Predicting Object Interactions with Behavior Primitives: An Application in Stowing Tasks

Stowing, the task of placing objects in cluttered shelves or bins, is a common task in warehouse and manufacturing operations. However, this task is still predominantly carried out by human workers as stowing is challenging to automate due to the complex multi-object interactions and long-horizon nature of the task. Previous works typically involve extensive data collection and costly human labeling of semantic priors across diverse object categories. This paper presents a method to learn a generalizable robot stowing policy from predictive model of object interactions and a single demonstration with behavior primitives. We propose a novel framework that utilizes Graph Neural Networks to predict object interactions within the parameter space of behavioral primitives. We further employ primitive-augmented trajectory optimization to search the parameters of a predefined library of heterogeneous behavioral primitives to instantiate the control action. Our framework enables robots to proficiently execute long-horizon stowing tasks with a few keyframes (3-4) from a single demonstration. Despite being solely trained in a simulation, our framework demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities. It efficiently adapts to a broad spectrum of real-world conditions, including various shelf widths, fluctuating quantities of objects, and objects with diverse attributes such as sizes and shapes.

DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navigation with Visual Language Grounding

Persons with visual impairments (PwVI) have difficulties understanding and navigating spaces around them. Current wayfinding technologies either focus solely on navigation or provide limited communication about the environment. Motivated by recent advances in visual-language grounding and semantic navigation, we propose DRAGON, a guiding robot powered by a dialogue system and the ability to associate the environment with natural language. By understanding the commands from the user, DRAGON is able to guide the user to the desired landmarks on the map, describe the environment, and answer questions from visual observations. Through effective utilization of dialogue, the robot can ground the user's free-form descriptions to landmarks in the environment, and give the user semantic information through spoken language. We conduct a user study with blindfolded participants in an everyday indoor environment. Our results demonstrate that DRAGON is able to communicate with the user smoothly, provide a good guiding experience, and connect users with their surrounding environment in an intuitive manner.

Designing a Wayfinding Robot for People with Visual Impairments

People with visual impairments (PwVI) often have difficulties navigating through unfamiliar indoor environments. However, current wayfinding tools are fairly limited. In this short paper, we present our in-progress work on a wayfinding robot for PwVI. The robot takes an audio command from the user that specifies the intended destination. Then, the robot autonomously plans a path to navigate to the goal. We use sensors to estimate the real-time position of the user, which is fed to the planner to improve the safety and comfort of the user. In addition, the robot describes the surroundings to the user periodically to prevent disorientation and potential accidents. We demonstrate the feasibility of our design in a public indoor environment. Finally, we analyze the limitations of our current design, as well as our insights and future work. A demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/BS9r5bkIass.