Kinematics Learning of Massive Heterogeneous Serial Robots

Abstract

Kinematics and instantaneous kinematics are fundamental in many robotic tasks, such as positioning and collision avoidance. Existing learning methods mainly concern a single robot, and small-scale networks are sufficient for considerable approximation accuracy. A question is: Can we learn a kinematics model that can generalize to various robots rather than a single robot? This paper studies the kinematics learning of massive heterogeneous serial robots and the transfer of these general models to reality. We generate a dataset by randomizing dimensions, configurations, and link lengths and employ a network based on the generative pre-trained transformer to learn general kinematics mappings. We directly transfer our models for accuracy and use distillation-based transfer for computational efficiency. The results validate that our method can accurately approximate the kinematics of thousands of robot models and demonstrates generality in transfer.