From Temporal-Evolving to Spatial-Fixing: A Keypoints-Based Learning Paradigm for Visual Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

The current learning pipelines for robotics manipulation infer movement primitives sequentially along the temporal-evolving axis, which can result in an accumulation of prediction errors and subsequently cause the visual observations to fall out of the training distribution. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical behavior cloning approach which tries to dissociate standard behaviour cloning (BC) pipeline to two stages. The intuition of this approach is to eliminate accumu-lation errors using a fixed spatial representation. At first stage, a high-level planner will be employed to translate the initial observation of the scene into task-specific spatial waypoints. Then, a low-level robotic path planner takes over the task of guiding the robot by executing a set of pre-defined elementary movements or actions known as primitives, with the goal of reaching the previously predicted waypoints. Our hierarchical keypoints-based paradigm aims to simplify existing temporal-evolving approach to a more simple way: directly spatialize the whole sequential primitives as a set of 8D waypoints only from the very first observation. Plentiful experiments demon-strate that our paradigm can achieve comparable results with Reinforcement Learning (RL) and outperforms existing offline BC approaches, with only a single-shot inference from the initial observation. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/KevinRiou22/spatial-fixing-il