Related papers: Affordance Learning from Play for Sample-Efficient…
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…
For effective interactions with the open world, robots should understand how interactions with known and novel objects help them towards their goal. A key aspect of this understanding lies in detecting an object's affordances, which…
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…
Does having visual priors (e.g. the ability to detect objects) facilitate learning to perform vision-based manipulation (e.g. picking up objects)? We study this problem under the framework of transfer learning, where the model is first…
When interacting with objects, humans effectively reason about which regions of objects are viable for an intended action, i.e., the affordance regions of the object. They can also account for subtle differences in object regions based on…
Visual affordance learning is crucial for robots to understand and interact effectively with the physical world. Recent advances in this field attempt to leverage pre-trained knowledge of vision-language foundation models to learn…
Model-free reinforcement learning has recently been shown to be effective at learning navigation policies from complex image input. However, these algorithms tend to require large amounts of interaction with the environment, which can be…
One of the great promises of robot learning systems is that they will be able to learn from their mistakes and continuously adapt to ever-changing environments. Despite this potential, most of the robot learning systems today are deployed…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but their reliance on expert demonstrations limits their ability to learn from failures and perform self-corrections. Reinforcement…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great success in learning complex control policies for a variety of applications in robotics. However, in most such cases, the hardware of the robot has been considered immutable, modeled as part…
General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived action possibilities with…
The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature,…
Grasping occluded objects in cluttered environments is an essential component in complex robotic manipulation tasks. In this paper, we introduce an AffordanCE-driven Next-Best-View planning policy (ACE-NBV) that tries to find a feasible…
This paper presents an approach for learning invariant features for object affordance understanding. One of the major problems for a robotic agent acquiring a deeper understanding of affordances is finding sensory-grounded semantics. Being…
From rearranging objects on a table to putting groceries into shelves, robots must plan precise action points to perform tasks accurately and reliably. In spite of the recent adoption of vision language models (VLMs) to control robot…
Object affordance reasoning, the ability to infer object functionalities based on physical properties, is fundamental for task-oriented planning and activities in both humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This capability, required for…
Nowadays, robots are dominating the manufacturing, entertainment and healthcare industries. Robot vision aims to equip robots with the ability to discover information, understand it and interact with the environment. These capabilities…
Affordance information about a scene provides important clues as to what actions may be executed in pursuit of meeting a specified goal state. Thus, integrating affordance-based reasoning into symbolic action plannning pipelines would…
We present placing via picking (PvP), a method to autonomously collect real-world demonstrations for a family of placing tasks in which objects must be manipulated to specific, contact-constrained locations. With PvP, we approach the…
Humans naturally develop preferences for how manipulation tasks should be performed, which are often subtle, personal, and difficult to articulate. Although it is important for robots to account for these preferences to increase…