Adaptive Skill Coordination for Robotic Mobile Manipulation

We present Adaptive Skill Coordination (ASC) - an approach for accomplishing long-horizon tasks (e.g., mobile pick-and-place, consisting of navigating to an object, picking it, navigating to another location, placing it, repeating). ASC consists of three components - (1) a library of basic visuomotor skills (navigation, pick, place), (2) a skill coordination policy that chooses which skills are appropriate to use when, and (3) a corrective policy that adapts pre-trained skills when out-of-distribution states are perceived. All components of ASC rely only on onboard visual and proprioceptive sensing, without access to privileged information like pre-built maps or precise object locations, easing real-world deployment. We train ASC in simulated indoor environments, and deploy it zero-shot in two novel real-world environments on the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. ASC achieves near-perfect performance at mobile pick-and-place, succeeding in 59/60 (98%) episodes, while sequentially executing skills succeeds in only 44/60 (73%) episodes. It is robust to hand-off errors, changes in the environment layout, dynamic obstacles (e.g., people), and unexpected disturbances, making it an ideal framework for complex, long-horizon tasks. Supplementary videos available at adaptiveskillcoordination.github.io.

Where are we in the search for an Artificial Visual Cortex for Embodied Intelligence?

We present the largest and most comprehensive empirical study of pre-trained visual representations (PVRs) or visual 'foundation models' for Embodied AI. First, we curate CortexBench, consisting of 17 different tasks spanning locomotion, navigation, dexterous, and mobile manipulation. Next, we systematically evaluate existing PVRs and find that none are universally dominant. To study the effect of pre-training data scale and diversity, we combine over 4,000 hours of egocentric videos from 7 different sources (over 5.6M images) and ImageNet to train different-sized vision transformers using Masked Auto-Encoding (MAE) on slices of this data. Contrary to inferences from prior work, we find that scaling dataset size and diversity does not improve performance universally (but does so on average). Our largest model, named VC-1, outperforms all prior PVRs on average but does not universally dominate either. Finally, we show that task or domain-specific adaptation of VC-1 leads to substantial gains, with VC-1 (adapted) achieving competitive or superior performance than the best known results on all of the benchmarks in CortexBench. These models required over 10,000 GPU-hours to train and can be found on our website for the benefit of the research community.

BC-IRL: Learning Generalizable Reward Functions from Demonstrations

How well do reward functions learned with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) generalize? We illustrate that state-of-the-art IRL algorithms, which maximize a maximum-entropy objective, learn rewards that overfit to the demonstrations. Such rewards struggle to provide meaningful rewards for states not covered by the demonstrations, a major detriment when using the reward to learn policies in new situations. We introduce BC-IRL a new inverse reinforcement learning method that learns reward functions that generalize better when compared to maximum-entropy IRL approaches. In contrast to the MaxEnt framework, which learns to maximize rewards around demonstrations, BC-IRL updates reward parameters such that the policy trained with the new reward matches the expert demonstrations better. We show that BC-IRL learns rewards that generalize better on an illustrative simple task and two continuous robotic control tasks, achieving over twice the success rate of baselines in challenging generalization settings.

OVRL-V2: A simple state-of-art baseline for ImageNav and ObjectNav

We present a single neural network architecture composed of task-agnostic components (ViTs, convolutions, and LSTMs) that achieves state-of-art results on both the ImageNav ("go to location in <this picture>") and ObjectNav ("find a chair") tasks without any task-specific modules like object detection, segmentation, mapping, or planning modules. Such general-purpose methods offer advantages of simplicity in design, positive scaling with available compute, and versatile applicability to multiple tasks. Our work builds upon the recent success of self-supervised learning (SSL) for pre-training vision transformers (ViT). However, while the training recipes for convolutional networks are mature and robust, the recipes for ViTs are contingent and brittle, and in the case of ViTs for visual navigation, yet to be fully discovered. Specifically, we find that vanilla ViTs do not outperform ResNets on visual navigation. We propose the use of a compression layer operating over ViT patch representations to preserve spatial information along with policy training improvements. These improvements allow us to demonstrate positive scaling laws for the first time in visual navigation tasks. Consequently, our model advances state-of-the-art performance on ImageNav from 54.2% to 82.0% success and performs competitively against concurrent state-of-art on ObjectNav with success rate of 64.0% vs. 65.0%. Overall, this work does not present a fundamentally new approach, but rather recommendations for training a general-purpose architecture that achieves state-of-art performance today and could serve as a strong baseline for future methods.

Emergence of Maps in the Memories of Blind Navigation Agents

Animal navigation research posits that organisms build and maintain internal spatial representations, or maps, of their environment. We ask if machines -- specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) navigation agents -- also build implicit (or 'mental') maps. A positive answer to this question would (a) explain the surprising phenomenon in recent literature of ostensibly map-free neural-networks achieving strong performance, and (b) strengthen the evidence of mapping as a fundamental mechanism for navigation by intelligent embodied agents, whether they be biological or artificial. Unlike animal navigation, we can judiciously design the agent's perceptual system and control the learning paradigm to nullify alternative navigation mechanisms. Specifically, we train 'blind' agents -- with sensing limited to only egomotion and no other sensing of any kind -- to perform PointGoal navigation ('go to $\Delta$ x, $\Delta$ y') via reinforcement learning. Our agents are composed of navigation-agnostic components (fully-connected and recurrent neural networks), and our experimental setup provides no inductive bias towards mapping. Despite these harsh conditions, we find that blind agents are (1) surprisingly effective navigators in new environments (~95% success); (2) they utilize memory over long horizons (remembering ~1,000 steps of past experience in an episode); (3) this memory enables them to exhibit intelligent behavior (following walls, detecting collisions, taking shortcuts); (4) there is emergence of maps and collision detection neurons in the representations of the environment built by a blind agent as it navigates; and (5) the emergent maps are selective and task dependent (e.g. the agent 'forgets' exploratory detours). Overall, this paper presents no new techniques for the AI audience, but a surprising finding, an insight, and an explanation.

PIRLNav: Pretraining with Imitation and RL Finetuning for ObjectNav

We study ObjectGoal Navigation - where a virtual robot situated in a new environment is asked to navigate to an object. Prior work has shown that imitation learning (IL) on a dataset of human demonstrations achieves promising results. However, this has limitations $-$ 1) IL policies generalize poorly to new states, since the training mimics actions not their consequences, and 2) collecting demonstrations is expensive. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) is trivially scalable, but requires careful reward engineering to achieve desirable behavior. We present a two-stage learning scheme for IL pretraining on human demonstrations followed by RL-finetuning. This leads to a PIRLNav policy that advances the state-of-the-art on ObjectNav from $60.0\%$ success rate to $65.0\%$ ($+5.0\%$ absolute). Using this IL$\rightarrow$RL training recipe, we present a rigorous empirical analysis of design choices. First, we investigate whether human demonstrations can be replaced with `free' (automatically generated) sources of demonstrations, e.g. shortest paths (SP) or task-agnostic frontier exploration (FE) trajectories. We find that IL$\rightarrow$RL on human demonstrations outperforms IL$\rightarrow$RL on SP and FE trajectories, even when controlled for the same IL-pretraining success on TRAIN, and even on a subset of VAL episodes where IL-pretraining success favors the SP or FE policies. Next, we study how RL-finetuning performance scales with the size of the IL pretraining dataset. We find that as we increase the size of the IL-pretraining dataset and get to high IL accuracies, the improvements from RL-finetuning are smaller, and that $90\%$ of the performance of our best IL$\rightarrow$RL policy can be achieved with less than half the number of IL demonstrations. Finally, we analyze failure modes of our ObjectNav policies, and present guidelines for further improving them.

Cross-Domain Transfer via Semantic Skill Imitation

We propose an approach for semantic imitation, which uses demonstrations from a source domain, e.g. human videos, to accelerate reinforcement learning (RL) in a different target domain, e.g. a robotic manipulator in a simulated kitchen. Instead of imitating low-level actions like joint velocities, our approach imitates the sequence of demonstrated semantic skills like "opening the microwave" or "turning on the stove". This allows us to transfer demonstrations across environments (e.g. real-world to simulated kitchen) and agent embodiments (e.g. bimanual human demonstration to robotic arm). We evaluate on three challenging cross-domain learning problems and match the performance of demonstration-accelerated RL approaches that require in-domain demonstrations. In a simulated kitchen environment, our approach learns long-horizon robot manipulation tasks, using less than 3 minutes of human video demonstrations from a real-world kitchen. This enables scaling robot learning via the reuse of demonstrations, e.g. collected as human videos, for learning in any number of target domains.

Navigating to Objects in the Real World

Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the classical pipeline for spatial navigation, which builds a geometric map using depth sensors and plans to reach point goals. Broadly, end-to-end learning approaches reactively map sensor inputs to actions with deep neural networks, while modular learning approaches enrich the classical pipeline with learning-based semantic sensing and exploration. But learned visual navigation policies have predominantly been evaluated in simulation. How well do different classes of methods work on a robot? We present a large-scale empirical study of semantic visual navigation methods comparing representative methods from classical, modular, and end-to-end learning approaches across six homes with no prior experience, maps, or instrumentation. We find that modular learning works well in the real world, attaining a 90% success rate. In contrast, end-to-end learning does not, dropping from 77% simulation to 23% real-world success rate due to a large image domain gap between simulation and reality. For practitioners, we show that modular learning is a reliable approach to navigate to objects: modularity and abstraction in policy design enable Sim-to-Real transfer. For researchers, we identify two key issues that prevent today's simulators from being reliable evaluation benchmarks - (A) a large Sim-to-Real gap in images and (B) a disconnect between simulation and real-world error modes - and propose concrete steps forward.

Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances

We consider the problem of embodied visual navigation given an image-goal (ImageNav) where an agent is initialized in an unfamiliar environment and tasked with navigating to a location 'described' by an image. Unlike related navigation tasks, ImageNav does not have a standardized task definition which makes comparison across methods difficult. Further, existing formulations have two problematic properties; (1) image-goals are sampled from random locations which can lead to ambiguity (e.g., looking at walls), and (2) image-goals match the camera specification and embodiment of the agent; this rigidity is limiting when considering user-driven downstream applications. We present the Instance-specific ImageNav task (InstanceImageNav) to address these limitations. Specifically, the goal image is 'focused' on some particular object instance in the scene and is taken with camera parameters independent of the agent. We instantiate InstanceImageNav in the Habitat Simulator using scenes from the Habitat-Matterport3D dataset (HM3D) and release a standardized benchmark to measure community progress.

ViNL: Visual Navigation and Locomotion Over Obstacles

We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans and pets lift their feet over objects as they walk. ViNL consists of: (1) a visual navigation policy that outputs linear and angular velocity commands that guides the robot to a goal coordinate in unfamiliar indoor environments; and (2) a visual locomotion policy that controls the robot's joints to avoid stepping on obstacles while following provided velocity commands. Both the policies are entirely "model-free", i.e. sensors-to-actions neural networks trained end-to-end. The two are trained independently in two entirely different simulators and then seamlessly co-deployed by feeding the velocity commands from the navigator to the locomotor, entirely "zero-shot" (without any co-training). While prior works have developed learning methods for visual navigation or visual locomotion, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully learned approach that leverages vision to accomplish both (1) intelligent navigation in new environments, and (2) intelligent visual locomotion that aims to traverse cluttered environments without disrupting obstacles. On the task of navigation to distant goals in unknown environments, ViNL using just egocentric vision significantly outperforms prior work on robust locomotion using privileged terrain maps (+32.8% success and -4.42 collisions per meter). Additionally, we ablate our locomotion policy to show that each aspect of our approach helps reduce obstacle collisions. Videos and code at http://www.joannetruong.com/projects/vinl.html