Related papers: AffordSim: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark…
Assistive robots operating in unstructured environments must understand not only what objects are, but what they can be used for. This requires grounding language-based action queries to objects that both afford the requested function and…
When humans perform a task with an articulated object, they interact with the object only in a handful of ways, while the space of all possible interactions is nearly endless. This is because humans have prior knowledge about what…
While large language models (LLMs) are successful in completing various language processing tasks, they easily fail to interact with the physical world by generating control sequences properly. We find that the main reason is that LLMs are…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp…
Despite significant advancements in text-to-motion synthesis, generating language-guided human motion within 3D environments poses substantial challenges. These challenges stem primarily from (i) the absence of powerful generative models…
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…
While many quality metrics exist to evaluate the quality of a grasp by itself, no clear quantification of the quality of a grasp relatively to the task the grasp is used for has been defined yet. In this paper we propose a framework to…
The concept of 3D scene graphs is increasingly recognized as a powerful semantic and hierarchical representation of the environment. Current approaches often address this at a coarse, object-level resolution. In contrast, our goal is to…
Precise robotic grasping of several novel objects is a huge challenge in manufacturing, automation, and logistics. Most of the current methods for model-free grasping are disadvantaged by the sparse data in grasping datasets and by errors…
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…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While…
Large-scale robot datasets have facilitated the learning of a wide range of robot manipulation skills, but these datasets remain difficult to collect and scale further, owing to the intractable amount of human time, effort, and cost…
Recent advances in task planning leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve generalizability by combining such models with classical planning algorithms to address their inherent limitations in reasoning capabilities. However, these…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…
Reasoning about object handover configurations allows an assistive agent to estimate the appropriateness of handover for a receiver with different arm mobility capacities. While there are existing approaches for estimating the effectiveness…
Dexterous robotic hands are appealing for their agility and human-like morphology, yet their high degree of freedom makes learning to manipulate challenging. We introduce an approach for learning dexterous grasping. Our key idea is to embed…
Robot-assisted feeding requires reliable bite acquisition, a challenging task due to the complex interactions between utensils and food with diverse physical properties. These interactions are further complicated by the temporal variability…
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…
Affordance grounding, a task to ground (i.e., localize) action possibility region in objects, which faces the challenge of establishing an explicit link with object parts due to the diversity of interactive affordance. Human has the ability…
Planning in realistic environments requires searching in large planning spaces. Affordances are a powerful concept to simplify this search, because they model what actions can be successful in a given situation. However, the classical…