Related papers: SAGA: Open-World Mobile Manipulation via Structure…
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…
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…
Reasoning about object grasp affordances allows an autonomous agent to estimate the most suitable grasp to execute a task. While current approaches for estimating grasp affordances are effective, their prediction is driven by hypotheses on…
In open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM), task success often hinges on the selection of an appropriate base placement for the robot. Existing approaches typically navigate to proximity-based regions without considering affordances,…
Robot foundation models, particularly Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have garnered significant attention for their ability to enhance robot policy learning, greatly improving robot's generalization and robustness. OpenAI's recent…
Achieving precise and generalizable grasping across diverse objects and environments is essential for intelligent and collaborative robotic systems. However, existing approaches often struggle with ambiguous affordance reasoning and limited…
Learning robot manipulation from human videos is appealing due to the scale and diversity of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to executable robot behavior remains challenging. Prior work either relies on robot data…
Grounding 3D object affordance is a task that locates objects in 3D space where they can be manipulated, which links perception and action for embodied intelligence. For example, for an intelligent robot, it is necessary to accurately…
The term "affordance" denotes the behavioral meaning of objects. We propose a cognitive architecture for the detection of affordances in the visual modality. This model is based on the internal simulation of movement sequences. For each…
Affordance reasoning provides a principled link between perception and action, yet remains underexplored in surgical robotics, where tissues are highly deformable, compliant, and dynamically coupled with tool motion. We present arg-VU, a…
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…
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…
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…
Avoiding obstacles in the perceived world has been the classical approach to autonomous mobile robot navigation. However, this usually leads to unnatural and inefficient motions that significantly differ from the way humans move in tight…
3D Object Affordance Grounding aims to predict the functional regions on a 3D object and has laid the foundation for a wide range of applications in robotics. Recent advances tackle this problem via learning a mapping between 3D regions and…
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…
Visual affordance grounding aims to segment all possible interaction regions between people and objects from an image/video, which is beneficial for many applications, such as robot grasping and action recognition. However, existing methods…
Foundation models pre-trained on web-scale data are shown to encapsulate extensive world knowledge beneficial for robotic manipulation in the form of task planning. However, the actual physical implementation of these plans often relies on…
The fragmentation between high-level task semantics and low-level geometric features remains a persistent challenge in robotic manipulation. While vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in generating affordance-aware visual…
Visual actionable affordance has emerged as a transformative approach in robotics, focusing on perceiving interaction areas prior to manipulation. Traditional methods rely on pixel sampling to identify successful interaction samples or…