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Wire-harnessing tasks pose great challenges to be automated by the robot due to the complex dynamics and unpredictable behavior of the deformable wire. Traditional methods, often reliant on dual-robot arms or tactile sensing, face limitations in adaptability, cost, and scalability. This paper introduces a novel single-robot wire-harnessing pipeline that leverages a robot's twisting motion to generate necessary wire tension for precise insertion into clamps, using only one robot arm with an integrated force/torque (F/T) sensor. Benefiting from this design, the single robot arm can efficiently apply tension for wire routing and insertion into clamps in a narrow space. Our approach is structured around four principal components: a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based on the Koopman operator for tension tracking and wire following, a motion planner for sequencing harnessing waypoints, a suite of insertion primitives for clamp engagement, and a fix-point switching mechanism for wire constraint updating. Evaluated on an industrial-level wire harnessing task, our method demonstrated superior performance and reliability over conventional approaches, efficiently handling both single and multiple wire configurations with high success rates.
Increasingly large imitation learning datasets are being collected with the goal of training foundation models for robotics. However, despite the fact that data selection has been of utmost importance in vision and natural language processing, little work in robotics has questioned what data such models should actually be trained on. In this work we investigate how to weigh different subsets or ``domains'' of robotics datasets for robot foundation model pre-training. Concrete, we use distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to maximize worst-case performance across all possible downstream domains. Our method, Re-Mix, addresses the wide range of challenges that arise when applying DRO to robotics datasets including variability in action spaces and dynamics across different datasets. Re-Mix employs early stopping, action normalization, and discretization to counteract these issues. Through extensive experimentation on the largest open-source robot manipulation dataset, the Open X-Embodiment dataset, we demonstrate that data curation can have an outsized impact on downstream performance. Specifically, domain weights learned by Re-Mix outperform uniform weights by 38\% on average and outperform human-selected weights by 32\% on datasets used to train existing generalist robot policies, specifically the RT-X models.
Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built , a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4o, solves only ~49% of our 'normal' tasks and ~30% of 'challenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark's difficulty and AppWorld's potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents. The project website is available at https://appworld.dev/.
Foundation models, e.g., large language models (LLMs), trained on internet-scale data possess zero-shot generalization capabilities that make them a promising technology towards detecting and mitigating out-of-distribution failure modes of robotic systems. Fully realizing this promise, however, poses two challenges: (i) mitigating the considerable computational expense of these models such that they may be applied online, and (ii) incorporating their judgement regarding potential anomalies into a safe control framework. In this work, we present a two-stage reasoning framework: First is a fast binary anomaly classifier that analyzes observations in an LLM embedding space, which may then trigger a slower fallback selection stage that utilizes the reasoning capabilities of generative LLMs. These stages correspond to branch points in a model predictive control strategy that maintains the joint feasibility of continuing along various fallback plans to account for the slow reasoner's latency as soon as an anomaly is detected, thus ensuring safety. We show that our fast anomaly classifier outperforms autoregressive reasoning with state-of-the-art GPT models, even when instantiated with relatively small language models. This enables our runtime monitor to improve the trustworthiness of dynamic robotic systems, such as quadrotors or autonomous vehicles, under resource and time constraints. Videos illustrating our approach in both simulation and real-world experiments are available on this project page: https://sites.google.com/view/aesop-llm.
Machine learning (ML) datasets, often perceived as neutral, inherently encapsulate abstract and disputed social constructs. Dataset curators frequently employ value-laden terms such as diversity, bias, and quality to characterize datasets. Despite their prevalence, these terms lack clear definitions and validation. Our research explores the implications of this issue by analyzing "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets. Drawing from social sciences, we apply principles from measurement theory to identify considerations and offer recommendations for conceptualizing, operationalizing, and evaluating diversity in datasets. Our findings have broader implications for ML research, advocating for a more nuanced and precise approach to handling value-laden properties in dataset construction.
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 policy. In this work, we propose Equivariant Diffusion Policy, a novel diffusion policy learning method that leverages domain symmetries to obtain better sample efficiency and generalization in the denoising function. We theoretically analyze the symmetry of full 6-DoF control and characterize when a diffusion model is -equivariant. We furthermore evaluate the method empirically on a set of 12 simulation tasks in MimicGen, and show that it obtains a success rate that is, on average, 21.9% higher than the baseline Diffusion Policy. We also evaluate the method on a real-world system to show that effective policies can be learned with relatively few training samples, whereas the baseline Diffusion Policy cannot.
We present PoliFormer (Policy Transformer), an RGB-only indoor navigation agent trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning at scale that generalizes to the real-world without adaptation despite being trained purely in simulation. PoliFormer uses a foundational vision transformer encoder with a causal transformer decoder enabling long-term memory and reasoning. It is trained for hundreds of millions of interactions across diverse environments, leveraging parallelized, multi-machine rollouts for efficient training with high throughput. PoliFormer is a masterful navigator, producing state-of-the-art results across two distinct embodiments, the LoCoBot and Stretch RE-1 robots, and four navigation benchmarks. It breaks through the plateaus of previous work, achieving an unprecedented 85.5% success rate in object goal navigation on the CHORES-S benchmark, a 28.5% absolute improvement. PoliFormer can also be trivially extended to a variety of downstream applications such as object tracking, multi-object navigation, and open-vocabulary navigation with no finetuning.
Quadrotors are among the most agile flying robots. Despite recent advances in learning-based control and computer vision, autonomous drones still rely on explicit state estimation. On the other hand, human pilots only rely on a first-person-view video stream from the drone onboard camera to push the platform to its limits and fly robustly in unseen environments. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first vision-based quadrotor system that autonomously navigates through a sequence of gates at high speeds while directly mapping pixels to control commands. Like professional drone-racing pilots, our system does not use explicit state estimation and leverages the same control commands humans use (collective thrust and body rates). We demonstrate agile flight at speeds up to 40km/h with accelerations up to 2g. This is achieved by training vision-based policies with reinforcement learning (RL). The training is facilitated using an asymmetric actor-critic with access to privileged information. To overcome the computational complexity during image-based RL training, we use the inner edges of the gates as a sensor abstraction. This simple yet robust, task-relevant representation can be simulated during training without rendering images. During deployment, a Swin-transformer-based gate detector is used. Our approach enables autonomous agile flight with standard, off-the-shelf hardware. Although our demonstration focuses on drone racing, we believe that our method has an impact beyond drone racing and can serve as a foundation for future research into real-world applications in structured environments.
One of the key arguments for building robots that have similar form factors to human beings is that we can leverage the massive human data for training. Yet, doing so has remained challenging in practice due to the complexities in humanoid perception and control, lingering physical gaps between humanoids and humans in morphologies and actuation, and lack of a data pipeline for humanoids to learn autonomous skills from egocentric vision. In this paper, we introduce a full-stack system for humanoids to learn motion and autonomous skills from human data. We first train a low-level policy in simulation via reinforcement learning using existing 40-hour human motion datasets. This policy transfers to the real world and allows humanoid robots to follow human body and hand motion in real time using only a RGB camera, i.e. shadowing. Through shadowing, human operators can teleoperate humanoids to collect whole-body data for learning different tasks in the real world. Using the data collected, we then perform supervised behavior cloning to train skill policies using egocentric vision, allowing humanoids to complete different tasks autonomously by imitating human skills. We demonstrate the system on our customized 33-DoF 180cm humanoid, autonomously completing tasks such as wearing a shoe to stand up and walk, unloading objects from warehouse racks, folding a sweatshirt, rearranging objects, typing, and greeting another robot with 60-100% success rates using up to 40 demonstrations. Project website: https://humanoid-ai.github.io/
Large policies pretrained on a combination of Internet-scale vision-language data and diverse robot demonstrations have the potential to change how we teach robots new skills: rather than training new behaviors from scratch, we can fine-tune such vision-language-action (VLA) models to obtain robust, generalizable policies for visuomotor control. Yet, widespread adoption of VLAs for robotics has been challenging as 1) existing VLAs are largely closed and inaccessible to the public, and 2) prior work fails to explore methods for efficiently fine-tuning VLAs for new tasks, a key component for adoption. Addressing these challenges, we introduce OpenVLA, a 7B-parameter open-source VLA trained on a diverse collection of 970k real-world robot demonstrations. OpenVLA builds on a Llama 2 language model combined with a visual encoder that fuses pretrained features from DINOv2 and SigLIP. As a product of the added data diversity and new model components, OpenVLA demonstrates strong results for generalist manipulation, outperforming closed models such as RT-2-X (55B) by 16.5% in absolute task success rate across 29 tasks and multiple robot embodiments, with 7x fewer parameters. We further show that we can effectively fine-tune OpenVLA for new settings, with especially strong generalization results in multi-task environments involving multiple objects and strong language grounding abilities, and outperform expressive from-scratch imitation learning methods such as Diffusion Policy by 20.4%. We also explore compute efficiency; as a separate contribution, we show that OpenVLA can be fine-tuned on consumer GPUs via modern low-rank adaptation methods and served efficiently via quantization without a hit to downstream success rate. Finally, we release model checkpoints, fine-tuning notebooks, and our PyTorch codebase with built-in support for training VLAs at scale on Open X-Embodiment datasets.