Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website $\href{https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io}{\text{robotics-transformer-x.github.io}}$.

FG-NeRF: Flow-GAN based Probabilistic Neural Radiance Field for Independence-Assumption-Free Uncertainty Estimation

Neural radiance fields with stochasticity have garnered significant interest by enabling the sampling of plausible radiance fields and quantifying uncertainty for downstream tasks. Existing works rely on the independence assumption of points in the radiance field or the pixels in input views to obtain tractable forms of the probability density function. However, this assumption inadvertently impacts performance when dealing with intricate geometry and texture. In this work, we propose an independence-assumption-free probabilistic neural radiance field based on Flow-GAN. By combining the generative capability of adversarial learning and the powerful expressivity of normalizing flow, our method explicitly models the density-radiance distribution of the whole scene. We represent our probabilistic NeRF as a mean-shifted probabilistic residual neural model. Our model is trained without an explicit likelihood function, thereby avoiding the independence assumption. Specifically, We downsample the training images with different strides and centers to form fixed-size patches which are used to train the generator with patch-based adversarial learning. Through extensive experiments, our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance by predicting lower rendering errors and more reliable uncertainty on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

How to Model Brushless Electric Motors for the Design of Lightweight Robotic Systems

A key step in the development of lightweight, high performance robotic systems is the modeling and selection of permanent magnet brushless direct current (BLDC) electric motors. Typical modeling analyses are completed a priori, and provide insight for properly sizing a motor for an application, specifying the required operating voltage and current, as well as assessing the thermal response and other design attributes (e.g.transmission ratio). However, to perform these modeling analyses, proper information about the motor's characteristics are needed, which are often obtained from manufacturer datasheets. Through our own experience and communications with manufacturers, we have noticed a lack of clarity and standardization in modeling BLDC motors, compounded by vague or inconsistent terminology used in motor datasheets. The purpose of this tutorial is to concisely describe the governing equations for BLDC motor analyses used in the design process, as well as highlight potential errors that can arise from incorrect usage. We present a power-invariant conversion from phase and line-to-line reference frames to a familiar q-axis DC motor representation, which provides a ``brushed'' analogue of a three phase BLDC motor that is convenient for analysis and design. We highlight potential errors including incorrect calculations of winding resistive heat loss, improper estimation of motor torque via the motor's torque constant, and incorrect estimation of the required bus voltage or resulting angular velocity limitations. A unified and condensed set of governing equations is available for designers in the Appendix. The intent of this work is to provide a consolidated mathematical foundation for modeling BLDC motors that addresses existing confusion and fosters high performance designs of future robotic systems.

OpenIllumination: A Multi-Illumination Dataset for Inverse Rendering Evaluation on Real Objects

We introduce OpenIllumination, a real-world dataset containing over 108K images of 64 objects with diverse materials, captured under 72 camera views and a large number of different illuminations. For each image in the dataset, we provide accurate camera parameters, illumination ground truth, and foreground segmentation masks. Our dataset enables the quantitative evaluation of most inverse rendering and material decomposition methods for real objects. We examine several state-of-the-art inverse rendering methods on our dataset and compare their performances. The dataset and code can be found on the project page: https://oppo-us-research.github.io/OpenIllumination.

AnyTeleop: A General Vision-Based Dexterous Robot Arm-Hand Teleoperation System

Vision-based teleoperation offers the possibility to endow robots with human-level intelligence to physically interact with the environment, while only requiring low-cost camera sensors. However, current vision-based teleoperation systems are designed and engineered towards a particular robot model and deploy environment, which scales poorly as the pool of the robot models expands and the variety of the operating environment increases. In this paper, we propose AnyTeleop, a unified and general teleoperation system to support multiple different arms, hands, realities, and camera configurations within a single system. Although being designed to provide great flexibility to the choice of simulators and real hardware, our system can still achieve great performance. For real-world experiments, AnyTeleop can outperform a previous system that was designed for a specific robot hardware with a higher success rate, using the same robot. For teleoperation in simulation, AnyTeleop leads to better imitation learning performance, compared with a previous system that is particularly designed for that simulator. Project page: http://anyteleop.com/.

Strivec: Sparse Tri-Vector Radiance Fields

We propose Strivec, a novel neural representation that models a 3D scene as a radiance field with sparsely distributed and compactly factorized local tensor feature grids. Our approach leverages tensor decomposition, following the recent work TensoRF, to model the tensor grids. In contrast to TensoRF which uses a global tensor and focuses on their vector-matrix decomposition, we propose to utilize a cloud of local tensors and apply the classic CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition to factorize each tensor into triple vectors that express local feature distributions along spatial axes and compactly encode a local neural field. We also apply multi-scale tensor grids to discover the geometry and appearance commonalities and exploit spatial coherence with the tri-vector factorization at multiple local scales. The final radiance field properties are regressed by aggregating neural features from multiple local tensors across all scales. Our tri-vector tensors are sparsely distributed around the actual scene surface, discovered by a fast coarse reconstruction, leveraging the sparsity of a 3D scene. We demonstrate that our model can achieve better rendering quality while using significantly fewer parameters than previous methods, including TensoRF and Instant-NGP.

Reparameterized Policy Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Optimization

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used Gaussian parameterization. To achieve this, we propose a principled framework that models the continuous RL policy as a generative model of optimal trajectories. By conditioning the policy on a latent variable, we derive a novel variational bound as the optimization objective, which promotes exploration of the environment. We then present a practical model-based RL method, called Reparameterized Policy Gradient (RPG), which leverages the multimodal policy parameterization and learned world model to achieve strong exploration capabilities and high data efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can help agents evade local optima in tasks with dense rewards and solve challenging sparse-reward environments by incorporating an object-centric intrinsic reward. Our method consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available on the project page https://haosulab.github.io/RPG/

3Deformer: A Common Framework for Image-Guided Mesh Deformation

We propose 3Deformer, a general-purpose framework for interactive 3D shape editing. Given a source 3D mesh with semantic materials, and a user-specified semantic image, 3Deformer can accurately edit the source mesh following the shape guidance of the semantic image, while preserving the source topology as rigid as possible. Recent studies of 3D shape editing mostly focus on learning neural networks to predict 3D shapes, which requires high-cost 3D training datasets and is limited to handling objects involved in the datasets. Unlike these studies, our 3Deformer is a non-training and common framework, which only requires supervision of readily-available semantic images, and is compatible with editing various objects unlimited by datasets. In 3Deformer, the source mesh is deformed utilizing the differentiable renderer technique, according to the correspondences between semantic images and mesh materials. However, guiding complex 3D shapes with a simple 2D image incurs extra challenges, that is, the deform accuracy, surface smoothness, geometric rigidity, and global synchronization of the edited mesh should be guaranteed. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical optimization architecture to balance the global and local shape features, and propose further various strategies and losses to improve properties of accuracy, smoothness, rigidity, and so on. Extensive experiments show that our 3Deformer is able to produce impressive results and reaches the state-of-the-art level.