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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…
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…
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…
Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, the visual representations of most VLA models are often dominated by global object appearance and struggle…
Robotic manipulation with two-finger grippers is challenged by objects lacking distinct graspable features. Traditional pre-grasping methods, which typically involve repositioning objects or utilizing external aids like table edges, are…
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.…
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…
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…
Object affordance is an important concept in hand-object interaction, providing information on action possibilities based on human motor capacity and objects' physical property thus benefiting tasks such as action anticipation and robot…
Diffusion-based policies have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation tasks while struggling with out-of-domain distributions. Recent efforts attempted to enhance generalization by improving the visual feature encoding for…
Enabling robotic manipulation that generalizes to out-of-distribution scenes is a crucial step toward open-world embodied intelligence. For human beings, this ability is rooted in the understanding of semantic correspondence among objects,…
In the quest to enable robots to coexist with humans, understanding dynamic situations and selecting appropriate actions based on common sense and affordances are essential. Conventional AI systems face challenges in applying affordance, as…
Affordance refers to the functional properties that an agent perceives and utilizes from its environment, and is key perceptual information required for robots to perform actions. This information is rich and multimodal in nature. Existing…
In this study, we address the problem of open-vocabulary mobile manipulation, where a robot is required to carry a wide range of objects to receptacles based on free-form natural language instructions. This task is challenging, as it…
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…
Affordance is crucial for intelligent robots in the context of object manipulation. In this paper, we argue that affordance should be task-/instruction-dependent, which is overlooked by many previous works. That is, different instructions…
Many everyday robot manipulation skills are affordance-dependent, with success determined by whether the robot contacts the functional object region required by the subsequent action. Current simulation data generators obtain contacts from…
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…
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…
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…