A Universal Semantic-Geometric Representation for Robotic Manipulation

Robots rely heavily on sensors, especially RGB and depth cameras, to perceive and interact with the world. RGB cameras record 2D images with rich semantic information while missing precise spatial information. On the other side, depth cameras offer critical 3D geometry data but capture limited semantics. Therefore, integrating both modalities is crucial for learning representations for robotic perception and control. However, current research predominantly focuses on only one of these modalities, neglecting the benefits of incorporating both. To this end, we present Semantic-Geometric Representation (SGR), a universal perception module for robotics that leverages the rich semantic information of large-scale pre-trained 2D models and inherits the merits of 3D spatial reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that SGR empowers the agent to successfully complete a diverse range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods significantly in both single-task and multi-task settings. Furthermore, SGR possesses the unique capability to generalize to novel semantic attributes, setting it apart from the other methods.