Related papers: Affordance Learning from Play for Sample-Efficient…
Constructing a diverse repertoire of manipulation skills in a scalable fashion remains an unsolved challenge in robotics. One way to address this challenge is with unstructured human play, where humans operate freely in an environment to…
Learning to manipulate 3D objects in an interactive environment has been a challenging problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, it is hard to train a policy that can generalize over objects with different semantic categories,…
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…
Building a robot that can understand and learn to interact by watching humans has inspired several vision problems. However, despite some successful results on static datasets, it remains unclear how current models can be used on a robot…
A generalist robot equipped with learned skills must be able to perform many tasks in many different environments. However, zero-shot generalization to new settings is not always possible. When the robot encounters a new environment or…
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects in ever more unstructured environments where the object properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object…
Planning in realistic environments requires searching in large planning spaces. Affordances are a powerful concept to simplify this search, because they model what actions can be successful in a given situation. However, the classical…
Dexterous robotic hands are appealing for their agility and human-like morphology, yet their high degree of freedom makes learning to manipulate challenging. We introduce an approach for learning dexterous grasping. Our key idea is to embed…
Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We explore how intermediate policy representations can facilitate generalization by providing guidance on how to perform manipulation tasks. Existing representations such as language, goal images, and trajectory sketches have been shown to…
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,…
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…
This paper introduces a challenging object grasping task and proposes a self-supervised learning approach. The goal of the task is to grasp an object which is not feasible with a single parallel gripper, but only with harnessing environment…
Human-robot handovers are characterized by high uncertainty and poor structure of the problem that make them difficult tasks. While machine learning methods have shown promising results, their application to problems with large state…