Designing Library of Skill-Agents for Hardware-Level Reusability

To use new robot hardware in a new environment, it is necessary to develop a control program tailored to that specific robot in that environment. Considering the reusability of software among robots is crucial to minimize the effort involved in this process and maximize software reuse across different robots in different environments. This paper proposes a method to remedy this process by considering hardware-level reusability, using Learning-from-observation (LfO) paradigm with a pre-designed skill-agent library. The LfO framework represents the required actions in hardware-independent representations, referred to as task models, from observing human demonstrations, capturing the necessary parameters for the interaction between the environment and the robot. When executing the desired actions from the task models, a set of skill agents is employed to convert the representations into robot commands. This paper focuses on the latter part of the LfO framework, utilizing the set to generate robot actions from the task models, and explores a hardware-independent design approach for these skill agents. These skill agents are described in a hardware-independent manner, considering the relative relationship between the robot's hand position and the environment. As a result, it is possible to execute these actions on robots with different hardware configurations by simply swapping the inverse kinematics solver. This paper, first, defines a necessary and sufficient skill-agent set corresponding to cover all possible actions, and considers the design principles for these skill agents in the library. We provide concrete examples of such skill agents and demonstrate the practicality of using these skill agents by showing that the same representations can be executed on two different robots, Nextage and Fetch, using the proposed skill-agents set.

GPT-4V(ision) for Robotics: Multimodal Task Planning from Human Demonstration

We introduce a pipeline that enhances a general-purpose Vision Language Model, GPT-4V(ision), by integrating observations of human actions to facilitate robotic manipulation. This system analyzes videos of humans performing tasks and creates executable robot programs that incorporate affordance insights. The computation starts by analyzing the videos with GPT-4V to convert environmental and action details into text, followed by a GPT-4-empowered task planner. In the following analyses, vision systems reanalyze the video with the task plan. Object names are grounded using an open-vocabulary object detector, while focus on the hand-object relation helps to detect the moment of grasping and releasing. This spatiotemporal grounding allows the vision systems to further gather affordance data (e.g., grasp type, way points, and body postures). Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate this method's efficacy in achieving real robots' operations from human demonstrations in a zero-shot manner. The prompts of GPT-4V/GPT-4 are available at this project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GPT4Vision-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts/

Constraint-aware Policy for Compliant Manipulation

Robot manipulation in a physically-constrained environment requires compliant manipulation. Compliant manipulation is a manipulation skill to adjust hand motion based on the force imposed by the environment. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to solve household operations involving compliant manipulation. However, previous RL methods have primarily focused on designing a policy for a specific operation that limits their applicability and requires separate training for every new operation. We propose a constraint-aware policy that is applicable to various unseen manipulations by grouping several manipulations together based on the type of physical constraint involved. The type of physical constraint determines the characteristic of the imposed force direction; thus, a generalized policy is trained in the environment and reward designed on the basis of this characteristic. This paper focuses on two types of physical constraints: prismatic and revolute joints. Experiments demonstrated that the same policy could successfully execute various compliant-manipulation operations, both in the simulation and reality. We believe this study is the first step toward realizing a generalized household-robot.

Bias in Emotion Recognition with ChatGPT

This technical report explores the ability of ChatGPT in recognizing emotions from text, which can be the basis of various applications like interactive chatbots, data annotation, and mental health analysis. While prior research has shown ChatGPT's basic ability in sentiment analysis, its performance in more nuanced emotion recognition is not yet explored. Here, we conducted experiments to evaluate its performance of emotion recognition across different datasets and emotion labels. Our findings indicate a reasonable level of reproducibility in its performance, with noticeable improvement through fine-tuning. However, the performance varies with different emotion labels and datasets, highlighting an inherent instability and possible bias. The choice of dataset and emotion labels significantly impacts ChatGPT's emotion recognition performance. This paper sheds light on the importance of dataset and label selection, and the potential of fine-tuning in enhancing ChatGPT's emotion recognition capabilities, providing a groundwork for better integration of emotion analysis in applications using ChatGPT.

Applying Learning-from-observation to household service robots: three common-sense formulation

Utilizing a robot in a new application requires the robot to be programmed at each time. To reduce such programmings efforts, we have been developing ``Learning-from-observation (LfO)'' that automatically generates robot programs by observing human demonstrations. One of the main issues with introducing this LfO system into the domain of household tasks is the cluttered environments, which cause difficulty in determining which elements are important for task execution when observing demonstrations. To overcome this issue, it is necessary for the system to have common sense shared with the human demonstrator. This paper addresses three relationships that LfO in the household domain should focus on when observing demonstrations and proposes representations to describe the common sense used by the demonstrator for optimal execution of task sequences. Specifically, the paper proposes to use labanotation to describe the postures between the environment and the robot, contact-webs to describe the grasping methods between the robot and the tool, and physical and semantic constraints to describe the motions between the tool and the environment. Then, based on these representations, the paper formulates task models, machine-independent robot programs, that indicate what to do and how to do. Third, the paper explains the task encoder to obtain task models and task decoder to execute the task models on the robot hardware. Finally, this paper presents how the system actually works through several example scenes.

ChatGPT Empowered Long-Step Robot Control in Various Environments: A Case Application

This paper demonstrates how OpenAI's ChatGPT can be used in a few-shot setting to convert natural language instructions into a sequence of executable robot actions. The paper proposes easy-to-customize input prompts for ChatGPT that meet common requirements in practical applications, such as easy integration with robot execution systems and applicability to various environments while minimizing the impact of ChatGPT's token limit. The prompts encourage ChatGPT to output a sequence of predefined robot actions, represent the operating environment in a formalized style, and infer the updated state of the operating environment. Experiments confirmed that the proposed prompts enable ChatGPT to act according to requirements in various environments, and users can adjust ChatGPT's output with natural language feedback for safe and robust operation. The proposed prompts and source code are open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/ChatGPT-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts

Bounding Box Annotation with Visible Status

Training deep-learning-based vision systems requires the manual annotation of a significant amount of data to optimize several parameters of the deep convolutional neural networks. Such manual annotation is highly time-consuming and labor-intensive. To reduce this burden, a previous study presented a fully automated annotation approach that does not require any manual intervention. The proposed method associates a visual marker with an object and captures it in the same image. However, because the previous method relied on moving the object within the capturing range using a fixed-point camera, the collected image dataset was limited in terms of capturing viewpoints. To overcome this limitation, this study presents a mobile application-based free-viewpoint image-capturing method. With the proposed application, users can collect multi-view image datasets automatically that are annotated with bounding boxes by moving the camera. However, capturing images through human involvement is laborious and monotonous. Therefore, we propose gamified application features to track the progress of the collection status. Our experiments demonstrated that using the gamified mobile application for bounding box annotation, with visible collection progress status, can motivate users to collect multi-view object image datasets with less mental workload and time pressure in an enjoyable manner, leading to increased engagement.

Task-sequencing Simulator: Integrated Machine Learning to Execution Simulation for Robot Manipulation

A task-sequencing simulator in robotics manipulation to integrate simulation-for-learning and simulation-for-execution is introduced. Unlike existing machine-learning simulation where a non-decomposed simulation is used to simulate a training scenario, the task-sequencing simulator runs a composed simulation using building blocks. This way, the simulation-for-learning is structured similarly to a multi-step simulation-for-execution. To compose both learning and execution scenarios, a unified trainable-and-composable description of blocks called a concept model is proposed and used. Using the simulator design and concept models, a reusable simulator for learning different tasks, a common-ground system for learning-to-execution, simulation-to-real is achieved and shown.

Interactive Learning-from-Observation through multimodal human demonstration

Learning-from-Observation (LfO) is a robot teaching framework for programming operations through few-shots human demonstration. While most previous LfO systems run with visual demonstration, recent research on robot teaching has shown the effectiveness of verbal instruction in making recognition robust and teaching interactive. To the best of our knowledge, however, few solutions have been proposed for LfO that utilizes verbal instruction, namely multimodal LfO. This paper aims to propose a practical pipeline for multimodal LfO. For input, an user temporally stops hand movements to match the granularity of human instructions with the granularity of robot execution. The pipeline recognizes tasks based on step-by-step verbal instructions accompanied by demonstrations. In addition, the recognition is made robust through interactions with the user. We test the pipeline on a real robot and show that the user can successfully teach multiple operations from multimodal demonstrations. The results suggest the utility of the proposed pipeline for multimodal LfO.