Improving Robot Success Detection using Static Object Data We use static object data to improve success detection for stacking objects on and nesting objects in one another. Such actions are necessary for certain robotics tasks, e.g., clearing a dining table or packing a warehouse bin. However, using an RGBD camera to detect success can be insufficient: samecolored objects can be difficult to differentiate, and reflective silverware cause noisy depth camera perception. We show that adding static data about the objects themselves improves the performance of an endtoend pipeline for classifying action outcomes. Images of the objects, and language expressions describing them, encode prior geometry, shape, and size information that refine classification accuracy. We collect over 13 hours of egocentric manipulation data for training a model to reason about whether a robot successfully placed unseen objects in or on one another. The model achieves up to a 57% absolute gain over the task baseline on pairs of previously unseen objects.

The CoSTAR Block Stacking Dataset: Learning with Workspace Constraints A robot can now grasp an object more effectively than ever before, but once it has the object what happens next? We show that a mild relaxation of the task and workspace constraints implicit in existing object grasping datasets can cause neural network based grasping algorithms to fail on even a simple block stacking task when executed under more realistic circumstances. To address this, we introduce the JHU CoSTAR Block Stacking Dataset (BSD), where a robot interacts with 5.1 cm colored blocks to complete an orderfulfillment style block stacking task. It contains dynamic scenes and real timeseries data in a less constrained environment than comparable datasets. There are nearly 12,000 stacking attempts and over 2 million frames of real data. We discuss the ways in which this dataset provides a valuable resource for a broad range of other topics of investigation. We find that handdesigned neural networks that work on prior datasets do not generalize to this task. Thus, to establish a baseline for this dataset, we demonstrate an automated search of neural network based models using a novel multipleinput HyperTree MetaModel, and find a final model which makes reasonable 3D pose predictions for grasping and stacking on our dataset. The CoSTAR BSD, code, and instructions are available at sites.google.comsitecostardataset.