QUAR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Quadruped Robots

The important manifestation of robot intelligence is the ability to naturally interact and autonomously make decisions. Traditional approaches to robot control often compartmentalize perception, planning, and decision-making, simplifying system design but limiting the synergy between different information streams. This compartmentalization poses challenges in achieving seamless autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and action execution. To address these limitations, a novel paradigm, named Vision-Language-Action tasks for QUAdruped Robots (QUAR-VLA), has been introduced in this paper. This approach tightly integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions, effectively merging perception, planning, and decision-making. The central idea is to elevate the overall intelligence of the robot. Within this framework, a notable challenge lies in aligning fine-grained instructions with visual perception information. This emphasizes the complexity involved in ensuring that the robot accurately interprets and acts upon detailed instructions in harmony with its visual observations. Consequently, we propose QUAdruped Robotic Transformer (QUART), a family of VLA models to integrate visual information and instructions from diverse modalities as input and generates executable actions for real-world robots and present QUAdruped Robot Dataset (QUARD), a large-scale multi-task dataset including navigation, complex terrain locomotion, and whole-body manipulation tasks for training QUART models. Our extensive evaluation (4000 evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables QUART to obtain a range of emergent capabilities.

RSG: Fast Learning Adaptive Skills for Quadruped Robots by Skill Graph

Developing robotic intelligent systems that can adapt quickly to unseen wild situations is one of the critical challenges in pursuing autonomous robotics. Although some impressive progress has been made in walking stability and skill learning in the field of legged robots, their ability to fast adaptation is still inferior to that of animals in nature. Animals are born with massive skills needed to survive, and can quickly acquire new ones, by composing fundamental skills with limited experience. Inspired by this, we propose a novel framework, named Robot Skill Graph (RSG) for organizing massive fundamental skills of robots and dexterously reusing them for fast adaptation. Bearing a structure similar to the Knowledge Graph (KG), RSG is composed of massive dynamic behavioral skills instead of static knowledge in KG and enables discovering implicit relations that exist in be-tween of learning context and acquired skills of robots, serving as a starting point for understanding subtle patterns existing in robots' skill learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RSG can provide rational skill inference upon new tasks and environments and enable quadruped robots to adapt to new scenarios and learn new skills rapidly.

Beyond OOD State Actions: Supported Cross-Domain Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy using only pre-collected and fixed data. Although avoiding the time-consuming online interactions in RL, it poses challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) state actions and often suffers from data inefficiency for training. Despite many efforts being devoted to addressing OOD state actions, the latter (data inefficiency) receives little attention in offline RL. To address this, this paper proposes the cross-domain offline RL, which assumes offline data incorporate additional source-domain data from varying transition dynamics (environments), and expects it to contribute to the offline data efficiency. To do so, we identify a new challenge of OOD transition dynamics, beyond the common OOD state actions issue, when utilizing cross-domain offline data. Then, we propose our method BOSA, which employs two support-constrained objectives to address the above OOD issues. Through extensive experiments in the cross-domain offline RL setting, we demonstrate BOSA can greatly improve offline data efficiency: using only 10\% of the target data, BOSA could achieve {74.4\%} of the SOTA offline RL performance that uses 100\% of the target data. Additionally, we also show BOSA can be effortlessly plugged into model-based offline RL and noising data augmentation techniques (used for generating source-domain data), which naturally avoids the potential dynamics mismatch between target-domain data and newly generated source-domain data.

BVIP Guiding System with Adaptability to Individual Differences

Guiding robots can not only detect close-range obstacles like other guiding tools, but also extend its range to perceive the environment when making decisions. However, most existing works over-simplified the interaction between human agents and robots, ignoring the differences between individuals, resulting in poor experiences for different users. To solve the problem, we propose a data-driven guiding system to cope with the effect brighten by individual differences. In our guiding system, we design a Human Motion Predictor (HMP) and a Robot Dynamics Model (RDM) based on deep neural network, the time convolutional network (TCN) is verified to have the best performance, to predict differences in interaction between different human agents and robots. To train our models, we collected datasets that records the interactions from different human agents. Moreover, given the predictive information of the specific user, we propose a waypoints selector that allows the robot to naturally adapt to the user's state changes, which are mainly reflected in the walking speed. We compare the performance of our models with previous works and achieve significant performance improvements. On this basis, our guiding system demonstrated good adaptability to different human agents. Our guiding system is deployed on a real quadruped robot to verify the practicability.

Extending the Use of MDL for High-Dimensional Problems: Variable Selection, Robust Fitting, and Additive Modeling

In the signal processing and statistics literature, the minimum description length (MDL) principle is a popular tool for choosing model complexity. Successful examples include signal denoising and variable selection in linear regression, for which the corresponding MDL solutions often enjoy consistent properties and produce very promising empirical results. This paper demonstrates that MDL can be extended naturally to the high-dimensional setting, where the number of predictors $p$ is larger than the number of observations $n$. It first considers the case of linear regression, then allows for outliers in the data, and lastly extends to the robust fitting of nonparametric additive models. Results from numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the MDL approach.

Few-shot Domain Adaptation for IMU Denoising

Different application scenarios will cause IMU to exhibit different error characteristics which will cause trouble to robot application. However, most data processing methods need to be designed for specific scenario. To solve this problem, we propose a few-shot domain adaptation method. In this work, a domain adaptation framework is considered for denoising the IMU, a reconstitution loss is designed to improve domain adaptability. In addition, in order to further improve the adaptability in the case of limited data, a few-shot training strategy is adopted. In the experiment, we quantify our method on two datasets (EuRoC and TUM-VI) and two real robots (car and quadruped robot) with three different precision IMUs. According to the experimental results, the adaptability of our framework is verified by t-SNE. In orientation results, our proposed method shows the great denoising performance.