Related papers: Learning Spatial Bimanual Action Models Based on A…
Dexterous robotic manipulation remains a longstanding challenge in robotics due to the high dimensionality of control spaces and the semantic complexity of object interaction. In this paper, we propose an object affordance-guided…
Affordance grounding aims to localize the interaction regions for the manipulated objects in the scene image according to given instructions. A critical challenge in affordance grounding is that the embodied agent should understand human…
Embodied agents operating in human spaces must be able to master how their environment works: what objects can the agent use, and how can it use them? We introduce a reinforcement learning approach for exploration for interaction, whereby…
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…
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…
A growing field in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is human-robot collaboration, whose target is to enable effective teamwork between humans and robots. However, in many situations human teams are still superior to…
Many everyday objects are difficult to directly grasp (e.g., a flat iPad) or manipulate functionally (e.g., opening the cap of a pen lying on a desk). Such tasks require sequential, asymmetric coordination between two arms, where one arm…
We present a framework for assistive robot manipulation, which focuses on two fundamental challenges: first, efficiently adapting large-scale models to downstream scene affordance understanding tasks, especially in daily living scenarios…
Articulated object manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging task in robotics. Due to significant geometric and semantic variations across object categories, previous manipulation models struggle to generalize to novel categories.…
Robotic manipulation faces critical challenges in understanding spatial affordances--the "where" and "how" of object interactions--essential for complex manipulation tasks like wiping a board or stacking objects. Existing methods, including…
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…
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…
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…
Interactions with articulated objects are a challenging but important task for mobile robots. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel closed-loop control pipeline, which integrates manipulation priors from affordance estimation with…
Humans use semantic concepts such as spatial relations between objects to describe scenes and communicate tasks such as "Put the tea to the right of the cup" or "Move the plate between the fork and the spoon." Just as children, assistive…
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…
Controlling embodied agents with many actuated degrees of freedom is a challenging task. We propose a method that can discover and interpolate between context dependent high-level actions or body-affordances. These provide an abstract,…
A core problem of Embodied AI is to learn object manipulation from observation, as humans do. To achieve this, it is important to localize 3D object affordance areas through observation such as images (3D affordance grounding) and…
Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the…
Grounded understanding of natural language in physical scenes can greatly benefit robots that follow human instructions. In object manipulation scenarios, existing end-to-end models are proficient at understanding semantic concepts, but…