechanisms, multi-modal fusion, and memory-augmented networks to improve adaptability in cluttered or deformable scenes. Furthermore, one could integrate sim-to-real transfer methods with SSL so as to close the gap in data efficiency and make practical deployment possible. Progress has occurred, but challenges remain in long-horizon task planning, real-time inference, and safety-critical decision making. Future investigations can include both hybrid SSL-supervised methods, meta-learning for fast adaptation, and physics-informed representations to close the simulation-reality gap. None of these observations preclude the use of our approach in the domain of logistics, agriculture or domestic robotics, where unstructured environments require manipulation over a greater extent while remaining autonomous.