Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks

Designing robotic agents to perform open vocabulary tasks has been the long-standing goal in robotics and AI. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in creating robotic agents for performing open vocabulary tasks. However, planning for these tasks in the presence of uncertainties is challenging as it requires \enquote{chain-of-thought} reasoning, aggregating information from the environment, updating state estimates, and generating actions based on the updated state estimates. In this paper, we present an interactive planning technique for partially observable tasks using LLMs. In the proposed method, an LLM is used to collect missing information from the environment using a robot and infer the state of the underlying problem from collected observations while guiding the robot to perform the required actions. We also use a fine-tuned Llama 2 model via self-instruct and compare its performance against a pre-trained LLM like GPT-4. Results are demonstrated on several tasks in simulation as well as real-world environments. A video describing our work along with some results could be found here.

EARL: Eye-on-Hand Reinforcement Learner for Dynamic Grasping with Active Pose Estimation

In this paper, we explore the dynamic grasping of moving objects through active pose tracking and reinforcement learning for hand-eye coordination systems. Most existing vision-based robotic grasping methods implicitly assume target objects are stationary or moving predictably. Performing grasping of unpredictably moving objects presents a unique set of challenges. For example, a pre-computed robust grasp can become unreachable or unstable as the target object moves, and motion planning must also be adaptive. In this work, we present a new approach, Eye-on-hAnd Reinforcement Learner (EARL), for enabling coupled Eye-on-Hand (EoH) robotic manipulation systems to perform real-time active pose tracking and dynamic grasping of novel objects without explicit motion prediction. EARL readily addresses many thorny issues in automated hand-eye coordination, including fast-tracking of 6D object pose from vision, learning control policy for a robotic arm to track a moving object while keeping the object in the camera's field of view, and performing dynamic grasping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in extensive experiments validated on multiple commercial robotic arms in both simulations and complex real-world tasks.

Style-transfer based Speech and Audio-visual Scene Understanding for Robot Action Sequence Acquisition from Videos

To realize human-robot collaboration, robots need to execute actions for new tasks according to human instructions given finite prior knowledge. Human experts can share their knowledge of how to perform a task with a robot through multi-modal instructions in their demonstrations, showing a sequence of short-horizon steps to achieve a long-horizon goal. This paper introduces a method for robot action sequence generation from instruction videos using (1) an audio-visual Transformer that converts audio-visual features and instruction speech to a sequence of robot actions called dynamic movement primitives (DMPs) and (2) style-transfer-based training that employs multi-task learning with video captioning and weakly-supervised learning with a semantic classifier to exploit unpaired video-action data. We built a system that accomplishes various cooking actions, where an arm robot executes a DMP sequence acquired from a cooking video using the audio-visual Transformer. Experiments with Epic-Kitchen-100, YouCookII, QuerYD, and in-house instruction video datasets show that the proposed method improves the quality of DMP sequences by 2.3 times the METEOR score obtained with a baseline video-to-action Transformer. The model achieved 32% of the task success rate with the task knowledge of the object.

Learning Generalizable Pivoting Skills

The skill of pivoting an object with a robotic system is challenging for the external forces that act on the system, mainly given by contact interaction. The complexity increases when the same skills are required to generalize across different objects. This paper proposes a framework for learning robust and generalizable pivoting skills, which consists of three steps. First, we learn a pivoting policy on an ``unitary'' object using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Then, we obtain the object's feature space by supervised learning to encode the kinematic properties of arbitrary objects. Finally, to adapt the unitary policy to multiple objects, we learn data-driven projections based on the object features to adjust the state and action space of the new pivoting task. The proposed approach is entirely trained in simulation. It requires only one depth image of the object and can zero-shot transfer to real-world objects. We demonstrate robustness to sim-to-real transfer and generalization to multiple objects.

Task-Directed Exploration in Continuous POMDPs for Robotic Manipulation of Articulated Objects

Representing and reasoning about uncertainty is crucial for autonomous agents acting in partially observable environments with noisy sensors. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) serve as a general framework for representing problems in which uncertainty is an important factor. Online sample-based POMDP methods have emerged as efficient approaches to solving large POMDPs and have been shown to extend to continuous domains. However, these solutions struggle to find long-horizon plans in problems with significant uncertainty. Exploration heuristics can help guide planning, but many real-world settings contain significant task-irrelevant uncertainty that might distract from the task objective. In this paper, we propose STRUG, an online POMDP solver capable of handling domains that require long-horizon planning with significant task-relevant and task-irrelevant uncertainty. We demonstrate our solution on several temporally extended versions of toy POMDP problems as well as robotic manipulation of articulated objects using a neural perception frontend to construct a distribution of possible models. Our results show that STRUG outperforms the current sample-based online POMDP solvers on several tasks.

Generalizable Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly Using Imitation Learning and Force Control

Robots have been steadily increasing their presence in our daily lives, where they can work along with humans to provide assistance in various tasks on industry floors, in offices, and in homes. Automated assembly is one of the key applications of robots, and the next generation assembly systems could become much more efficient by creating collaborative human-robot systems. However, although collaborative robots have been around for decades, their application in truly collaborative systems has been limited. This is because a truly collaborative human-robot system needs to adjust its operation with respect to the uncertainty and imprecision in human actions, ensure safety during interaction, etc. In this paper, we present a system for human-robot collaborative assembly using learning from demonstration and pose estimation, so that the robot can adapt to the uncertainty caused by the operation of humans. Learning from demonstration is used to generate motion trajectories for the robot based on the pose estimate of different goal locations from a deep learning-based vision system. The proposed system is demonstrated using a physical 6 DoF manipulator in a collaborative human-robot assembly scenario. We show successful generalization of the system's operation to changes in the initial and final goal locations through various experiments.

Design of Adaptive Compliance Controllers for Safe Robotic Assembly

Insertion operations are a critical element of most robotic assembly operation, and peg-in-hole (PiH) insertion is one of the most widely studied tasks in the industrial and academic manipulation communities. PiH insertion is in fact an entire class of problems, where the complexity of the problem can depend on the type of misalignment and contact formation during an insertion attempt. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of adaptive compliance controllers which can be used in insertion-type assembly tasks, including learning-based compliance controllers which can be used for insertion problems in the presence of uncertainty in the goal location during robotic assembly. We first present the design of compliance controllers which can ensure safe operation of the robot by limiting experienced contact forces during contact formation. Consequently, we present analysis of the force signature obtained during the contact formation to learn the corrective action needed to perform insertion. Finally, we use the proposed compliance controllers and learned models to design a policy that can successfully perform insertion in novel test conditions with almost perfect success rate. We validate the proposed approach on a physical robotic test-bed using a 6-DoF manipulator arm.

Learning to Synthesize Volumetric Meshes from Vision-based Tactile Imprints

Vision-based tactile sensors typically utilize a deformable elastomer and a camera mounted above to provide high-resolution image observations of contacts. Obtaining accurate volumetric meshes for the deformed elastomer can provide direct contact information and benefit robotic grasping and manipulation. This paper focuses on learning to synthesize the volumetric mesh of the elastomer based on the image imprints acquired from vision-based tactile sensors. Synthetic image-mesh pairs and real-world images are gathered from 3D finite element methods (FEM) and physical sensors, respectively. A graph neural network (GNN) is introduced to learn the image-to-mesh mappings with supervised learning. A self-supervised adaptation method and image augmentation techniques are proposed to transfer networks from simulation to reality, from primitive contacts to unseen contacts, and from one sensor to another. Using these learned and adapted networks, our proposed method can accurately reconstruct the deformation of the real-world tactile sensor elastomer in various domains, as indicated by the quantitative and qualitative results.

InSeGAN: A Generative Approach to Segmenting Identical Instances in Depth Images

In this paper, we present InSeGAN, an unsupervised 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for segmenting (nearly) identical instances of rigid objects in depth images. Using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, we design a novel GAN architecture to synthesize a multiple-instance depth image with independent control over each instance. InSeGAN takes in a set of code vectors (e.g., random noise vectors), each encoding the 3D pose of an object that is represented by a learned implicit object template. The generator has two distinct modules. The first module, the instance feature generator, uses each encoded pose to transform the implicit template into a feature map representation of each object instance. The second module, the depth image renderer, aggregates all of the single-instance feature maps output by the first module and generates a multiple-instance depth image. A discriminator distinguishes the generated multiple-instance depth images from the distribution of true depth images. To use our model for instance segmentation, we propose an instance pose encoder that learns to take in a generated depth image and reproduce the pose code vectors for all of the object instances. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new synthetic dataset, "Insta-10", consisting of 100,000 depth images, each with 5 instances of an object from one of 10 classes. Our experiments on Insta-10, as well as on real-world noisy depth images, show that InSeGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, often outperforming prior methods by large margins.