Multi-Modal Human-Machine Communication for Instructing Robot Grasping Tasks

A major challenge for the realization of intelligent robots is to supply them with cognitive abilities in order to allow ordinary users to program them easily and intuitively. One way of such programming is teaching work tasks by interactive demonstration. To make this effective and convenient for the user, the machine must be capable to establish a common focus of attention and be able to use and integrate spoken instructions, visual perceptions, and non-verbal clues like gestural commands. We report progress in building a hybrid architecture that combines statistical methods, neural networks, and finite state machines into an integrated system for instructing grasping tasks by man-machine interaction. The system combines the GRAVIS-robot for visual attention and gestural instruction with an intelligent interface for speech recognition and linguistic interpretation, and an modality fusion module to allow multi-modal task-oriented man-machine communication with respect to dextrous robot manipulation of objects.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Interactively Picking Real-World Objects with Unconstrained Spoken Language Instructions

Comprehension of spoken natural language is an essential component for robots to communicate with human effectively. However, handling unconstrained spoken instructions is challenging due to (1) complex structures including a wide variety of expressions used in spoken language and (2) inherent ambiguity in interpretation of human instructions. In this paper, we propose the first comprehensive system that can handle unconstrained spoken language and is able to effectively resolve ambiguity in spoken instructions. Specifically, we integrate deep-learning-based object detection together with natural language processing technologies to handle unconstrained spoken instructions, and propose a method for robots to resolve instruction ambiguity through dialogue. Through our experiments on both a simulated environment as well as a physical industrial robot arm, we demonstrate the ability of our system to understand natural instructions from human operators effectively, and how higher success rates of the object picking task can be achieved through an interactive clarification process.Comment: 9 pages. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018. Accompanying videos are available at the following links: https://youtu.be/_Uyv1XIUqhk (the system submitted to ICRA-2018) and http://youtu.be/DGJazkyw0Ws (with improvements after ICRA-2018 submission

GraspGPT: Leveraging Semantic Knowledge from a Large Language Model for Task-Oriented Grasping

Task-oriented grasping (TOG) refers to the problem of predicting grasps on an object that enable subsequent manipulation tasks. To model the complex relationships between objects, tasks, and grasps, existing methods incorporate semantic knowledge as priors into TOG pipelines. However, the existing semantic knowledge is typically constructed based on closed-world concept sets, restraining the generalization to novel concepts out of the pre-defined sets. To address this issue, we propose GraspGPT, a large language model (LLM) based TOG framework that leverages the open-end semantic knowledge from an LLM to achieve zero-shot generalization to novel concepts. We conduct experiments on Language Augmented TaskGrasp (LA-TaskGrasp) dataset and demonstrate that GraspGPT outperforms existing TOG methods on different held-out settings when generalizing to novel concepts out of the training set. The effectiveness of GraspGPT is further validated in real-robot experiments. Our code, data, appendix, and video are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/graspgpt/.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Language-guided Robot Grasping: CLIP-based Referring Grasp Synthesis in Clutter

Robots operating in human-centric environments require the integration of visual grounding and grasping capabilities to effectively manipulate objects based on user instructions. This work focuses on the task of referring grasp synthesis, which predicts a grasp pose for an object referred through natural language in cluttered scenes. Existing approaches often employ multi-stage pipelines that first segment the referred object and then propose a suitable grasp, and are evaluated in private datasets or simulators that do not capture the complexity of natural indoor scenes. To address these limitations, we develop a challenging benchmark based on cluttered indoor scenes from OCID dataset, for which we generate referring expressions and connect them with 4-DoF grasp poses. Further, we propose a novel end-to-end model (CROG) that leverages the visual grounding capabilities of CLIP to learn grasp synthesis directly from image-text pairs. Our results show that vanilla integration of CLIP with pretrained models transfers poorly in our challenging benchmark, while CROG achieves significant improvements both in terms of grounding and grasping. Extensive robot experiments in both simulation and hardware demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in challenging interactive object grasping scenarios that include clutter

Language-guided Robot Grasping: CLIP-based Referring Grasp Synthesis in Clutter

Robots operating in human-centric environments require the integration of visual grounding and grasping capabilities to effectively manipulate objects based on user instructions. This work focuses on the task of referring grasp synthesis, which predicts a grasp pose for an object referred through natural language in cluttered scenes. Existing approaches often employ multi-stage pipelines that first segment the referred object and then propose a suitable grasp, and are evaluated in private datasets or simulators that do not capture the complexity of natural indoor scenes. To address these limitations, we develop a challenging benchmark based on cluttered indoor scenes from OCID dataset, for which we generate referring expressions and connect them with 4-DoF grasp poses. Further, we propose a novel end-to-end model (CROG) that leverages the visual grounding capabilities of CLIP to learn grasp synthesis directly from image-text pairs. Our results show that vanilla integration of CLIP with pretrained models transfers poorly in our challenging benchmark, while CROG achieves significant improvements both in terms of grounding and grasping. Extensive robot experiments in both simulation and hardware demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in challenging interactive object grasping scenarios that include clutter.Comment: Poster CoRL 2023. Dataset and code available here: https://github.com/gtziafas/OCID-VL

LanPose: Language-Instructed 6D Object Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly

Comprehending natural language instructions is a critical skill for robots to cooperate effectively with humans. In this paper, we aim to learn 6D poses for roboticassembly by natural language instructions. For this purpose, Language-Instructed 6D Pose Regression Network (LanPose) is proposed to jointly predict the 6D poses of the observed object and the corresponding assembly position. Our proposed approach is based on the fusion of geometric and linguistic features, which allows us to finely integrate multi-modality input and map it to the 6D pose in SE(3) space by the cross-attention mechanism and the language-integrated 6D pose mapping module, respectively. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, an integrated robotic system is established to precisely and robustly perceive, grasp, manipulate and assemble blocks by language commands. 98.09 and 93.55 in ADD(-S)-0.1d are derived for the prediction of 6D object pose and 6D assembly pose, respectively. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed language-instructed 6D pose estimation methodology and its potential to enable robots to better understand and execute natural language instructions.Comment: 8 page

Mapping natural language procedures descriptions to linear temporal logic templates: an application in the surgical robotic domain

Natural language annotations and manuals can provide useful procedural information and relations for the highly specialized scenario of autonomous robotic task planning. In this paper, we propose and publicly release AUTOMATE, a pipeline for automatic task knowledge extraction from expert-written domain texts. AUTOMATE integrates semantic sentence classifcation, semantic role labeling, and identifcation of procedural connectors, in order to extract templates of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) relations that can be directly implemented in any sufciently expressive logic programming formalism for autonomous reasoning, assuming some low-level commonsense and domain-independent knowledge is available. This is the frst work that bridges natural language descriptions of complex LTL relations and the automation of full robotic tasks. Unlike most recent similar works that assume strict language constraints in substantially simplifed domains, we test our pipeline on texts that refect the expressiveness of natural language used in available textbooks and manuals. In fact, we test AUTOMATE in the surgical robotic scenario, defning realistic language constraints based on a publicly available dataset. In the context of two benchmark training tasks with texts constrained as above, we show that automatically extracted LTL templates, after translation to a suitable logic programming paradigm, achieve comparable planning success in reduced time, with respect to logic programs written by expert programmer