Related papers: Can Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Speci…
Multimodal task specification is essential for enhanced robotic performance, where \textit{Cross-modality Alignment} enables the robot to holistically understand complex task instructions. Directly annotating multimodal instructions for…
In this paper, we study the problem of zero-shot sim-to-real when the task requires both highly precise control with sub-millimetre error tolerance, and wide task space generalisation. Our framework involves a coarse-to-fine controller,…
Object goal navigation is a fundamental task in embodied AI, where an agent is instructed to locate a target object in an unexplored environment. Traditional learning-based methods rely heavily on large-scale annotated data or require…
To substantially enhance robot intelligence, there is a pressing need to develop a large model that enables general-purpose robots to proficiently undertake a broad spectrum of manipulation tasks, akin to the versatile task-planning ability…
The ability to specify robot commands by a non-expert user is critical for building generalist agents capable of solving a large variety of tasks. One convenient way to specify the intended robot goal is by a video of a person demonstrating…
We pursue the goal of developing robots that can interact zero-shot with generic unseen objects via a diverse repertoire of manipulation skills and show how passive human videos can serve as a rich source of data for learning such…
Automating activities through robots in unstructured environments, such as construction sites, has been a long-standing desire. However, the high degree of unpredictable events in these settings has resulted in far less adoption compared to…
Shape servoing, a robotic task dedicated to controlling objects to desired goal shapes, is a promising approach to deformable object manipulation. An issue arises, however, with the reliance on the specification of a goal shape. This goal…
This thesis investigates how foundation models can be systematically leveraged to enhance robotic capabilities, enabling more effective localization, interaction, and manipulation in unstructured environments. The work is structured around…
Mobile manipulation stands as a core challenge in robotics, enabling robots to assist humans across varied tasks and dynamic daily environments. Conventional mobile manipulation approaches often struggle to generalize across different tasks…
This paper presents a framework that leverages pre-trained foundation models for robotic manipulation without domain-specific training. The framework integrates off-the-shelf models, combining multimodal perception from foundation models…
Robot models, particularly those trained with large amounts of data, have recently shown a plethora of real-world manipulation and navigation capabilities. Several independent efforts have shown that given sufficient training data in an…
For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
Requirements engineering plays a critical role in developing software systems. One of the most difficult tasks in this process is identifying functional requirements. A critical problem in many projects is missing requirements until late in…
Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation…
Learned dynamics models combined with both planning and policy learning algorithms have shown promise in enabling artificial agents to learn to perform many diverse tasks with limited supervision. However, one of the fundamental challenges…
We study the problem of learning a range of vision-based manipulation tasks from a large offline dataset of robot interaction. In order to accomplish this, humans need easy and effective ways of specifying tasks to the robot. Goal images…
Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction…
While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors. Instead of learning a large collection of skills…