19 accepted papers
Imitation learning from human demonstrations is an effective means to teach robots manipulation skills. But data acquisition is a major bottleneck in applying this paradigm more broadly, due to the high costs and human efforts involved. There has been significant interest in imitation learning for b
We present DexUMI - a data collection and policy learning framework that uses the human hand as the natural interface to transfer dexterous manipulation skills to various robot hands. DexUMI incorporates hardware and software adaptations to minimize the embodiment gap between the human hand and vari…
Humanoid whole-body control requires adapting to diverse tasks such as navigation, loco-manipulation, and tabletop manipulation, each demanding a different mode of control. For example, navigation relies on root velocity or position tracking, while tabletop manipulation prioritizes upper-body joint
Diffusion models, praised for their success in generative tasks, are increasingly being applied to robotics, demonstrating exceptional performance in behavior cloning. However, their slow generation process stemming from iterative denoising steps poses a challenge for real-time applications in resou…
Large real-world robot datasets hold great potential for developing generalist robot policies, but scaling real-world data collection is time-consuming, costly, and resource-intensive. Simulation offers a promising solution, with recent advances in generative AI and synthetic data generation tools e…
"Manipulation of elastoplastic objects like dough often involves topological changes such as splitting and merging. The ability to accurately predict these topological changes that a specific action might incur is critical for planning interactions with elastoplastic objects. We present DoughNet, a…
We present Im2Flow2Act, a scalable learning framework that enables robots to acquire real-world manipulation skills without the need of real-world robot training data. The key idea behind Im2Flow2Act is to use object flow as the manipulation interface, bridging domain gaps between different embodime…
We present Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) -- a data collection and policy learning framework that allows direct skill transfer from in-the-wild human demonstrations to deployable robot policies. UMI employs hand-held grippers coupled with careful interface design to enable portable, low-cost…
This paper introduces Diffusion Policy, a new way of generating robot behavior by representing a robot's visuomotor policy as a conditional denoising diffusion process. We benchmark Diffusion Policy across 12 different tasks from 4 different robot manipulation benchmarks and find that it consistentl…
Humans manipulate various kinds of fluids in their everyday life: creating latte art, scooping floating objects from water, rolling an ice cream cone, etc. Using robots to augment or replace human labors in these daily settings remain as a challenging task due to the multifaceted complexities of flu…
We introduce RoboNinja, a learning-based cutting system for multi-material objects (i.e., soft objects with rigid cores such as avocados or mangos). In contrast to prior works using open-loop cutting actions to cut through single-material objects (e.g., slicing a cucumber), RoboNinja aims to remove…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of promising capabilities --- from step-by-step planning to commonsense reasoning --- that may provide utility for robots, but remain prone to confidently hallucinated predictions. In this work, we present KnowNo, a framework for measuring and aligni…
Human demonstration videos are a widely available data source for robot learning and an intuitive user interface for expressing desired behavior. However, directly extracting reusable robot manipulation skills from unstructured human videos is challenging due to the big embodiment difference and un…
We introduce BusyBoard, a toy-inspired robot learning environment that leverages a diverse set of articulated objects and inter-object functional relations to provide rich visual feedback for robot interactions. Based on this environment, we introduce a learning framework, BusyBot, which allows an a…
This paper introduces DextAIRity, an approach to manipulate deformable objects using active airflow. In contrast to conventional contact-based quasi-static manipulations, DextAIRity allows the system to apply dense forces on out-of-contact surfaces, expands the system's reach range, and provides saf…
We introduce the Universal Manipulation Policy Network (UMPNet) – a single image-based policy network that infers closed-loop action sequences for manipulating articulated objects. To infer a wide range of action trajectories, the policy supports 6DoF action representation and varying trajectory len
This paper aims to improve robots’ versatility and adaptability by allowing them to use a large variety of end- effector tools and quickly adapt to new tools. We propose AdaGrasp, a method to learn a single grasping policy that generalizes to novel grippers. By training on a large collection of grip…
3D scene representation for robot manipulation should capture three key object properties: permanency - objects that become occluded over time continue to exist; amodal completeness - objects have 3D occupancy, even if only partial observations are available; spatiotemporal continuity - the movement
We study the problem of learning physical object representations for robot manipulation. Understanding object physics is critical for successful object manipulation, but also challenging because physical object properties can rarely be inferred from the object's static appearance. In this paper, we…