In Part 1 of the tutorial, we learned how to create our Scene in Unity Editor.
In Part 2 of the tutorial, we learned:
- How to equip the camera for the data collection
- How to set up labelling and label configurations
- How to create your own Randomizer
- How to add our custom Randomizer
In this part, we will be collecting a large dataset of RGB images of the Scene, and the corresponding pose of the cube. We will then use this data to train a machine learning model to predict the cube's position and rotation from images taken by our camera. We will then be ready to use the trained model for our pick-and-place task in Part 4.
Steps included in this part of the tutorial:
Table of Contents
Now it is time to collect the data: a set of images with the corresponding position and orientation of the cube relative to the camera.
We need to collect data for the training process and data for the validation one.
We have chosen a training dataset of 30,000 images and a validation dataset of 3,000 images.
-
Select the
Simulation Scenario
GameObject and in the Inspector tab, make sureAutomatic Iteration
is enabled. When this flag is enabled, our Scenario automatically proceeds through Iterations, triggering theOnIterationStart()
method of all Randomizers on each Iteration. When this flag is disabled, the Iterations would have to be triggered manually. -
In the Inspector view of
Pose Estimation Scenario
, set theTotal Frames
field underConstants
to 30000. -
Press play and wait until the simulation is done. It should take a bit of time (~10 min).
-
Select
Main Camera
again to bring up its Inspector view. At the bottom of the UI forPerception Camera
, there are buttons for showing the latest dataset output folder and copying its path to clipboard. An example is shown below (Mac OS):
-
Click Show Folder to show and highlight the folder in your operating system's file explorer.
-
Change this folder's name to
UR3_single_cube_training
. -
Enter the folder
You should then see something similar to this:
Now we need to collect the validation dataset.
-
Back in Unity Editor, Select the
Simulation Scenario
GameObject and in the Inspector tab, inPose Estimation Scenario
, set theTotal Frames
field underConstants
to 3000. -
Press play and wait until the simulation is done. Once the simulation finishes, follow the same steps as before to navigate to the output folder.
-
Change the folder name where the latest data was saved to
UR3_single_cube_validation
. -
(Optional): Move the
UR3_single_cube_training
andUR3_single_cube_validation
folders to a directory of your choice.
Now it's time to train our deep learning model! We've provided the model training code for you, but if you'd like to learn more about it - or make your own changes - you can dig into the details here.
This step can take a long time if your computer doesn't have GPU support (~5 days on CPU). Even with a GPU, it can take around ~10 hours. We have provided an already trained model as an alternative to waiting for training to complete. If you would like to use this provided model, you can proceed to Part 4.
- Navigate to the
Robotics-Object-Pose-Estimation/Model
directory.
We support two approaches for running the model: Docker (which can run anywhere) or locally with Conda.
If you would like to run using Docker, you can follow the Docker steps provided in the model documentation.
To run this project locally, you will need to install Anaconda or Miniconda.
If running locally without Docker, we first need to create a Conda virtual environment and install the dependencies for our machine learning model. If you only have access to CPUs, install the dependencies specified in the environment.yml
file. If your development machine has GPU support, you can choose to use the environment-gpu.yml
file instead.
- In a terminal window, enter the following command to create the environment. Replace
<env-name>
with an environment name of your choice, e.g.pose-estimation
:
conda env create -n <env-name> -f environment.yml
Then, you need to activate the Conda environment.
- Still in the same terminal window, enter the following command:
conda activate <env-name>
At the top of the cli.py file in the model code, you can see the documentation for all supported commands. Since typing these in can be laborious, we use a config.yaml file to feed in all these arguments. You can still use the command line arguments if you want - they will override the config.
There are a few settings specific to your setup that you'll need to change.
First, we need to specify the path to the folders where your training and validation data are saved:
- In the config.yaml, under
system
, you need to set the argumentdata/root
to the path of the directory containing your data folders. For example, since I put my data (UR3_single_cube_training
andUR3_single_cube_validation
) in a folder calleddata
in Documents, I set the following:
data_root: /Users/<user-name>/Documents/data
Second, we need to modify the location where the model is going to be saved:
- In the config.yaml, under
system
, you need to set the argumentlog_dir_system
to the full path of the output folder where your model's results will be saved. For example, I created a new directory calledmodels
in my Documents, and then set the following:
log_dir_system: /Users/<user-name>/Documents/models
-
If you are not already in the
Robotics-Object-Pose-Estimation/Model
directory, navigate there. -
Enter the following command to start training:
python -m pose_estimation.cli train
Note (Optional): If you want to override certain training hyperparameters, you can do so with additional arguments on the above command. See the documentation at the top of cli.py for a full list of supported arguments.
Note: If the training process ends unexpectedly, check the Troubleshooting Guide for potential solutions.
If you'd like to examine the results of your training run in more detail, see our guide on viewing the Tensorboard logs.
Once training has completed, we can also run our model on our validation dataset to measure its performance on data it has never seen before.
However, first we need to specify a few settings in our config file.
-
In config.yaml, under
checkpoint
, you need to set the argumentlog_dir_checkpoint
to the path where you have saved your newly trained model. -
If you are not already in the
Robotics-Object-Pose-Estimation/Model
directory, navigate there. -
To start the evaluation run, enter the following command:
python -m pose_estimation.cli evaluate
Note (Optional): To override additional settings on your evaluation run, you can tag on additional arguments to the command above. See the documentation in cli.py for more details.
Optional: If you would like to learn more about Randomizers and apply domain randomization to this scene more thoroughly, check out our further exercises for the reader here.