24 accepted papers
We present Generalizable Hierarchical Skill Learning (GSL), a novel framework for hierarchical policy learning that improves policy generalization and sample efficiency in robot manipulation. One core idea of GSL is to use object-centric skills as an interface that bridges the high-level vision-lang
We present Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation Interface (HoMMI), a data collection and policy learning framework that learns whole-body mobile manipulation directly from robot-free human demonstrations. We augment UMI interfaces with egocentric sensing to capture the global context required for mobile m…
Recent work has shown that equivariant policy networks can achieve strong performance on robot manipulation tasks with limited human demonstrations. However, existing equivariant methods typically require structured inputs, such as 3D point clouds or top-down camera views, which prevents their use…
Equivariant models have recently been shown to improve the data efficiency of diffusion policy by a significant margin. However, prior work that explored this direction focused primarily on point cloud inputs generated by multiple cameras fixed in the workspace. This type of point cloud input is not…
Recently, equivariant neural networks for policy learning have shown promising improvements in sample efficiency and generalization, however, their wide adoption faces substantial barriers due to implementation complexity. Equivariant architectures typically require specialized mathematical formulat…
Recent advances in hierarchical policy learning highlight the advantages of decomposing systems into high-level and low-level agents, enabling efficient long-horizon reasoning and precise fine-grained control. However, the interface between these hierarchy levels remains underexplored, and existing…
Controlling robots through natural language is pivotal for enhancing human-robot collaboration and synthesizing complex robot behaviors. Recent works that are trained on large robot datasets show impressive generalization abilities. However, such pretrained methods are (1) often fragile to unseen sc
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to rearrange objects relative to one another. Such tasks can be described as a sequence of relative poses between parts of a set of rigid bodies. In this work, we propose Match Policy, a simple but novel pipeline for solving high-precision pick and place tas
Recent work has shown diffusion models are an effective approach to learning the multimodal distributions arising from demonstration data in behavior cloning. However, a drawback of this approach is the need to learn a denoising function, which is significantly more complex than learning an explicit…
Many complex robotic manipulation tasks can be decomposed as a sequence of pick and place actions. Training a robotic agent to learn this sequence over many different starting conditions typically requires many iterations or demonstrations, especially in 3D environments. In this work, we propose Fou…
Humans can imagine goal states during planning and perform actions to match those goals. In this work, we propose IMAGINATION POLICY, a novel multi-task key-frame policy network for solving high-precision pick and place tasks. Instead of learning actions directly, IMAGINATION POLICY generates point…
While grasp detection is an important part of any robotic manipulation pipeline, reliable and accurate grasp detection in $\\mathrm{SE}(3)$ remains a research challenge. Many robotics applications in unstructured environments such as the home or warehouse would benefit a lot from better grasp perfor…
Although equivariant machine learning has proven effective at many tasks, success depends heavily on the assumption that the ground truth function is symmetric over the entire domain matching the symmetry in an equivariant neural network. A missing piece in the equivariant learning literature is the…
Given point cloud input, the problem of 6-DoF grasp pose detection is to identify a set of hand poses in SE(3) from which an object can be successfully grasped. This important problem has many practical applications. Here we propose a novel method and neural network model that enables better grasp s…
Incorporating inductive biases is a promising approach for tackling challenging robot learning domains with sample-efficient solutions. This paper identifies partially observable domains where symmetries can be a useful inductive bias for efficient learning. Specifically, by encoding the equivarianc…
In robotic manipulation, acquiring samples is extremely expensive because it often requires interacting with the real world. Traditional image-level data augmentation has shown the potential to improve sample efficiency in various machine learning tasks. However, image-level data augmentation is ins…
Extensive work has demonstrated that equivariant neural networks can significantly improve sample efficiency and generalization by enforcing an inductive bias in the network architecture. These applications typically assume that the domain symmetry is fully described by explicit transformations of t…
Equivariant neural networks enforce symmetry within the structure of their convolutional layers, resulting in a substantial improvement in sample efficiency when learning an equivariant or invariant function. Such models are applicable to robotic manipulation learning which can often be formulated a…
Transporter Net is a recently proposed framework for pick and place that is able to learn good manipulation policies from a very few expert demonstrations. A key reason why Transporter Net is so sample efficient is that the model incorporates rotational equivariance into the pick-conditioned place m…
Reinforcement learning in partially observable domains is challenging due to the lack of observable state information. Thankfully, learning offline in a simulator with such state information is often possible. In particular, we propose a method for partially observable reinforcement learning that us…
Recently, equivariant neural network models have been shown to improve sample efficiency for tasks in computer vision and reinforcement learning. This paper explores this idea in the context of on-robot policy learning in which a policy must be learned entirely on a physical robotic system without r…
In planar grasp detection, the goal is to learn a function from an image of a scene onto a set of feasible grasp poses in SE(2). In this paper, we recognize that the optimal grasp function is SE(2)-equivariant and can be modeled using an equivariant convolutional neural network. As a result, we are…
Recently, a variety of new equivariant neural network model architectures have been proposed that generalize better over rotational and reflectional symmetries than standard models. These models are relevant to robotics because many robotics problems can be expressed in a rotationally symmetric way.…
In the spatial action representation, the action space spans the space of target poses for robot motion commands, i.e. SE(2) or SE(3). This approach has been used to solve challenging robotic manipulation problems and shows promise. However, the method is often limited to a three dimensional action