Model Reconciliation through Explainability and Collaborative Recovery in Assistive Robotics

Whenever humans and robots work together, it is essential that unexpected robot behavior can be explained to the user. Especially in applications such as shared control the user and the robot must share the same model of the objects in the world, and the actions that can be performed on these objects. In this paper, we achieve this with a so-called model reconciliation framework. We leverage a Large Language Model to predict and explain the difference between the robot's and the human's mental models, without the need of a formal mental model of the user. Furthermore, our framework aims to solve the model divergence after the explanation by allowing the human to correct the robot. We provide an implementation in an assistive robotics domain, where we conduct a set of experiments with a real wheelchair-based mobile manipulator and its digital twin.

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website $\href{https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io}{\text{robotics-transformer-x.github.io}}$.