Anyone who has ever tried to pack a family-sized amount of luggage into a sedan-sized trunk knows this is a hard problem. Robots struggle with dense packing tasks, too. For the robot, solving the packing problem involves satisfying many constraints, such as stacking luggage so suitcases don’t topple out of the trunk, heavy objects aren’t placed on top of lighter ones, and collisions between the robotic arm and the car’s bumper are avoided.
Some traditional methods tackle this problem sequentially, guessing a partial solution that meets one constraint at a time and then checking to see if any other constraints were violated. With a long sequence of actions to take, and a pile of luggage to pack, this process can be impractically time consuming.
MIT researchers used a form of generative AI, called a diffusion model, to solve this problem more efficiently. Their method uses a collection of machine-learning models, each of which is trained to represent one specific type of constraint. These models are combined to generate global solutions to the packing problem, taking into account all constraints at once.
To solve these problems efficiently, the MIT researchers developed a machine-learning technique called Diffusion-CCSP. Diffusion models learn to generate new data samples that resemble samples in a training dataset by iteratively refining their output.
Their method was able to generate effective solutions faster than other techniques, and it produced a greater number of successful solutions in the same amount of time. Importantly, their technique was also able to solve problems with novel combinations of constraints and larger numbers of objects, that the models did not see during training.
Due to this generalizability, their technique can be used to teach robots how to understand and meet the overall constraints of packing problems, such as the importance of avoiding collisions or a desire for one object to be next to another object. Robots trained in this way could be applied to a wide array of complex tasks in diverse environments, from order fulfillment in a warehouse to organizing a bookshelf in someone’s home.
“My vision is to push robots to do more complicated tasks that have many geometric constraints and more continuous decisions that need to be made — these are the kinds of problems service robots face in our unstructured and diverse human environments. With the powerful tool of compositional diffusion models, we can now solve these more complex problems and get great generalization results,” said Zhutian Yang, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student and lead author of a paper on this new machine-learning technique.
“With this process, data generation is almost instantaneous in simulation. We can generate tens of thousands of environments where we know the problems are solvable,” she said.
Trained using these data, the diffusion models work together to determine locations objects should be placed by the robotic gripper that achieve the packing task while meeting all of the constraints.
They conducted feasibility studies, and then demonstrated Diffusion-CCSP with a real robot solving a number of difficult problems, including fitting 2D triangles into a box, packing 2D shapes with spatial relationship constraints, stacking 3D objects with stability constraints, and packing 3D objects with a robotic arm.
Their method outperformed other techniques in many experiments, generating a greater number of effective solutions that were both stable and collision-free.
In the future, Yang and her collaborators want to test Diffusion-CCSP in more complicated situations, such as with robots that can move around a room. They also want to enable Diffusion-CCSP to tackle problems in different domains without the need to be retrained on new data.
For more information, contact Abby Abazorius at