What do we learn from a large-scale study of pre-trained visual representations in sim and real environments?

We present a large empirical investigation on the use of pre-trained visual representations (PVRs) for training downstream policies that execute real-world tasks. Our study spans five different PVRs, two different policy-learning paradigms (imitation and reinforcement learning), and three different robots for 5 distinct manipulation and indoor navigation tasks. From this effort, we can arrive at three insights: 1) the performance trends of PVRs in the simulation are generally indicative of their trends in the real world, 2) the use of PVRs enables a first-of-its-kind result with indoor ImageNav (zero-shot transfer to a held-out scene in the real world), and 3) the benefits from variations in PVRs, primarily data-augmentation and fine-tuning, also transfer to the real-world performance. See project website for additional details and visuals.

Skill Transformer: A Monolithic Policy for Mobile Manipulation

We present Skill Transformer, an approach for solving long-horizon robotic tasks by combining conditional sequence modeling and skill modularity. Conditioned on egocentric and proprioceptive observations of a robot, Skill Transformer is trained end-to-end to predict both a high-level skill (e.g., navigation, picking, placing), and a whole-body low-level action (e.g., base and arm motion), using a transformer architecture and demonstration trajectories that solve the full task. It retains the composability and modularity of the overall task through a skill predictor module while reasoning about low-level actions and avoiding hand-off errors, common in modular approaches. We test Skill Transformer on an embodied rearrangement benchmark and find it performs robust task planning and low-level control in new scenarios, achieving a 2.5x higher success rate than baselines in hard rearrangement problems.

Exploiting Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Unseen State Augmentations

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods strike a balance between exploration and exploitation by conservative value estimation -- penalizing values of unseen states and actions. Model-free methods penalize values at all unseen actions, while model-based methods are able to further exploit unseen states via model rollouts. However, such methods are handicapped in their ability to find unseen states far away from the available offline data due to two factors -- (a) very short rollout horizons in models due to cascading model errors, and (b) model rollouts originating solely from states observed in offline data. We relax the second assumption and present a novel unseen state augmentation strategy to allow exploitation of unseen states where the learned model and value estimates generalize. Our strategy finds unseen states by value-informed perturbations of seen states followed by filtering out states with epistemic uncertainty estimates too high (high error) or too low (too similar to seen data). We observe improved performance in several offline RL tasks and find that our augmentation strategy consistently leads to overall lower average dataset Q-value estimates i.e. more conservative Q-value estimates than a baseline.

Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation

We contribute the Habitat Synthetic Scene Dataset, a dataset of 211 high-quality 3D scenes, and use it to test navigation agent generalization to realistic 3D environments. Our dataset represents real interiors and contains a diverse set of 18,656 models of real-world objects. We investigate the impact of synthetic 3D scene dataset scale and realism on the task of training embodied agents to find and navigate to objects (ObjectGoal navigation). By comparing to synthetic 3D scene datasets from prior work, we find that scale helps in generalization, but the benefits quickly saturate, making visual fidelity and correlation to real-world scenes more important. Our experiments show that agents trained on our smaller-scale dataset can match or outperform agents trained on much larger datasets. Surprisingly, we observe that agents trained on just 122 scenes from our dataset outperform agents trained on 10,000 scenes from the ProcTHOR-10K dataset in terms of zero-shot generalization in real-world scanned environments.

HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation

HomeRobot (noun): An affordable compliant robot that navigates homes and manipulates a wide range of objects in order to complete everyday tasks. Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) is the problem of picking any object in any unseen environment, and placing it in a commanded location. This is a foundational challenge for robots to be useful assistants in human environments, because it involves tackling sub-problems from across robotics: perception, language understanding, navigation, and manipulation are all essential to OVMM. In addition, integration of the solutions to these sub-problems poses its own substantial challenges. To drive research in this area, we introduce the HomeRobot OVMM benchmark, where an agent navigates household environments to grasp novel objects and place them on target receptacles. HomeRobot has two components: a simulation component, which uses a large and diverse curated object set in new, high-quality multi-room home environments; and a real-world component, providing a software stack for the low-cost Hello Robot Stretch to encourage replication of real-world experiments across labs. We implement both reinforcement learning and heuristic (model-based) baselines and show evidence of sim-to-real transfer. Our baselines achieve a 20% success rate in the real world; our experiments identify ways future research work improve performance. See videos on our website: https://ovmm.github.io/.

Galactic: Scaling End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Rearrangement at 100k Steps-Per-Second

We present Galactic, a large-scale simulation and reinforcement-learning (RL) framework for robotic mobile manipulation in indoor environments. Specifically, a Fetch robot (equipped with a mobile base, 7DoF arm, RGBD camera, egomotion, and onboard sensing) is spawned in a home environment and asked to rearrange objects - by navigating to an object, picking it up, navigating to a target location, and then placing the object at the target location. Galactic is fast. In terms of simulation speed (rendering + physics), Galactic achieves over 421,000 steps-per-second (SPS) on an 8-GPU node, which is 54x faster than Habitat 2.0 (7699 SPS). More importantly, Galactic was designed to optimize the entire rendering + physics + RL interplay since any bottleneck in the interplay slows down training. In terms of simulation+RL speed (rendering + physics + inference + learning), Galactic achieves over 108,000 SPS, which 88x faster than Habitat 2.0 (1243 SPS). These massive speed-ups not only drastically cut the wall-clock training time of existing experiments, but also unlock an unprecedented scale of new experiments. First, Galactic can train a mobile pick skill to >80% accuracy in under 16 minutes, a 100x speedup compared to the over 24 hours it takes to train the same skill in Habitat 2.0. Second, we use Galactic to perform the largest-scale experiment to date for rearrangement using 5B steps of experience in 46 hours, which is equivalent to 20 years of robot experience. This scaling results in a single neural network composed of task-agnostic components achieving 85% success in GeometricGoal rearrangement, compared to 0% success reported in Habitat 2.0 for the same approach. The code is available at github.com/facebookresearch/galactic.

Adaptive Coordination in Social Embodied Rearrangement

We present the task of "Social Rearrangement", consisting of cooperative everyday tasks like setting up the dinner table, tidying a house or unpacking groceries in a simulated multi-agent environment. In Social Rearrangement, two robots coordinate to complete a long-horizon task, using onboard sensing and egocentric observations, and no privileged information about the environment. We study zero-shot coordination (ZSC) in this task, where an agent collaborates with a new partner, emulating a scenario where a robot collaborates with a new human partner. Prior ZSC approaches struggle to generalize in our complex and visually rich setting, and on further analysis, we find that they fail to generate diverse coordination behaviors at training time. To counter this, we propose Behavior Diversity Play (BDP), a novel ZSC approach that encourages diversity through a discriminability objective. Our results demonstrate that BDP learns adaptive agents that can tackle visual coordination, and zero-shot generalize to new partners in unseen environments, achieving 35% higher success and 32% higher efficiency compared to baselines.

IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal: Learning to Navigate Outdoors without any Outdoor Experience

We present IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal (I2O), an end-to-end learned visual navigation approach, trained solely in simulated short-range indoor environments, and demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to the outdoors for long-range navigation on the Spot robot. Our method uses zero real-world experience (indoor or outdoor), and requires the simulator to model no predominantly-outdoor phenomenon (sloped grounds, sidewalks, etc). The key to I2O transfer is in providing the robot with additional context of the environment (i.e., a satellite map, a rough sketch of a map by a human, etc.) to guide the robot's navigation in the real-world. The provided context-maps do not need to be accurate or complete -- real-world obstacles (e.g., trees, bushes, pedestrians, etc.) are not drawn on the map, and openings are not aligned with where they are in the real-world. Crucially, these inaccurate context-maps provide a hint to the robot about a route to take to the goal. We find that our method that leverages Context-Maps is able to successfully navigate hundreds of meters in novel environments, avoiding novel obstacles on its path, to a distant goal without a single collision or human intervention. In comparison, policies without the additional context fail completely. Lastly, we test the robustness of the Context-Map policy by adding varying degrees of noise to the map in simulation. We find that the Context-Map policy is surprisingly robust to noise in the provided context-map. In the presence of significantly inaccurate maps (corrupted with 50% noise, or entirely blank maps), the policy gracefully regresses to the behavior of a policy with no context. Videos are available at https://www.joannetruong.com/projects/i2o.html

AutoNeRF: Training Implicit Scene Representations with Autonomous Agents

Implicit representations such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been shown to be very effective at novel view synthesis. However, these models typically require manual and careful human data collection for training. In this paper, we present AutoNeRF, a method to collect data required to train NeRFs using autonomous embodied agents. Our method allows an agent to explore an unseen environment efficiently and use the experience to build an implicit map representation autonomously. We compare the impact of different exploration strategies including handcrafted frontier-based exploration and modular approaches composed of trained high-level planners and classical low-level path followers. We train these models with different reward functions tailored to this problem and evaluate the quality of the learned representations on four different downstream tasks: classical viewpoint rendering, map reconstruction, planning, and pose refinement. Empirical results show that NeRFs can be trained on actively collected data using just a single episode of experience in an unseen environment, and can be used for several downstream robotic tasks, and that modular trained exploration models significantly outperform the classical baselines.

Navigating to Objects Specified by Images

Images are a convenient way to specify which particular object instance an embodied agent should navigate to. Solving this task requires semantic visual reasoning and exploration of unknown environments. We present a system that can perform this task in both simulation and the real world. Our modular method solves sub-tasks of exploration, goal instance re-identification, goal localization, and local navigation. We re-identify the goal instance in egocentric vision using feature-matching and localize the goal instance by projecting matched features to a map. Each sub-task is solved using off-the-shelf components requiring zero fine-tuning. On the HM3D InstanceImageNav benchmark, this system outperforms a baseline end-to-end RL policy 7x and a state-of-the-art ImageNav model 2.3x (56% vs 25% success). We deploy this system to a mobile robot platform and demonstrate effective real-world performance, achieving an 88% success rate across a home and an office environment.