Related papers: STAM: A Framework for Spatio-Temporal Affordance M…
To be capable of lifelong learning in a real-life environment, robots have to tackle multiple challenges. Being able to relate physical properties they may observe in their environment to possible interactions they may have is one of them.…
Many language-guided robotic systems rely on collapsing spatial reasoning into discrete points, making them brittle to perceptual noise and semantic ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose RoboMAP, a framework that represents…
Object affordance is an important concept in hand-object interaction, providing information on action possibilities based on human motor capacity and objects' physical property thus benefiting tasks such as action anticipation and robot…
Building a generalized affordance grounding model to identify actionable regions on objects is vital for real-world applications. Existing methods to train the model can be divided into weakly and fully supervised ways. However, the former…
Affordance refers to the perception of possible actions allowed by an object. Despite its relevance to human-computer interaction, no existing theory explains the mechanisms that underpin affordance-formation; that is, how affordances are…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While…
Inferring the affordance of an object and grasping it in a task-oriented manner is crucial for robots to successfully complete manipulation tasks. Affordance indicates where and how to grasp an object by taking its functionality into…
Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for embodied AI agents. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting or by the blade for safe handover. While existing…
Lexical semantics and cognitive science point to affordances (i.e. the actions that objects support) as critical for understanding and representing nouns and verbs. However, study of these semantic features has not yet been integrated with…
Recent advances in task planning leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve generalizability by combining such models with classical planning algorithms to address their inherent limitations in reasoning capabilities. However, these…
Autonomous agents rely on sensor data to construct representations of their environments, essential for predicting future events and planning their actions. However, sensor measurements suffer from limited range, occlusions, and sensor…
Imitation learning has unlocked the potential for robots to exhibit highly dexterous behaviours. However, it still struggles with long-horizon, multi-object tasks due to poor sample efficiency and limited generalisation. Existing methods…
The word semantics, in robotics and AI, has no canonical definition. It usually serves to denote additional data provided to autonomous agents to aid HRI. Most researchers seem, implicitly, to understand that such data cannot simply be…
Humans and animals have the ability to reason and make predictions about different courses of action at many time scales. In reinforcement learning, option models (Sutton, Precup \& Singh, 1999; Precup, 2000) provide the framework for this…
Intelligent agents working in real-world environments must be able to learn about the environment and its capabilities which enable them to take actions to change to the state of the world to complete a complex multi-step task in a…
Understanding 3D scene-level affordances from natural language instructions is essential for enabling embodied agents to interact meaningfully in complex environments. However, this task remains challenging due to the need for semantic…
Short-Term object-interaction Anticipation (STA) consists of detecting the location of the next-active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, and the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. We propose…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the process of constructing a global model of an environment from local observations of it; this is a foundational capability for mobile robots, supporting such core functions as planning,…
Robots operating in human-centered environments should have the ability to understand how objects function: what can be done with each object, where this interaction may occur, and how the object is used to achieve a goal. To this end, we…
The concept of 3D scene graphs is increasingly recognized as a powerful semantic and hierarchical representation of the environment. Current approaches often address this at a coarse, object-level resolution. In contrast, our goal is to…