RAMP: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robotic Assembly Manipulation and Planning

We introduce RAMP, an open-source robotics benchmark inspired by real-world industrial assembly tasks. RAMP consists of beams that a robot must assemble into specified goal configurations using pegs as fasteners. As such it assesses planning and execution capabilities, and poses challenges in perception, reasoning, manipulation, diagnostics, fault recovery and goal parsing. RAMP has been designed to be accessible and extensible. Parts are either 3D printed or otherwise constructed from materials that are readily obtainable. The part design and detailed instructions are publicly available. In order to broaden community engagement, RAMP incorporates fixtures such as April Tags which enable researchers to focus on individual sub-tasks of the assembly challenge if desired. We provide a full digital twin as well as rudimentary baselines to enable rapid progress. Our vision is for RAMP to form the substrate for a community-driven endeavour that evolves as capability matures.

Projections of Model Spaces for Latent Graph Inference

Graph Neural Networks leverage the connectivity structure of graphs as an inductive bias. Latent graph inference focuses on learning an adequate graph structure to diffuse information on and improve the downstream performance of the model. In this work we employ stereographic projections of the hyperbolic and spherical model spaces, as well as products of Riemannian manifolds, for the purpose of latent graph inference. Stereographically projected model spaces achieve comparable performance to their non-projected counterparts, while providing theoretical guarantees that avoid divergence of the spaces when the curvature tends to zero. We perform experiments on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Efficient Skill Acquisition for Complex Manipulation Tasks in Obstructed Environments

Data efficiency in robotic skill acquisition is crucial for operating robots in varied small-batch assembly settings. To operate in such environments, robots must have robust obstacle avoidance and versatile goal conditioning acquired from only a few simple demonstrations. Existing approaches, however, fall short of these requirements. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) enables a robot to learn complex manipulation tasks but is often limited to small task spaces in the real world due to sample inefficiency and safety concerns. Motion planning (MP) can generate collision-free paths in obstructed environments, but cannot solve complex manipulation tasks and requires goal states often specified by a user or object-specific pose estimator. In this work, we propose a system for efficient skill acquisition that leverages an object-centric generative model (OCGM) for versatile goal identification to specify a goal for MP combined with RL to solve complex manipulation tasks in obstructed environments. Specifically, OCGM enables one-shot target object identification and re-identification in new scenes, allowing MP to guide the robot to the target object while avoiding obstacles. This is combined with a skill transition network, which bridges the gap between terminal states of MP and feasible start states of a sample-efficient RL policy. The experiments demonstrate that our OCGM-based one-shot goal identification provides competitive accuracy to other baseline approaches and that our modular framework outperforms competitive baselines, including a state-of-the-art RL algorithm, by a significant margin for complex manipulation tasks in obstructed environments.

Leveraging Scene Embeddings for Gradient-Based Motion Planning in Latent Space

Motion planning framed as optimisation in structured latent spaces has recently emerged as competitive with traditional methods in terms of planning success while significantly outperforming them in terms of computational speed. However, the real-world applicability of recent work in this domain remains limited by the need to express obstacle information directly in state-space, involving simple geometric primitives. In this work we address this challenge by leveraging learned scene embeddings together with a generative model of the robot manipulator to drive the optimisation process. In addition, we introduce an approach for efficient collision checking which directly regularises the optimisation undertaken for planning. Using simulated as well as real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our approach, AMP-LS, is able to successfully plan in novel, complex scenes while outperforming traditional planning baselines in terms of computation speed by an order of magnitude. We show that the resulting system is fast enough to enable closed-loop planning in real-world dynamic scenes.

DITTO: Offline Imitation Learning with World Models

We propose DITTO, an offline imitation learning algorithm which uses world models and on-policy reinforcement learning to addresses the problem of covariate shift, without access to an oracle or any additional online interactions. We discuss how world models enable offline, on-policy imitation learning, and propose a simple intrinsic reward defined in the world model latent space that induces imitation learning by reinforcement learning. Theoretically, we show that our formulation induces a divergence bound between expert and learner, in turn bounding the difference in reward. We test our method on difficult Atari environments from pixels alone, and achieve state-of-the-art performance in the offline setting.

Variational Causal Dynamics: Discovering Modular World Models from Interventions

Latent world models allow agents to reason about complex environments with high-dimensional observations. However, adapting to new environments and effectively leveraging previous knowledge remain significant challenges. We present variational causal dynamics (VCD), a structured world model that exploits the invariance of causal mechanisms across environments to achieve fast and modular adaptation. By causally factorising a transition model, VCD is able to identify reusable components across different environments. This is achieved by combining causal discovery and variational inference to learn a latent representation and transition model jointly in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we optimise the evidence lower bound jointly over a representation model and a transition model structured as a causal graphical model. In evaluations on simulated environments with state and image observations, we show that VCD is able to successfully identify causal variables, and to discover consistent causal structures across different environments. Moreover, given a small number of observations in a previously unseen, intervened environment, VCD is able to identify the sparse changes in the dynamics and to adapt efficiently. In doing so, VCD significantly extends the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art in latent world models while also comparing favourably in terms of prediction accuracy.

ObPose: Leveraging Canonical Pose for Object-Centric Scene Inference in 3D

We present ObPose, an unsupervised object-centric generative model that learns to segment 3D objects from RGB-D video in an unsupervised manner. Inspired by prior art in 2D representation learning, ObPose considers a factorised latent space, separately encoding object-wise location (where) and appearance (what) information. In particular, ObPose leverages an object's canonical pose, defined via a minimum volume principle, as a novel inductive bias for learning the where component. To achieve this, we propose an efficient, voxelised approximation approach to recover the object shape directly from a neural radiance field (NeRF). As a consequence, ObPose models scenes as compositions of NeRFs representing individual objects. When evaluated on the YCB dataset for unsupervised scene segmentation, ObPose outperforms the current state-of-the-art in 3D scene inference (ObSuRF) by a significant margin in terms of segmentation quality for both video inputs as well as for multi-view static scenes. In addition, the design choices made in the ObPose encoder are validated with relevant ablations.

VAE-Loco: Versatile Quadruped Locomotion by Learning a Disentangled Gait Representation

Quadruped locomotion is rapidly maturing to a degree where robots now routinely traverse a variety of unstructured terrains. However, while gaits can be varied typically by selecting from a range of pre-computed styles, current planners are unable to vary key gait parameters continuously while the robot is in motion. The synthesis, on-the-fly, of gaits with unexpected operational characteristics or even the blending of dynamic manoeuvres lies beyond the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art. In this work we address this limitation by learning a latent space capturing the key stance phases constituting a particular gait. This is achieved via a generative model trained on a single trot style, which encourages disentanglement such that application of a drive signal to a single dimension of the latent state induces holistic plans synthesising a continuous variety of trot styles. We demonstrate that specific properties of the drive signal map directly to gait parameters such as cadence, footstep height and full stance duration. Due to the nature of our approach these synthesised gaits are continuously variable online during robot operation and robustly capture a richness of movement significantly exceeding the relatively narrow behaviour seen during training. In addition, the use of a generative model facilitates the detection and mitigation of disturbances to provide a versatile and robust planning framework. We evaluate our approach on two versions of the real ANYmal quadruped robots and demonstrate that our method achieves a continuous blend of dynamic trot styles whilst being robust and reactive to external perturbations.

Zero-Shot Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Object pose estimation is an important component of most vision pipelines for embodied agents, as well as in 3D vision more generally. In this paper we tackle the problem of estimating the pose of novel object categories in a zero-shot manner. This extends much of the existing literature by removing the need for pose-labelled datasets or category-specific CAD models for training or inference. Specifically, we make the following contributions. First, we formalise the zero-shot, category-level pose estimation problem and frame it in a way that is most applicable to real-world embodied agents. Secondly, we propose a novel method based on semantic correspondences from a self-supervised vision transformer to solve the pose estimation problem. We further re-purpose the recent CO3D dataset to present a controlled and realistic test setting. Finally, we demonstrate that all baselines for our proposed task perform poorly, and show that our method provides a six-fold improvement in average rotation accuracy at 30 degrees. Our code is available at https://github.com/applied-ai-lab/zero-shot-pose.

Fast-MbyM: Leveraging Translational Invariance of the Fourier Transform for Efficient and Accurate Radar Odometry

Masking By Moving (MByM), provides robust and accurate radar odometry measurements through an exhaustive correlative search across discretised pose candidates. However, this dense search creates a significant computational bottleneck which hinders real-time performance when high-end GPUs are not available. Utilising the translational invariance of the Fourier Transform, in our approach, f-MByM, we decouple the search for angle and translation. By maintaining end-to-end differentiability a neural network is used to mask scans and trained by supervising pose prediction directly. Training faster and with less memory, utilising a decoupled search allows f-MByM to achieve significant run-time performance improvements on a CPU (168%) and to run in real-time on embedded devices, in stark contrast to MByM. Throughout, our approach remains accurate and competitive with the best radar odometry variants available in the literature -- achieving an end-point drift of 2.01% in translation and 6.3deg/km on the Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset.