Pave the Way to Grasp Anything: Transferring Foundation Models for Universal Pick-Place Robots

Improving the generalization capabilities of general-purpose robotic agents has long been a significant challenge actively pursued by research communities. Existing approaches often rely on collecting large-scale real-world robotic data, such as the RT-1 dataset. However, these approaches typically suffer from low efficiency, limiting their capability in open-domain scenarios with new objects, and diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that effectively leverages language-grounded segmentation masks generated by state-of-the-art foundation models, to address a wide range of pick-and-place robot manipulation tasks in everyday scenarios. By integrating precise semantics and geometries conveyed from masks into our multi-view policy model, our approach can perceive accurate object poses and enable sample-efficient learning. Besides, such design facilitates effective generalization for grasping new objects with similar shapes observed during training. Our approach consists of two distinct steps. First, we introduce a series of foundation models to accurately ground natural language demands across multiple tasks. Second, we develop a Multi-modal Multi-view Policy Model that incorporates inputs such as RGB images, semantic masks, and robot proprioception states to jointly predict precise and executable robot actions. Extensive real-world experiments conducted on a Franka Emika robot arm validate the effectiveness of our proposed paradigm. Real-world demos are shown in YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9wNzfp_4E ) and Bilibili (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV178411Z7H2/ )

Interactron: Embodied Adaptive Object Detection

Over the years various methods have been proposed for the problem of object detection. Recently, we have witnessed great strides in this domain owing to the emergence of powerful deep neural networks. However, there are typically two main assumptions common among these approaches. First, the model is trained on a fixed training set and is evaluated on a pre-recorded test set. Second, the model is kept frozen after the training phase, so no further updates are performed after the training is finished. These two assumptions limit the applicability of these methods to real-world settings. In this paper, we propose Interactron, a method for adaptive object detection in an interactive setting, where the goal is to perform object detection in images observed by an embodied agent navigating in different environments. Our idea is to continue training during inference and adapt the model at test time without any explicit supervision via interacting with the environment. Our adaptive object detection model provides a 11.8 point improvement in AP (and 19.1 points in AP50) over DETR, a recent, high-performance object detector. Moreover, we show that our object detection model adapts to environments with completely different appearance characteristics, and its performance is on par with a model trained with full supervision for those environments. The code is available at: https://github.com/allenai/interactron .Comment: CVPR 202

Learning object, grasping and manipulation activities using hierarchical HMMs

This article presents a probabilistic algorithm for representing and learning complex manipulation activities performed by humans in everyday life. The work builds on the multi-level Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM) framework which allows decomposition of longer-term complex manipulation activities into layers of abstraction whereby the building blocks can be represented by simpler action modules called action primitives. This way, human task knowledge can be synthesised in a compact, effective representation suitable, for instance, to be subsequently transferred to a robot for imitation. The main contribution is the use of a robust framework capable of dealing with the uncertainty or incomplete data inherent to these activities, and the ability to represent behaviours at multiple levels of abstraction for enhanced task generalisation. Activity data from 3D video sequencing of human manipulation of different objects handled in everyday life is used for evaluation. A comparison with a mixed generative-discriminative hybrid model HHMM/SVM (support vector machine) is also presented to add rigour in highlighting the benefit of the proposed approach against comparable state of the art techniques. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Graph learning in robotics: a survey

Deep neural networks for graphs have emerged as a powerful tool for learning on complex non-euclidean data, which is becoming increasingly common for a variety of different applications. Yet, although their potential has been widely recognised in the machine learning community, graph learning is largely unexplored for downstream tasks such as robotics applications. To fully unlock their potential, hence, we propose a review of graph neural architectures from a robotics perspective. The paper covers the fundamentals of graph-based models, including their architecture, training procedures, and applications. It also discusses recent advancements and challenges that arise in applied settings, related for example to the integration of perception, decision-making, and control. Finally, the paper provides an extensive review of various robotic applications that benefit from learning on graph structures, such as bodies and contacts modelling, robotic manipulation, action recognition, fleet motion planning, and many more. This survey aims to provide readers with a thorough understanding of the capabilities and limitations of graph neural architectures in robotics, and to highlight potential avenues for future research