ImageManip: Image-based Robotic Manipulation with Affordance-guided Next View Selection

In the realm of future home-assistant robots, 3D articulated object manipulation is essential for enabling robots to interact with their environment. Many existing studies make use of 3D point clouds as the primary input for manipulation policies. However, this approach encounters challenges due to data sparsity and the significant cost associated with acquiring point cloud data, which can limit its practicality. In contrast, RGB images offer high-resolution observations using cost effective devices but lack spatial 3D geometric information. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel image-based robotic manipulation framework. This framework is designed to capture multiple perspectives of the target object and infer depth information to complement its geometry. Initially, the system employs an eye-on-hand RGB camera to capture an overall view of the target object. It predicts the initial depth map and a coarse affordance map. The affordance map indicates actionable areas on the object and serves as a constraint for selecting subsequent viewpoints. Based on the global visual prior, we adaptively identify the optimal next viewpoint for a detailed observation of the potential manipulation success area. We leverage geometric consistency to fuse the views, resulting in a refined depth map and a more precise affordance map for robot manipulation decisions. By comparing with prior works that adopt point clouds or RGB images as inputs, we demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our method. In the project webpage (https://sites.google.com/view/imagemanip), real world experiments further highlight the potential of our method for practical deployment.

Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects

Articulated object manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging task in robotics. Due to significant geometric and semantic variations across object categories, previous manipulation models struggle to generalize to novel categories. Few-shot learning is a promising solution for alleviating this issue by allowing robots to perform a few interactions with unseen objects. However, extant approaches often necessitate costly and inefficient test-time interactions with each unseen instance. Recognizing this limitation, we observe that despite their distinct shapes, different categories often share similar local geometries essential for manipulation, such as pullable handles and graspable edges - a factor typically underutilized in previous few-shot learning works. To harness this commonality, we introduce 'Where2Explore', an affordance learning framework that effectively explores novel categories with minimal interactions on a limited number of instances. Our framework explicitly estimates the geometric similarity across different categories, identifying local areas that differ from shapes in the training categories for efficient exploration while concurrently transferring affordance knowledge to similar parts of the objects. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate our framework's capacity for efficient few-shot exploration and generalization.