Deep imitation learning is a promising approach that does not require hard-coded control rules in autonomous robot manipulation. The current applications of deep imitation learning to robot manipulation have been limited to reactive control based on the states at the current time step. However, future robots will also be required to solve tasks utilizing their memory obtained by experience in complicated environments (e.g., when the robot is asked to find a previously used object on a shelf). In such a situation, simple deep imitation learning may fail because of distractions caused by complicated environments. We propose that gaze prediction from sequential visual input enables the robot to perform a manipulation task that requires memory. The proposed algorithm uses a Transformer-based self-attention architecture for the gaze estimation based on sequential data to implement memory. The proposed method was evaluated with a real robot multi-object manipulation task that requires memory of the previous states.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Imitation learning by behavioral cloning is a prevalent method that has achieved some success in vision-based autonomous driving. The basic idea behind behavioral cloning is to have the neural network learn from observing a human expert's behavior. Typically, a convolutional neural network learns to predict the steering commands from raw driver-view images by mimicking the behaviors of human drivers. However, there are other cues, such as gaze behavior, available from human drivers that have yet to be exploited. Previous researches have shown that novice human learners can benefit from observi…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Vision-based autonomous driving through imitation learning mimics the behaviors of human drivers by training on pairs of data of raw driver-view images and actions. However, there are other cues, e.g. gaze behavior, available from human drivers that have yet to be exploited. Previous research has shown that novice human learners can benefit from observing experts' gaze patterns. We show here that deep neural networks can also benefit from this. We demonstrate different approaches to integrating gaze information into imitation networks. Our results show that the integration of gaze information …
Gaze-based dual resolution deep imitation learning for high-precision dexterous robot manipulation
Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（智能系统与信息学实验室，信息科学与技术研究生院，东京大学）
Gaze-Guided Task Decomposition for Imitation Learning in Robotic Manipulation
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology（信息科学与技术研究生院）；Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Informatics（智能系统与信息学实验室）
Optimizing behaviors for dexterous manipulation has been a longstanding challenge in robotics, with a variety of methods from model-based control to model-free reinforcement learning having been previously explored in literature. Perhaps one of the most powerful techniques to learn complex manipulation strategies is imitation learning. However, collecting and learning from demonstrations in dexterous manipulation is quite challenging. The complex, high-dimensional action-space involved with multi-finger control often leads to poor sample efficiency of learning-based methods. In this work, we p…
Generalizable object manipulation skills are critical for intelligent and multi-functional robots to work in real-world complex scenes. Despite the recent progress in reinforcement learning, it is still very challenging to learn a generalizable manipulation policy that can handle a category of geometrically diverse articulated objects. In this work, we tackle this category-level object manipulation policy learning problem via imitation learning in a task-agnostic manner, where we assume no handcrafted dense rewards but only a terminal reward. Given this novel and challenging generalizable poli…
Contrastive Imitation Learning for Language-guided Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation
AI Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）AI Thrust）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Honda Research Institute EU（本田欧洲研究院）；Honda R&D Co., Ltd. Innovative Research Excellence（本田研发株式会社创新卓越研究中心）
Shared control can help in teleoperated object manipulation by assisting with the execution of the user's intention. To this end, robust and prompt intention estimation is needed, which relies on behavioral observations. Here, an intention estimation framework is presented, which uses natural gaze and motion features to predict the current action and the target object. The system is trained and tested in a simulated environment with pick and place sequences produced in a relatively cluttered scene and with both hands, with possible hand-over to the other hand. Validation is conducted across di…
While significant progress has been made on understanding hand-object interactions in computer vision, it is still very challenging for robots to perform complex dexterous manipulation. In this paper, we propose a new platform and pipeline DexMV (Dexterous Manipulation from Videos) for imitation learning. We design a platform with: (i) a simulation system for complex dexterous manipulation tasks with a multi-finger robot hand and (ii) a computer vision system to record large-scale demonstrations of a human hand conducting the same tasks. In our novel pipeline, we extract 3D hand and object pos…
We propose to perform imitation learning for dexterous manipulation with multi-finger robot hand from human demonstrations, and transfer the policy to the real robot hand. We introduce a novel single-camera teleoperation system to collect the 3D demonstrations efficiently with only an iPad and a computer. One key contribution of our system is that we construct a customized robot hand for each user in the physical simulator, which is a manipulator resembling the same kinematics structure and shape of the operator's hand. This provides an intuitive interface and avoid unstable human-robot hand r…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）
We present a deep imitation learning framework for robotic bimanual manipulation in a continuous state-action space. A core challenge is to generalize the manipulation skills to objects in different locations. We hypothesize that modeling the relational information in the environment can significantly improve generalization. To achieve this, we propose to (i) decompose the multi-modal dynamics into elemental movement primitives, (ii) parameterize each primitive using a recurrent graph neural network to capture interactions, and (iii) integrate a high-level planner that composes primitives sequ…
Robot control for tactile feedback-based manipulation can be difficult due to the modeling of physical contacts, partial observability of the environment, and noise in perception and control. This work focuses on solving partial observability of contact-rich manipulation tasks as a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq)} Imitation Learning (IL) problem. The proposed Seq2Seq model produces a robot-environment interaction sequence to estimate the partially observable environment state variables. Then, the observed interaction sequence is transformed to a control sequence for the task itself. The propose…
AutoFocus-IL: VLM-based Saliency Maps for Data-Efficient Visual Imitation Learning without Extra Human Annotations
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside, USA（电气与计算机工程系，加州大学河滨分校）；Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, USA（汤姆斯·劳德计算机科学系，南加州大学）
This study proposes an imitation learning method based on force and position information. Force information is required for precise object manipulation but is difficult to obtain because the acting and reaction forces cannnot be separated. To separate the forces, we proposed to introduce bilateral control, in which the acting and reaction forces are divided using two robots. In the proposed method, two models of neural networks learn a task; to draw a line along a ruler. We verify the possibility that force information is essential to imitate the human skill of object manipulation.
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能）
We introduce VIOLA, an object-centric imitation learning approach to learning closed-loop visuomotor policies for robot manipulation. Our approach constructs object-centric representations based on general object proposals from a pre-trained vision model. VIOLA uses a transformer-based policy to reason over these representations and attend to the task-relevant visual factors for action prediction. Such object-based structural priors improve deep imitation learning algorithm's robustness against object variations and environmental perturbations. We quantitatively evaluate VIOLA in simulation an…
Khoury College of Computer Sciences（Khoury计算机科学学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
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 insufficient for an imitation learning agent to learn good manipulation policies in a reasonable amount of demonstrations. We propose Simulation-augmented Equivariant Imitation Learning (SEIL), a method that combines a novel data augmentation strategy of supplementing expert trajectories with simulated…
FUNCTO: Function-Centric One-Shot Imitation Learning for Tool Manipulation
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Smart Systems Institute, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学智能系统研究院）
In mobile manipulation (MM), robots can both navigate within and interact with their environment and are thus able to complete many more tasks than robots only capable of navigation or manipulation. In this work, we explore how to apply imitation learning (IL) to learn continuous visuo-motor policies for MM tasks. Much prior work has shown that IL can train visuo-motor policies for either manipulation or navigation domains, but few works have applied IL to the MM domain. Doing this is challenging for two reasons: on the data side, current interfaces make collecting high-quality human demonstra…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）
Learning from visual data opens the potential to accrue a large range of manipulation behaviors by leveraging human demonstrations without specifying each of them mathematically, but rather through natural task specification. In this paper, we present Learning by Watching (LbW), an algorithmic framework for policy learning through imitation from a single video specifying the task. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, since the human arms may not have the same morphology as robot arms, our framework learns unsupervised human to robot translation to overcome the morphology mismatc…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Embodied Intelligence；OpenAI；International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)（国际计算机科学研究所（ICSI））
Imitation learning is a powerful paradigm for robot skill acquisition. However, obtaining demonstrations suitable for learning a policy that maps from raw pixels to actions can be challenging. In this paper we describe how consumer-grade Virtual Reality headsets and hand tracking hardware can be used to naturally teleoperate robots to perform complex tasks. We also describe how imitation learning can learn deep neural network policies (mapping from pixels to actions) that can acquire the demonstrated skills. Our experiments showcase the effectiveness of our approach for learning visuomotor ski…
Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an initial to goal configuration, and outputs a sequence of actions that can reproduce the human demonstration, using only monocular images as input. To perform this task, the robot learns a pixel-level inverse dynamics model of rope manipulation directly from images in a self-supervised manner, using about 60K interactions with the rope collected autonomously by…
A Comparison of Imitation Learning Algorithms for Bimanual Manipulation
School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与增强智能学院）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人学院）
University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
We present a novel approach for robust manipulation of high-DOF deformable objects such as cloth. Our approach uses a random forest-based controller that maps the observed visual features of the cloth to an optimal control action of the manipulator. The topological structure of this random forest-based controller is determined automatically based on the training data consisting visual features and optimal control actions. This enables us to integrate the overall process of training data classification and controller optimization into an imitation learning (IL) approach. Our approach enables le…
Robotic Manipulation via Imitation Learning: Taxonomy, Evolution, Benchmark, and Challenges
Ecole Centrale de Lyon, CNRS, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, INSA Lyon, Université Lumière Lyon 2, LIRIS, UMR5205（Lyon中央理工学院、CNRS、Claude Bernard Lyon 1大学、INSA Lyon、Lyon大学、LIRIS、UMR5205）；Beihang University（北航大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法国大学研究院（IUF））
Human hand actions are quite complex, especially when they involve object manipulation, mainly due to the high dimensionality of the hand and the vast action space that entails. Imitating those actions with dexterous hand models involves different important and challenging steps: acquiring human hand information, retargeting it to a hand model, and learning a policy from acquired data. In this work, we capture the hand information by using a state-of-the-art hand pose estimator. We tackle the retargeting problem from the hand pose to a 29 DoF hand model by combining inverse kinematics and PSO …
RoboManipBaselines: A Unified Framework for Imitation Learning in Robotic Manipulation across Real and Simulation Environments
Artificial Intelligence Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本国家先进工业科学技术研究院人工智能研究中心）；CNRS-AIST JRL (Joint Robotics Laboratory), IRL（法国国家科学研究中心与日本AIST联合机器人实验室）；Institute for AI and Robotics, Future Robotics Organization, Waseda University（早稻田大学未来机器人组织人工智能与机器人研究所）；AI Robot Association (AIRoA)（人工智能机器人协会）
We introduce a simple new method for visual imitation learning, which allows a novel robot manipulation task to be learned from a single human demonstration, without requiring any prior knowledge of the object being interacted with. Our method models imitation learning as a state estimation problem, with the state defined as the end-effector's pose at the point where object interaction begins, as observed from the demonstration. By then modelling a manipulation task as a coarse, approach trajectory followed by a fine, interaction trajectory, this state estimator can be trained in a self-superv…
