CrayonRobo: Object-Centric Prompt-Driven Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

In robotic, task goals can be conveyed through various modalities, such as language, goal images, and goal videos. However, natural language can be ambiguous, while images or videos may offer overly detailed specifications. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CrayonRobo that leverages comprehensive multi-modal prompts that explicitly convey both low-level actions and high-level planning in a simple manner. Specifically, for each key-frame in the task sequence, our method allows for manual or automatic generation of simple and expressive 2D visual prompts overlaid on RGB images. These prompts represent the required task goals, such as the end-effector pose and the desired movement direction after contact. We develop a training strategy that enables the model to interpret these visual-language prompts and predict the corresponding contact poses and movement directions in SE(3) space. Furthermore, by sequentially executing all key-frame steps, the model can complete long-horizon tasks. This approach not only helps the model explicitly understand the task objectives but also enhances its robustness on unseen tasks by providing easily interpretable prompts. We evaluate our method in both simulated and real-world environments, demonstrating its robust manipulation capabilities.

ManipGPT: Is Affordance Segmentation by Large Vision Models Enough for Articulated Object Manipulation?

Visual actionable affordance has emerged as a transformative approach in robotics, focusing on perceiving interaction areas prior to manipulation. Traditional methods rely on pixel sampling to identify successful interaction samples or processing pointclouds for affordance mapping. However, these approaches are computationally intensive and struggle to adapt to diverse and dynamic environments. This paper introduces ManipGPT, a framework designed to predict optimal interaction areas for articulated objects using a large pre-trained vision transformer (ViT). We created a dataset of 9.9k simulated and real images to bridge the sim-to-real gap and enhance real-world applicability. By fine-tuning the vision transformer on this small dataset, we significantly improved part-level affordance segmentation, adapting the model's in-context segmentation capabilities to robot manipulation scenarios. This enables effective manipulation across simulated and real-world environments by generating part-level affordance masks, paired with an impedance adaptation policy, sufficiently eliminating the need for complex datasets or perception systems.

ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Models

The integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with robotic systems has significantly enhanced the ability of robots to interpret and act upon natural language instructions. Despite these advancements, conventional MLLMs are typically trained on generic image-text pairs, lacking essential robotics knowledge such as affordances and physical knowledge, which hampers their efficacy in manipulation tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce ManipVQA, a novel framework designed to endow MLLMs with Manipulation-centric knowledge through a Visual Question-Answering format. This approach not only encompasses tool detection and affordance recognition but also extends to a comprehensive understanding of physical concepts. Our approach starts with collecting a varied set of images displaying interactive objects, which presents a broad range of challenges in tool object detection, affordance, and physical concept predictions. To seamlessly integrate this robotic-specific knowledge with the inherent vision-reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we adopt a unified VQA format and devise a fine-tuning strategy that preserves the original vision-reasoning abilities while incorporating the new robotic insights. Empirical evaluations conducted in robotic simulators and across various vision task benchmarks demonstrate the robust performance of ManipVQA. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/ManipVQA.