CS Events

PhD Defense Object-Centric Manipulation: Representation and Algorithms
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Speaker: Haonan Chang

Location : Room 402, 4th floor, 1 Spring Street, Downtown New Brunswick

Committee: 

Professor Abdeslam Boularias (Advisor/Chair) 

Professor Kostas Bekris  

Professor Jinjin Yu 

Professor Yuke Zhu (external)

Event Type: PhD Defense

Abstract: In contemporary robotic manipulation research, two dominant paradigms have emerged: \textbf{action-centric} and \textbf{object-centric} approaches. Action-centric methods, exemplified by end-to-end imitation learning, emphasize direct modeling of robotic actions conditioned on sensory observations. These approaches typically operate through one or few neural networks, offering advantages in implementation simplicity and deployment efficiency. However, this paradigm demands extensive real-world robot-environment interaction data from the same type of robot for training, which is costly to collect and challenging to transfer across different robotic morphologies. In contrast, object-centric manipulation explicitly models manipulated objects and the environment through discrete representations. This framework generally follows a multistage pipeline: (1) perceptual scene understanding and object state estimation, (2) (optional) task planning based on scene analysis, (3) motion planning for action sequencing, and (4) trajectory execution via control strategies. Although architecturally more complex than action-centric alternatives due to its modular composition, the object-centric paradigm demonstrates superior cross-platform transferability and reduced simulation-to-reality transfer challenges for its separated handling of the environment and the robot. This thesis will focus on discussing object-centric manipulation methodologies, conducting a comprehensive analysis of diverse object representation schemes and their corresponding manipulation strategies across various manipulation tasks.

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Contact  Professor Abdeslam Boularias

Zoom link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/98239352784?pwd=5JOML47MYckxgbjei9h8kxSNf9kHcI.1