Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects

We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3D understanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.

Real-to-Sim Adaptation via High-Fidelity Simulation to Control a Wheeled-Humanoid Robot with Unknown Dynamics

Model-based controllers using a linearized model around the system's equilibrium point is a common approach in the control of a wheeled humanoid due to their less computational load and ease of stability analysis. However, controlling a wheeled humanoid robot while it lifts an unknown object presents significant challenges, primarily due to the lack of knowledge in object dynamics. This paper presents a framework designed for predicting the new equilibrium point explicitly to control a wheeled-legged robot with unknown dynamics. We estimated the total mass and center of mass of the system from its response to initially unknown dynamics, then calculated the new equilibrium point accordingly. To avoid using additional sensors (e.g., force torque sensor) and reduce the effort of obtaining expensive real data, a data-driven approach is utilized with a novel real-to-sim adaptation. A more accurate nonlinear dynamics model, offering a closer representation of real-world physics, is injected into a rigid-body simulation for real-to-sim adaptation. The nonlinear dynamics model parameters were optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization. The efficacy of this framework was validated on a physical wheeled inverted pendulum, a simplified model of a wheeled-legged robot. The experimental results indicate that employing a more precise analytical model with optimized parameters significantly reduces the gap between simulation and reality, thus improving the efficiency of a model-based controller in controlling a wheeled robot with unknown dynamics.

Diffusion Meets DAgger: Supercharging Eye-in-hand Imitation Learning

A common failure mode for policies trained with imitation is compounding execution errors at test time. When the learned policy encounters states that were not present in the expert demonstrations, the policy fails, leading to degenerate behavior. The Dataset Aggregation, or DAgger approach to this problem simply collects more data to cover these failure states. However, in practice, this is often prohibitively expensive. In this work, we propose Diffusion Meets DAgger (DMD), a method to reap the benefits of DAgger without the cost for eye-in-hand imitation learning problems. Instead of collecting new samples to cover out-of-distribution states, DMD uses recent advances in diffusion models to create these samples with diffusion models. This leads to robust performance from few demonstrations. In experiments conducted for non-prehensile pushing on a Franka Research 3, we show that DMD can achieve a success rate of 80% with as few as 8 expert demonstrations, where naive behavior cloning reaches only 20%. DMD also outperform competing NeRF-based augmentation schemes by 50%.

Opening Cabinets and Drawers in the Real World using a Commodity Mobile Manipulator

Pulling open cabinets and drawers presents many difficult technical challenges in perception (inferring articulation parameters for objects from onboard sensors), planning (producing motion plans that conform to tight task constraints), and control (making and maintaining contact while applying forces on the environment). In this work, we build an end-to-end system that enables a commodity mobile manipulator (Stretch RE2) to pull open cabinets and drawers in diverse previously unseen real world environments. We conduct 4 days of real world testing of this system spanning 31 different objects from across 13 different real world environments. Our system achieves a success rate of 61% on opening novel cabinets and drawers in unseen environments zero-shot. An analysis of the failure modes suggests that errors in perception are the most significant challenge for our system. We will open source code and models for others to replicate and build upon our system.

Mitigating Perspective Distortion-induced Shape Ambiguity in Image Crops

Objects undergo varying amounts of perspective distortion as they move across a camera's field of view. Models for predicting 3D from a single image often work with crops around the object of interest and ignore the location of the object in the camera's field of view. We note that ignoring this location information further exaggerates the inherent ambiguity in making 3D inferences from 2D images and can prevent models from even fitting to the training data. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose Intrinsics-Aware Positional Encoding (KPE), which incorporates information about the location of crops in the image and camera intrinsics. Experiments on three popular 3D-from-a-single-image benchmarks: depth prediction on NYU, 3D object detection on KITTI & nuScenes, and predicting 3D shapes of articulated objects on ARCTIC, show the benefits of KPE.

3D Hand Pose Estimation in Egocentric Images in the Wild

We present WildHands, a method for 3D hand pose estimation in egocentric images in the wild. This is challenging due to (a) lack of 3D hand pose annotations for images in the wild, and (b) a form of perspective distortion-induced shape ambiguity that arises in the analysis of crops around hands. For the former, we use auxiliary supervision on in-the-wild data in the form of segmentation masks & grasp labels in addition to 3D supervision available in lab datasets. For the latter, we provide spatial cues about the location of the hand crop in the camera's field of view. Our approach achieves the best 3D hand pose on the ARCTIC leaderboard and outperforms FrankMocap, a popular and robust approach for estimating hand pose in the wild, by 45.3% when evaluated on 2D hand pose on our EPIC-HandKps dataset.

Bootstrapping Autonomous Radars with Self-Supervised Learning

The perception of autonomous vehicles using radars has attracted increased research interest due its ability to operate in fog and bad weather. However, training radar models is hindered by the cost and difficulty of annotating large-scale radar data. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a self-supervised learning framework to leverage the large amount of unlabeled radar data to pre-train radar-only embeddings for self-driving perception tasks. The proposed method combines radar-to-radar and radar-to-vision contrastive losses to learn a general representation from unlabeled radar heatmaps paired with their corresponding camera images. When used for downstream object detection, we demonstrate that the proposed self-supervision framework can improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art supervised baselines by 5.8% in mAP.

GOAT: GO to Any Thing

In deployment scenarios such as homes and warehouses, mobile robots are expected to autonomously navigate for extended periods, seamlessly executing tasks articulated in terms that are intuitively understandable by human operators. We present GO To Any Thing (GOAT), a universal navigation system capable of tackling these requirements with three key features: a) Multimodal: it can tackle goals specified via category labels, target images, and language descriptions, b) Lifelong: it benefits from its past experience in the same environment, and c) Platform Agnostic: it can be quickly deployed on robots with different embodiments. GOAT is made possible through a modular system design and a continually augmented instance-aware semantic memory that keeps track of the appearance of objects from different viewpoints in addition to category-level semantics. This enables GOAT to distinguish between different instances of the same category to enable navigation to targets specified by images and language descriptions. In experimental comparisons spanning over 90 hours in 9 different homes consisting of 675 goals selected across 200+ different object instances, we find GOAT achieves an overall success rate of 83%, surpassing previous methods and ablations by 32% (absolute improvement). GOAT improves with experience in the environment, from a 60% success rate at the first goal to a 90% success after exploration. In addition, we demonstrate that GOAT can readily be applied to downstream tasks such as pick and place and social navigation.

ContactGen: Generative Contact Modeling for Grasp Generation

This paper presents a novel object-centric contact representation ContactGen for hand-object interaction. The ContactGen comprises three components: a contact map indicates the contact location, a part map represents the contact hand part, and a direction map tells the contact direction within each part. Given an input object, we propose a conditional generative model to predict ContactGen and adopt model-based optimization to predict diverse and geometrically feasible grasps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can generate high-fidelity and diverse human grasps for various objects. Project page: https://stevenlsw.github.io/contactgen/