Learning to Estimate Centers of Mass of Arbitrary Objects

Abstract

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning algorithm with robot manipulation to learn an arbitrary object's center of mass whose physical material composition is unknown. Robot learning is through manipulation of the object in a sequence of actions. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated in simulation to locate the centers of mass of rocks with complex shapes, with even or uneven mass distributions, and confirmed by vertically stacking the rocks along their learned centers of mass both in simulation and in real experiments.