Related papers: Deep Affordance Foresight: Planning Through What C…
Traditional autonomous vehicle pipelines that follow a modular approach have been very successful in the past both in academia and industry, which has led to autonomy deployed on road. Though this approach provides ease of interpretation,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms usually assume that all actions are always available to an agent. However, both people and animals understand the general link between the features of their environment and the actions that are feasible.…
Affordances - i.e. possibilities for action that an environment or objects in it provide - are important for robots operating in human environments to perceive. Existing approaches train such capabilities on annotated static images or…
Perceiving and interacting with 3D articulated objects, such as cabinets, doors, and faucets, pose particular challenges for future home-assistant robots performing daily tasks in human environments. Besides parsing the articulated parts…
Training end-to-end deep robot policies requires a lot of domain-, task-, and hardware-specific data, which is often costly to provide. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue by employing a deep neural network with a modular…
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…
We propose a developmental approach that allows a robot to interpret and describe the actions of human agents by reusing previous experience. The robot first learns the association between words and object affordances by manipulating the…
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…
An autonomous robot should be able to evaluate the affordances that are offered by a given situation. Here we address this problem by designing a system that can densely predict affordances given only a single 2D RGB image. This is achieved…
Affordances have been introduced in literature as action opportunities that objects offer, and used in robotics to semantically represent their interconnection. However, when considering an environment instead of an object, the problem…
Our ability to interact with the world around us relies on being able to infer what actions objects afford -- often referred to as affordances. The neural mechanisms of object-action associations are realized in the visuomotor pathway where…
Understanding and manipulating deformable objects (e.g., ropes and fabrics) is an essential yet challenging task with broad applications. Difficulties come from complex states and dynamics, diverse configurations and high-dimensional action…
In order to *generalize* to various tasks in the wild, robotic agents will need a suitable representation (i.e., vision network) that enables the robot to predict optimal actions given high dimensional vision inputs. However, learning such…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning bimanual manipulation actions from human demonstration by extracting spatial constraints between affordance regions, termed affordance constraints, of the objects involved. Affordance…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
In order to enable robust operation in unstructured environments, robots should be able to generalize manipulation actions to novel object instances. For example, to pour and serve a drink, a robot should be able to recognize novel…
Affordances, a foundational concept in human-computer interaction and design, have traditionally been explained by direct-perception theories, which assume that individuals perceive action possibilities directly from the environment.…
Motivated by the intuitive understanding humans have about the space of possible interactions, and the ease with which they can generalize this understanding to previously unseen scenes, we develop an approach for learning visual…
Humans perceive and interact with the world with the awareness of equivariance, facilitating us in manipulating different objects in diverse poses. For robotic manipulation, such equivariance also exists in many scenarios. For example, no…
Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by…