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May 25

Learned Perceptive Forward Dynamics Model for Safe and Platform-aware Robotic Navigation

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 27, 2025

Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models

Large-scale endeavors like and widespread community efforts such as Open-X-Embodiment have contributed to growing the scale of robot demonstration data. However, there is still an opportunity to improve the quality, quantity, and diversity of robot demonstration data. Although vision-language models have been shown to automatically generate demonstration data, their utility has been limited to environments with privileged state information, they require hand-designed skills, and are limited to interactions with few object instances. We propose Manipulate-Anything, a scalable automated generation method for real-world robotic manipulation. Unlike prior work, our method can operate in real-world environments without any privileged state information, hand-designed skills, and can manipulate any static object. We evaluate our method using two setups. First, Manipulate-Anything successfully generates trajectories for all 7 real-world and 14 simulation tasks, significantly outperforming existing methods like VoxPoser. Second, Manipulate-Anything's demonstrations can train more robust behavior cloning policies than training with human demonstrations, or from data generated by VoxPoser, Scaling-up, and Code-As-Policies. We believe Manipulate-Anything can be a scalable method for both generating data for robotics and solving novel tasks in a zero-shot setting. Project page: https://robot-ma.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

AnyTask: an Automated Task and Data Generation Framework for Advancing Sim-to-Real Policy Learning

Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high-quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort. We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible: 1) ViPR, a novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement; 2) ViPR-Eureka, a reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling; 3) ViPR-RL, a hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards. We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our project website is at https://anytask.rai-inst.com .

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 19, 2025

AnyPos: Automated Task-Agnostic Actions for Bimanual Manipulation

Learning generalizable manipulation policies hinges on data, yet robot manipulation data is scarce and often entangled with specific embodiments, making both cross-task and cross-platform transfer difficult. We tackle this challenge with task-agnostic embodiment modeling, which learns embodiment dynamics directly from task-agnostic action data and decouples them from high-level policy learning. By focusing on exploring all feasible actions of the embodiment to capture what is physically feasible and consistent, task-agnostic data takes the form of independent image-action pairs with the potential to cover the entire embodiment workspace, unlike task-specific data, which is sequential and tied to concrete tasks. This data-driven perspective bypasses the limitations of traditional dynamics-based modeling and enables scalable reuse of action data across different tasks. Building on this principle, we introduce AnyPos, a unified pipeline that integrates large-scale automated task-agnostic exploration with robust embodiment modeling through inverse dynamics learning. AnyPos generates diverse yet safe trajectories at scale, then learns embodiment representations by decoupling arm and end-effector motions and employing a direction-aware decoder to stabilize predictions under distribution shift, which can be seamlessly coupled with diverse high-level policy models. In comparison to the standard baseline, AnyPos achieves a 51% improvement in test accuracy. On manipulation tasks such as operating a microwave, toasting bread, folding clothes, watering plants, and scrubbing plates, AnyPos raises success rates by 30-40% over strong baselines. These results highlight data-driven embodiment modeling as a practical route to overcoming data scarcity and achieving generalization across tasks and platforms in visuomotor control. Project page: https://embodiedfoundation.github.io/vidar_anypos.

  • 8 authors
·
May 5

OK-Robot: What Really Matters in Integrating Open-Knowledge Models for Robotics

Remarkable progress has been made in recent years in the fields of vision, language, and robotics. We now have vision models capable of recognizing objects based on language queries, navigation systems that can effectively control mobile systems, and grasping models that can handle a wide range of objects. Despite these advancements, general-purpose applications of robotics still lag behind, even though they rely on these fundamental capabilities of recognition, navigation, and grasping. In this paper, we adopt a systems-first approach to develop a new Open Knowledge-based robotics framework called OK-Robot. By combining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for object detection, navigation primitives for movement, and grasping primitives for object manipulation, OK-Robot offers a integrated solution for pick-and-drop operations without requiring any training. To evaluate its performance, we run OK-Robot in 10 real-world home environments. The results demonstrate that OK-Robot achieves a 58.5% success rate in open-ended pick-and-drop tasks, representing a new state-of-the-art in Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) with nearly 1.8x the performance of prior work. On cleaner, uncluttered environments, OK-Robot's performance increases to 82%. However, the most important insight gained from OK-Robot is the critical role of nuanced details when combining Open Knowledge systems like VLMs with robotic modules. Videos of our experiments are available on our website: https://ok-robot.github.io

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024 2

GOAT: GO to Any Thing

In deployment scenarios such as homes and warehouses, mobile robots are expected to autonomously navigate for extended periods, seamlessly executing tasks articulated in terms that are intuitively understandable by human operators. We present GO To Any Thing (GOAT), a universal navigation system capable of tackling these requirements with three key features: a) Multimodal: it can tackle goals specified via category labels, target images, and language descriptions, b) Lifelong: it benefits from its past experience in the same environment, and c) Platform Agnostic: it can be quickly deployed on robots with different embodiments. GOAT is made possible through a modular system design and a continually augmented instance-aware semantic memory that keeps track of the appearance of objects from different viewpoints in addition to category-level semantics. This enables GOAT to distinguish between different instances of the same category to enable navigation to targets specified by images and language descriptions. In experimental comparisons spanning over 90 hours in 9 different homes consisting of 675 goals selected across 200+ different object instances, we find GOAT achieves an overall success rate of 83%, surpassing previous methods and ablations by 32% (absolute improvement). GOAT improves with experience in the environment, from a 60% success rate at the first goal to a 90% success after exploration. In addition, we demonstrate that GOAT can readily be applied to downstream tasks such as pick and place and social navigation.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 10, 2023 2

Any2Point: Empowering Any-modality Large Models for Efficient 3D Understanding

Large foundation models have recently emerged as a prominent focus of interest, attaining superior performance in widespread scenarios. Due to the scarcity of 3D data, many efforts have been made to adapt pre-trained transformers from vision to 3D domains. However, such 2D-to-3D approaches are still limited, due to the potential loss of spatial geometries and high computation cost. More importantly, their frameworks are mainly designed for 2D models, lacking a general any-to-3D paradigm. In this paper, we introduce Any2Point, a parameter-efficient method to empower any-modality large models (vision, language, audio) for 3D understanding. Given a frozen transformer from any source modality, we propose a 3D-to-any (1D or 2D) virtual projection strategy that correlates the input 3D points to the original 1D or 2D positions within the source modality. This mechanism enables us to assign each 3D token with a positional encoding paired with the pre-trained model, which avoids 3D geometry loss caused by the true projection and better motivates the transformer for 3D learning with 1D/2D positional priors. Then, within each transformer block, we insert an any-to-3D guided adapter module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The adapter incorporates prior spatial knowledge from the source modality to guide the local feature aggregation of 3D tokens, compelling the semantic adaption of any-modality transformers. We conduct extensive experiments to showcase the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Any2Point.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 11, 2024

Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

RoboAgent: Generalization and Efficiency in Robot Manipulation via Semantic Augmentations and Action Chunking

The grand aim of having a single robot that can manipulate arbitrary objects in diverse settings is at odds with the paucity of robotics datasets. Acquiring and growing such datasets is strenuous due to manual efforts, operational costs, and safety challenges. A path toward such an universal agent would require a structured framework capable of wide generalization but trained within a reasonable data budget. In this paper, we develop an efficient system (RoboAgent) for training universal agents capable of multi-task manipulation skills using (a) semantic augmentations that can rapidly multiply existing datasets and (b) action representations that can extract performant policies with small yet diverse multi-modal datasets without overfitting. In addition, reliable task conditioning and an expressive policy architecture enable our agent to exhibit a diverse repertoire of skills in novel situations specified using language commands. Using merely 7500 demonstrations, we are able to train a single agent capable of 12 unique skills, and demonstrate its generalization over 38 tasks spread across common daily activities in diverse kitchen scenes. On average, RoboAgent outperforms prior methods by over 40% in unseen situations while being more sample efficient and being amenable to capability improvements and extensions through fine-tuning. Videos at https://robopen.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4, 2023

Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis

Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data, rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts. Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like. We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next, we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics. Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage readers to view our ``living`` GitHub repository of resources, including papers reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for developing foundation models for robotics.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 14, 2023

HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation

HomeRobot (noun): An affordable compliant robot that navigates homes and manipulates a wide range of objects in order to complete everyday tasks. Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) is the problem of picking any object in any unseen environment, and placing it in a commanded location. This is a foundational challenge for robots to be useful assistants in human environments, because it involves tackling sub-problems from across robotics: perception, language understanding, navigation, and manipulation are all essential to OVMM. In addition, integration of the solutions to these sub-problems poses its own substantial challenges. To drive research in this area, we introduce the HomeRobot OVMM benchmark, where an agent navigates household environments to grasp novel objects and place them on target receptacles. HomeRobot has two components: a simulation component, which uses a large and diverse curated object set in new, high-quality multi-room home environments; and a real-world component, providing a software stack for the low-cost Hello Robot Stretch to encourage replication of real-world experiments across labs. We implement both reinforcement learning and heuristic (model-based) baselines and show evidence of sim-to-real transfer. Our baselines achieve a 20% success rate in the real world; our experiments identify ways future research work improve performance. See videos on our website: https://ovmm.github.io/.

  • 18 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

ROSGPT_Vision: Commanding Robots Using Only Language Models' Prompts

In this paper, we argue that the next generation of robots can be commanded using only Language Models' prompts. Every prompt interrogates separately a specific Robotic Modality via its Modality Language Model (MLM). A central Task Modality mediates the whole communication to execute the robotic mission via a Large Language Model (LLM). This paper gives this new robotic design pattern the name of: Prompting Robotic Modalities (PRM). Moreover, this paper applies this PRM design pattern in building a new robotic framework named ROSGPT_Vision. ROSGPT_Vision allows the execution of a robotic task using only two prompts: a Visual and an LLM prompt. The Visual Prompt extracts, in natural language, the visual semantic features related to the task under consideration (Visual Robotic Modality). Meanwhile, the LLM Prompt regulates the robotic reaction to the visual description (Task Modality). The framework automates all the mechanisms behind these two prompts. The framework enables the robot to address complex real-world scenarios by processing visual data, making informed decisions, and carrying out actions automatically. The framework comprises one generic vision module and two independent ROS nodes. As a test application, we used ROSGPT_Vision to develop CarMate, which monitors the driver's distraction on the roads and makes real-time vocal notifications to the driver. We showed how ROSGPT_Vision significantly reduced the development cost compared to traditional methods. We demonstrated how to improve the quality of the application by optimizing the prompting strategies, without delving into technical details. ROSGPT_Vision is shared with the community (link: https://github.com/bilel-bj/ROSGPT_Vision) to advance robotic research in this direction and to build more robotic frameworks that implement the PRM design pattern and enables controlling robots using only prompts.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is vital for robot localization. To date, the most performant VPR approaches are environment- and task-specific: while they exhibit strong performance in structured environments (predominantly urban driving), their performance degrades severely in unstructured environments, rendering most approaches brittle to robust real-world deployment. In this work, we develop a universal solution to VPR -- a technique that works across a broad range of structured and unstructured environments (urban, outdoors, indoors, aerial, underwater, and subterranean environments) without any re-training or fine-tuning. We demonstrate that general-purpose feature representations derived from off-the-shelf self-supervised models with no VPR-specific training are the right substrate upon which to build such a universal VPR solution. Combining these derived features with unsupervised feature aggregation enables our suite of methods, AnyLoc, to achieve up to 4X significantly higher performance than existing approaches. We further obtain a 6% improvement in performance by characterizing the semantic properties of these features, uncovering unique domains which encapsulate datasets from similar environments. Our detailed experiments and analysis lay a foundation for building VPR solutions that may be deployed anywhere, anytime, and across anyview. We encourage the readers to explore our project page and interactive demos: https://anyloc.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 1, 2023 1

Any to Full: Prompting Depth Anything for Depth Completion in One Stage

Accurate, dense depth estimation is crucial for robotic perception, but commodity sensors often yield sparse or incomplete measurements due to hardware limitations. Existing RGBD-fused depth completion methods learn priors jointly conditioned on training RGB distribution and specific depth patterns, limiting domain generalization and robustness to various depth patterns. Recent efforts leverage monocular depth estimation (MDE) models to introduce domain-general geometric priors, but current two-stage integration strategies relying on explicit relative-to-metric alignment incur additional computation and introduce structured distortions. To this end, we present Any2Full, a one-stage, domain-general, and pattern-agnostic framework that reformulates completion as a scale-prompting adaptation of a pretrained MDE model. To address varying depth sparsity levels and irregular spatial distributions, we design a Scale-Aware Prompt Encoder. It distills scale cues from sparse inputs into unified scale prompts, guiding the MDE model toward globally scale-consistent predictions while preserving its geometric priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Any2Full achieves superior robustness and efficiency. It outperforms OMNI-DC by 32.2\% in average AbsREL and delivers a 1.4times speedup over PriorDA with the same MDE backbone, establishing a new paradigm for universal depth completion. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/zhiyuandaily/Any2Full.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 5 2

HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit

Generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation poses significant challenges, requiring coordinated whole-body control and precise, contact-rich object manipulation. To address this, this paper introduces HOMIE, a semi-autonomous teleoperation system that combines a reinforcement learning policy for body control mapped to a pedal, an isomorphic exoskeleton arm for arm control, and motion-sensing gloves for hand control, forming a unified cockpit to freely operate humanoids and establish a data flywheel. The policy incorporates novel designs, including an upper-body pose curriculum, a height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization. These features enable the system to perform walking and squatting to specific heights while seamlessly adapting to arbitrary upper-body poses. The exoskeleton, by eliminating the reliance on inverse dynamics, delivers faster and more precise arm control. The gloves utilize Hall sensors instead of servos, allowing even compact devices to achieve 15 or more degrees of freedom and freely adapt to any model of dexterous hands. Compared to previous teleoperation systems, HOMIE stands out for its exceptional efficiency, completing tasks in half the time; its expanded working range, allowing users to freely reach high and low areas as well as interact with any objects; and its affordability, with a price of just $500. The system is fully open-source, demos and code can be found in our https://homietele.github.io/.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025

On Bringing Robots Home

Throughout history, we have successfully integrated various machines into our homes. Dishwashers, laundry machines, stand mixers, and robot vacuums are a few recent examples. However, these machines excel at performing only a single task effectively. The concept of a "generalist machine" in homes - a domestic assistant that can adapt and learn from our needs, all while remaining cost-effective - has long been a goal in robotics that has been steadily pursued for decades. In this work, we initiate a large-scale effort towards this goal by introducing Dobb-E, an affordable yet versatile general-purpose system for learning robotic manipulation within household settings. Dobb-E can learn a new task with only five minutes of a user showing it how to do it, thanks to a demonstration collection tool ("The Stick") we built out of cheap parts and iPhones. We use the Stick to collect 13 hours of data in 22 homes of New York City, and train Home Pretrained Representations (HPR). Then, in a novel home environment, with five minutes of demonstrations and fifteen minutes of adapting the HPR model, we show that Dobb-E can reliably solve the task on the Stretch, a mobile robot readily available on the market. Across roughly 30 days of experimentation in homes of New York City and surrounding areas, we test our system in 10 homes, with a total of 109 tasks in different environments, and finally achieve a success rate of 81%. Beyond success percentages, our experiments reveal a plethora of unique challenges absent or ignored in lab robotics. These range from effects of strong shadows, to variable demonstration quality by non-expert users. With the hope of accelerating research on home robots, and eventually seeing robot butlers in every home, we open-source Dobb-E software stack and models, our data, and our hardware designs at https://dobb-e.com

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 27, 2023 1

π_{0.7}: a Steerable Generalist Robotic Foundation Model with Emergent Capabilities

We present a new robotic foundation model, called π_{0.7}, that can enable strong out-of-the-box performance in a wide range of scenarios. π_{0.7} can follow diverse language instructions in unseen environments, including multi-stage tasks with various kitchen appliances, provide zero-shot cross-embodiment generalization, for example enabling a robot to fold laundry without seeing the task before, and perform challenging tasks such as operating an espresso machine out of the box at a level of performance that matches much more specialized RL-finetuned models. The main idea behind π_{0.7} is to use diverse context conditioning during training. This conditioning information, contained in the prompt, makes it possible to steer the model precisely to perform many tasks with different strategies. It is conditioned not just on a language command that describes what it should do, but on additional multimodal information that also describes the manner or strategy in which it should do it, including metadata about task performance and subgoal images. This enables π_{0.7} to use very diverse data, including demonstrations, potentially suboptimal (autonomous) data including failures, and data from non-robot sources. Our experiments evaluate π_{0.7} across numerous tasks with multiple robot platforms, on tasks that require speed and dexterity, language following, and compositional task generalization.

  • 88 authors
·
Apr 23

A Hybrid Cable-Driven Robot for Non-Destructive Leafy Plant Monitoring and Mass Estimation using Structure from Motion

We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is important to both farmers and researchers to detect anomalies and develop predictive models for plant growth. The availability of high-quality, off-the-shelf structure-from-motion (SfM) and photogrammetry packages has enabled a vibrant community of roboticists to apply computer vision for non-destructive plant monitoring. While existing approaches tend to focus on either high-throughput (e.g. satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), vehicle-mounted, conveyor-belt imagery) or high-accuracy/robustness to occlusions (e.g. turn-table scanner or robot arm), we propose a middle-ground that achieves high accuracy with a medium-throughput, highly automated robot. Our design pairs the workspace scalability of a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) with the dexterity of a 4 degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot arm to autonomously image many plants from a variety of viewpoints. We describe our robot design and demonstrate it experimentally by collecting daily photographs of 54 plants from 64 viewpoints each. We show that our approach can produce scientifically useful measurements, operate fully autonomously after initial calibration, and produce better reconstructions and plant property estimates than those of over-canopy methods (e.g. UAV). As example applications, we show that our system can successfully estimate plant mass with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.586g and, when used to perform hypothesis testing on the relationship between mass and age, produces p-values comparable to ground-truth data (p=0.0020 and p=0.0016, respectively).

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 18, 2022

LEO-RobotAgent: A General-purpose Robotic Agent for Language-driven Embodied Operator

We propose LEO-RobotAgent, a general-purpose language-driven intelligent agent framework for robots. Under this framework, LLMs can operate different types of robots to complete unpredictable complex tasks across various scenarios. This framework features strong generalization, robustness, and efficiency. The application-level system built around it can fully enhance bidirectional human-robot intent understanding and lower the threshold for human-robot interaction. Regarding robot task planning, the vast majority of existing studies focus on the application of large models in single-task scenarios and for single robot types. These algorithms often have complex structures and lack generalizability. Thus, the proposed LEO-RobotAgent framework is designed with a streamlined structure as much as possible, enabling large models to independently think, plan, and act within this clear framework. We provide a modular and easily registrable toolset, allowing large models to flexibly call various tools to meet different requirements. Meanwhile, the framework incorporates a human-robot interaction mechanism, enabling the algorithm to collaborate with humans like a partner. Experiments have verified that this framework can be easily adapted to mainstream robot platforms including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robotic arms, and wheeled robot, and efficiently execute a variety of carefully designed tasks with different complexity levels. Our code is available at https://github.com/LegendLeoChen/LEO-RobotAgent.

ZhejiangUniversity Zhejiang University
·
Dec 11, 2025 3

Articulate-Anything: Automatic Modeling of Articulated Objects via a Vision-Language Foundation Model

Interactive 3D simulated objects are crucial in AR/VR, animations, and robotics, driving immersive experiences and advanced automation. However, creating these articulated objects requires extensive human effort and expertise, limiting their broader applications. To overcome this challenge, we present Articulate-Anything, a system that automates the articulation of diverse, complex objects from many input modalities, including text, images, and videos. Articulate-Anything leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to generate code that can be compiled into an interactable digital twin for use in standard 3D simulators. Our system exploits existing 3D asset datasets via a mesh retrieval mechanism, along with an actor-critic system that iteratively proposes, evaluates, and refines solutions for articulating the objects, self-correcting errors to achieve a robust outcome. Qualitative evaluations demonstrate Articulate-Anything's capability to articulate complex and even ambiguous object affordances by leveraging rich grounded inputs. In extensive quantitative experiments on the standard PartNet-Mobility dataset, Articulate-Anything substantially outperforms prior work, increasing the success rate from 8.7-11.6% to 75% and setting a new bar for state-of-the-art performance. We further showcase the utility of our system by generating 3D assets from in-the-wild video inputs, which are then used to train robotic policies for fine-grained manipulation tasks in simulation that go beyond basic pick and place. These policies are then transferred to a real robotic system.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

AnyControl: Create Your Artwork with Versatile Control on Text-to-Image Generation

The field of text-to-image (T2I) generation has made significant progress in recent years, largely driven by advancements in diffusion models. Linguistic control enables effective content creation, but struggles with fine-grained control over image generation. This challenge has been explored, to a great extent, by incorporating additional user-supplied spatial conditions, such as depth maps and edge maps, into pre-trained T2I models through extra encoding. However, multi-control image synthesis still faces several challenges. Specifically, current approaches are limited in handling free combinations of diverse input control signals, overlook the complex relationships among multiple spatial conditions, and often fail to maintain semantic alignment with provided textual prompts. This can lead to suboptimal user experiences. To address these challenges, we propose AnyControl, a multi-control image synthesis framework that supports arbitrary combinations of diverse control signals. AnyControl develops a novel Multi-Control Encoder that extracts a unified multi-modal embedding to guide the generation process. This approach enables a holistic understanding of user inputs, and produces high-quality, faithful results under versatile control signals, as demonstrated by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available in https://any-control.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World

Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.

  • 118 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025 2

Towards Generalist Robots: A Promising Paradigm via Generative Simulation

This document serves as a position paper that outlines the authors' vision for a potential pathway towards generalist robots. The purpose of this document is to share the excitement of the authors with the community and highlight a promising research direction in robotics and AI. The authors believe the proposed paradigm is a feasible path towards accomplishing the long-standing goal of robotics research: deploying robots, or embodied AI agents more broadly, in various non-factory real-world settings to perform diverse tasks. This document presents a specific idea for mining knowledge in the latest large-scale foundation models for robotics research. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce low-level policies and actions, it advocates for a fully automated generative pipeline (termed as generative simulation), which uses these models to generate diversified tasks, scenes and training supervisions at scale, thereby scaling up low-level skill learning and ultimately leading to a foundation model for robotics that empowers generalist robots. The authors are actively pursuing this direction, but in the meantime, they recognize that the ambitious goal of building generalist robots with large-scale policy training demands significant resources such as computing power and hardware, and research groups in academia alone may face severe resource constraints in implementing the entire vision. Therefore, the authors believe sharing their thoughts at this early stage could foster discussions, attract interest towards the proposed pathway and related topics from industry groups, and potentially spur significant technical advancements in the field.

  • 6 authors
·
May 16, 2023

AnyI2V: Animating Any Conditional Image with Motion Control

Recent advancements in video generation, particularly in diffusion models, have driven notable progress in text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) synthesis. However, challenges remain in effectively integrating dynamic motion signals and flexible spatial constraints. Existing T2V methods typically rely on text prompts, which inherently lack precise control over the spatial layout of generated content. In contrast, I2V methods are limited by their dependence on real images, which restricts the editability of the synthesized content. Although some methods incorporate ControlNet to introduce image-based conditioning, they often lack explicit motion control and require computationally expensive training. To address these limitations, we propose AnyI2V, a training-free framework that animates any conditional images with user-defined motion trajectories. AnyI2V supports a broader range of modalities as the conditional image, including data types such as meshes and point clouds that are not supported by ControlNet, enabling more flexible and versatile video generation. Additionally, it supports mixed conditional inputs and enables style transfer and editing via LoRA and text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AnyI2V achieves superior performance and provides a new perspective in spatial- and motion-controlled video generation. Code is available at https://henghuiding.com/AnyI2V/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025 1

Being-0: A Humanoid Robotic Agent with Vision-Language Models and Modular Skills

Building autonomous robotic agents capable of achieving human-level performance in real-world embodied tasks is an ultimate goal in humanoid robot research. Recent advances have made significant progress in high-level cognition with Foundation Models (FMs) and low-level skill development for humanoid robots. However, directly combining these components often results in poor robustness and efficiency due to compounding errors in long-horizon tasks and the varied latency of different modules. We introduce Being-0, a hierarchical agent framework that integrates an FM with a modular skill library. The FM handles high-level cognitive tasks such as instruction understanding, task planning, and reasoning, while the skill library provides stable locomotion and dexterous manipulation for low-level control. To bridge the gap between these levels, we propose a novel Connector module, powered by a lightweight vision-language model (VLM). The Connector enhances the FM's embodied capabilities by translating language-based plans into actionable skill commands and dynamically coordinating locomotion and manipulation to improve task success. With all components, except the FM, deployable on low-cost onboard computation devices, Being-0 achieves efficient, real-time performance on a full-sized humanoid robot equipped with dexterous hands and active vision. Extensive experiments in large indoor environments demonstrate Being-0's effectiveness in solving complex, long-horizon tasks that require challenging navigation and manipulation subtasks. For further details and videos, visit https://beingbeyond.github.io/being-0.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 16, 2025 2

SAM 2 in Robotic Surgery: An Empirical Evaluation for Robustness and Generalization in Surgical Video Segmentation

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2 has demonstrated remarkable foundational competence in semantic segmentation, with its memory mechanism and mask decoder further addressing challenges in video tracking and object occlusion, thereby achieving superior results in interactive segmentation for both images and videos. Building upon our previous empirical studies, we further explore the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM 2 in robot-assisted surgery based on prompts, alongside its robustness against real-world corruption. For static images, we employ two forms of prompts: 1-point and bounding box, while for video sequences, the 1-point prompt is applied to the initial frame. Through extensive experimentation on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 2, when utilizing bounding box prompts, outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in comparative evaluations. The results with point prompts also exhibit a substantial enhancement over SAM's capabilities, nearing or even surpassing existing unprompted SOTA methodologies. Besides, SAM 2 demonstrates improved inference speed and less performance degradation against various image corruption. Although slightly unsatisfactory results remain in specific edges or regions, SAM 2's robust adaptability to 1-point prompts underscores its potential for downstream surgical tasks with limited prompt requirements.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 8, 2024

The One RING: a Robotic Indoor Navigation Generalist

Modern robots vary significantly in shape, size, and sensor configurations used to perceive and interact with their environments. However, most navigation policies are embodiment-specific--a policy trained on one robot typically fails to generalize to another, even with minor changes in body size or camera viewpoint. As custom hardware becomes increasingly common, there is a growing need for a single policy that generalizes across embodiments, eliminating the need to retrain for each specific robot. In this paper, we introduce RING (Robotic Indoor Navigation Generalist), an embodiment-agnostic policy that turns any mobile robot into an effective indoor semantic navigator. Trained entirely in simulation, RING leverages large-scale randomization over robot embodiments to enable robust generalization to many real-world platforms. To support this, we augment the AI2-THOR simulator to instantiate robots with controllable configurations, varying in body size, rotation pivot point, and camera parameters. On the visual object-goal navigation task, RING achieves strong cross-embodiment (XE) generalization--72.1% average success rate across five simulated embodiments (a 16.7% absolute improvement on the Chores-S benchmark) and 78.9% across four real-world platforms, including Stretch RE-1, LoCoBot, and Unitree Go1--matching or even surpassing embodiment-specific policies. We further deploy RING on the RB-Y1 wheeled humanoid in a real-world kitchen environment, showcasing its out-of-the-box potential for mobile manipulation platforms. (Project website: https://one-ring-policy.allen.ai)

  • 14 authors
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Dec 18, 2024

Open-H-Embodiment: A Large-Scale Dataset for Enabling Foundation Models in Medical Robotics

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

  • 215 authors
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Apr 28

BINDER: Instantly Adaptive Mobile Manipulation with Open-Vocabulary Commands

Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) requires robots to follow language instructions, navigate, and manipulate while updating their world representation under dynamic environmental changes. However, most prior approaches update their world representation only at discrete update points such as navigation targets, waypoints, or the end of an action step, leaving robots blind between updates and causing cascading failures: overlooked objects, late error detection, and delayed replanning. To address this limitation, we propose BINDER (Bridging INstant and DEliberative Reasoning), a dual process framework that decouples strategic planning from continuous environment monitoring. Specifically, BINDER integrates a Deliberative Response Module (DRM, a multimodal LLM for task planning) with an Instant Response Module (IRM, a VideoLLM for continuous monitoring). The two modules play complementary roles: the DRM performs strategic planning with structured 3D scene updates and guides what the IRM attends to, while the IRM analyzes video streams to update memory, correct ongoing actions, and trigger replanning when necessary. Through this bidirectional coordination, the modules address the trade off between maintaining awareness and avoiding costly updates, enabling robust adaptation under dynamic conditions. Evaluated in three real world environments with dynamic object placement, BINDER achieves substantially higher success and efficiency than SoTA baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness for real world deployment.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025

AnyMo: Geometry-Aware Setup-Agnostic Modeling of Human Motion in the Wild

As wearable and mobile devices become increasingly embedded in daily life, they offer a practical way to continuously sense human motion in the wild. But inertial signals are highly dependent on the sensing setup, including body location, mounting position, sensor orientation, device hardware, and sampling protocol. This setup dependence makes it difficult to learn motion representations that transfer across devices and datasets, and limits the broader use of wearable IMUs beyond closed-set recognition. We introduce AnyMo, a geometry-aware framework for setup-agnostic human motion modeling. AnyMo uses physics-grounded IMU simulation over dense body-surface placements to generate diverse and plausible synthetic signals, pre-trains a graph encoder from paired synthetic placement views and masked partial observations, tokenizes multi-position IMU into full-body motion tokens, and aligns these tokens with an LLM for motion-language understanding. We evaluate AnyMo on three complementary tasks: zero-shot activity recognition across 14 unseen downstream datasets, cross-modal retrieval, and wearable IMU motion captioning, where it improves average Accuracy/F1/R@2 by 11.7\%/11.6\%/22.6\% on HAR, increases zero-shot IMU-to-text and text-to-IMU retrieval MRR by 15.9\% and 28.6\%, respectively, and improves zero-shot captioning BERT-F1 by 18.8\%. These results support AnyMo as a generalist model for wearable motion understanding in the wild. Project page: https://baiyuchen.com/project/AnyMo.

Transforming Monolithic Foundation Models into Embodied Multi-Agent Architectures for Human-Robot Collaboration

Foundation models have become central to unifying perception and planning in robotics, yet real-world deployment exposes a mismatch between their monolithic assumption that a single model can handle all cognitive functions and the distributed, dynamic nature of practical service workflows. Vision-language models offer strong semantic understanding but lack embodiment-aware action capabilities while relying on hand-crafted skills. Vision-Language-Action policies enable reactive manipulation but remain brittle across embodiments, weak in geometric grounding, and devoid of proactive collaboration mechanisms. These limitations indicate that scaling a single model alone cannot deliver reliable autonomy for service robots operating in human-populated settings. To address this gap, we present InteractGen, an LLM-powered multi-agent framework that decomposes robot intelligence into specialized agents for continuous perception, dependency-aware planning, decision and verification, failure reflection, and dynamic human delegation, treating foundation models as regulated components within a closed-loop collective. Deployed on a heterogeneous robot team and evaluated in a three-month open-use study, InteractGen improves task success, adaptability, and human-robot collaboration, providing evidence that multi-agent orchestration offers a more feasible path toward socially grounded service autonomy than further scaling standalone models.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments

Robot models, particularly those trained with large amounts of data, have recently shown a plethora of real-world manipulation and navigation capabilities. Several independent efforts have shown that given sufficient training data in an environment, robot policies can generalize to demonstrated variations in that environment. However, needing to finetune robot models to every new environment stands in stark contrast to models in language or vision that can be deployed zero-shot for open-world problems. In this work, we present Robot Utility Models (RUMs), a framework for training and deploying zero-shot robot policies that can directly generalize to new environments without any finetuning. To create RUMs efficiently, we develop new tools to quickly collect data for mobile manipulation tasks, integrate such data into a policy with multi-modal imitation learning, and deploy policies on-device on Hello Robot Stretch, a cheap commodity robot, with an external mLLM verifier for retrying. We train five such utility models for opening cabinet doors, opening drawers, picking up napkins, picking up paper bags, and reorienting fallen objects. Our system, on average, achieves 90% success rate in unseen, novel environments interacting with unseen objects. Moreover, the utility models can also succeed in different robot and camera set-ups with no further data, training, or fine-tuning. Primary among our lessons are the importance of training data over training algorithm and policy class, guidance about data scaling, necessity for diverse yet high-quality demonstrations, and a recipe for robot introspection and retrying to improve performance on individual environments. Our code, data, models, hardware designs, as well as our experiment and deployment videos are open sourced and can be found on our project website: https://robotutilitymodels.com

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024 2

OR-Agent: Bridging Evolutionary Search and Structured Research for Automated Algorithm Discovery

Automating scientific discovery in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of programs; it demands structured hypothesis management, environment interaction, and principled reflection. We present OR-Agent, a configurable multi-agent research framework designed for automated exploration in rich experimental environments. OR-Agent organizes research as a structured tree-based workflow that explicitly models branching hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking, enabling controlled management of research trajectories beyond simple mutation-crossover loops. At its core, we introduce an evolutionary-systematic ideation mechanism that unifies evolutionary selection of research starting points, comprehensive research plan generation, and coordinated exploration within a research tree. We introduce a hierarchical optimization-inspired reflection system in which short-term reflections act as verbal gradients, long-term reflections as verbal momentum, and memory compression as semantic weight decay, collectively forming a principled mechanism for governing research dynamics. We conduct extensive experiments across classical combinatorial optimization benchmarks as well as simulation-based cooperative driving scenarios. Results demonstrate that OR-Agent outperforms strong evolutionary baselines while providing a general, extensible, and inspectable framework for AI-assisted scientific discovery. All code and experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/OR-Agent.

  • 4 authors
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Feb 14

Hierarchical and Modular Network on Non-prehensile Manipulation in General Environments

For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile manipulation cannot yet generalize across environments with diverse geometries. The main challenge lies in adapting to varying environmental constraints: within a cabinet, the robot must avoid walls and ceilings; to lift objects to the top of a step, the robot must account for the step's pose and extent. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive success in non-prehensile manipulation, accounting for such variability presents a challenge for the generalist policy, as it must learn diverse strategies for each new combination of constraints. To address this, we propose a modular and reconfigurable architecture that adaptively reconfigures network modules based on task requirements. To capture the geometric variability in environments, we extend the contact-based object representation (CORN) to environment geometries, and propose a procedural algorithm for generating diverse environments to train our agent. Taken together, the resulting policy can zero-shot transfer to novel real-world environments and objects despite training entirely within a simulator. We additionally release a simulation-based benchmark featuring nine digital twins of real-world scenes with 353 objects to facilitate non-prehensile manipulation research in realistic domains.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025

χ_{0}: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies

High-reliability long-horizon robotic manipulation has traditionally relied on large-scale data and compute to understand complex real-world dynamics. However, we identify that the primary bottleneck to real-world robustness is not resource scale alone, but the distributional shift among the human demonstration distribution, the inductive bias learned by the policy, and the test-time execution distribution -- a systematic inconsistency that causes compounding errors in multi-stage tasks. To mitigate these inconsistencies, we propose χ_{0}, a resource-efficient framework with effective modules designated to achieve production-level robustness in robotic manipulation. Our approach builds off three technical pillars: (i) Model Arithmetic, a weight-space merging strategy that efficiently soaks up diverse distributions of different demonstrations, varying from object appearance to state variations; (ii) Stage Advantage, a stage-aware advantage estimator that provides stable, dense progress signals, overcoming the numerical instability of prior non-stage approaches; and (iii) Train-Deploy Alignment, which bridges the distribution gap via spatio-temporal augmentation, heuristic DAgger corrections, and temporal chunk-wise smoothing. χ_{0} enables two sets of dual-arm robots to collaboratively orchestrate long-horizon garment manipulation, spanning tasks from flattening, folding, to hanging different clothes. Our method exhibits high-reliability autonomy; we are able to run the system from arbitrary initial state for consecutive 24 hours non-stop. Experiments validate that χ_{0} surpasses the state-of-the-art π_{0.5} in success rate by nearly 250%, with only 20-hour data and 8 A100 GPUs. Code, data and models will be released to facilitate the community.

FrankenBot: Brain-Morphic Modular Orchestration for Robotic Manipulation with Vision-Language Models

Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all functions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), pretrained on massive multimodal data, have acquired rich world knowledge, exhibiting exceptional scene understanding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods typically focus on realizing only a single function or a subset of functions within the robotic brain, without integrating them into a unified cognitive architecture. Inspired by a divide-and-conquer strategy and the architecture of the human brain, we propose FrankenBot, a VLM-driven, brain-morphic robotic manipulation framework that achieves both comprehensive functionality and high operational efficiency. Our framework includes a suite of components, decoupling a part of key functions from frequent VLM calls, striking an optimal balance between functional completeness and system efficiency. Specifically, we map task planning, policy generation, memory management, and low-level interfacing to the cortex, cerebellum, temporal lobe-hippocampus complex, and brainstem, respectively, and design efficient coordination mechanisms for the modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments, demonstrating that our method offers significant advantages in anomaly detection and handling, long-term memory, operational efficiency, and stability -- all without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24, 2025

M2T2: Multi-Task Masked Transformer for Object-centric Pick and Place

With the advent of large language models and large-scale robotic datasets, there has been tremendous progress in high-level decision-making for object manipulation. These generic models are able to interpret complex tasks using language commands, but they often have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution objects due to the inability of low-level action primitives. In contrast, existing task-specific models excel in low-level manipulation of unknown objects, but only work for a single type of action. To bridge this gap, we present M2T2, a single model that supplies different types of low-level actions that work robustly on arbitrary objects in cluttered scenes. M2T2 is a transformer model which reasons about contact points and predicts valid gripper poses for different action modes given a raw point cloud of the scene. Trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with 128K scenes, M2T2 achieves zero-shot sim2real transfer on the real robot, outperforming the baseline system with state-of-the-art task-specific models by about 19% in overall performance and 37.5% in challenging scenes where the object needs to be re-oriented for collision-free placement. M2T2 also achieves state-of-the-art results on a subset of language conditioned tasks in RLBench. Videos of robot experiments on unseen objects in both real world and simulation are available on our project website https://m2-t2.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 1, 2023

Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Model

Foundation models have made significant strides in various applications, including text-to-image generation, panoptic segmentation, and natural language processing. This paper presents Instruct2Act, a framework that utilizes Large Language Models to map multi-modal instructions to sequential actions for robotic manipulation tasks. Specifically, Instruct2Act employs the LLM model to generate Python programs that constitute a comprehensive perception, planning, and action loop for robotic tasks. In the perception section, pre-defined APIs are used to access multiple foundation models where the Segment Anything Model (SAM) accurately locates candidate objects, and CLIP classifies them. In this way, the framework leverages the expertise of foundation models and robotic abilities to convert complex high-level instructions into precise policy codes. Our approach is adjustable and flexible in accommodating various instruction modalities and input types and catering to specific task demands. We validated the practicality and efficiency of our approach by assessing it on robotic tasks in different scenarios within tabletop manipulation domains. Furthermore, our zero-shot method outperformed many state-of-the-art learning-based policies in several tasks. The code for our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Instruct2Act, serving as a robust benchmark for high-level robotic instruction tasks with assorted modality inputs.

  • 6 authors
·
May 18, 2023

QUAR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Quadruped Robots

The important manifestation of robot intelligence is the ability to naturally interact and autonomously make decisions. Traditional approaches to robot control often compartmentalize perception, planning, and decision-making, simplifying system design but limiting the synergy between different information streams. This compartmentalization poses challenges in achieving seamless autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and action execution. To address these limitations, a novel paradigm, named Vision-Language-Action tasks for QUAdruped Robots (QUAR-VLA), has been introduced in this paper. This approach tightly integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions, effectively merging perception, planning, and decision-making. The central idea is to elevate the overall intelligence of the robot. Within this framework, a notable challenge lies in aligning fine-grained instructions with visual perception information. This emphasizes the complexity involved in ensuring that the robot accurately interprets and acts upon detailed instructions in harmony with its visual observations. Consequently, we propose QUAdruped Robotic Transformer (QUART), a family of VLA models to integrate visual information and instructions from diverse modalities as input and generates executable actions for real-world robots and present QUAdruped Robot Dataset (QUARD), a large-scale multi-task dataset including navigation, complex terrain locomotion, and whole-body manipulation tasks for training QUART models. Our extensive evaluation (4000 evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables QUART to obtain a range of emergent capabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 22, 2023

Robot-Powered Data Flywheels: Deploying Robots in the Wild for Continual Data Collection and Foundation Model Adaptation

Foundation models (FM) have unlocked powerful zero-shot capabilities in vision and language, yet their reliance on internet pretraining data leaves them brittle in unstructured, real-world settings. The messy, real-world data encountered during deployment (e.g. occluded or multilingual text) remains massively underrepresented in existing corpora. Robots, as embodied agents, are uniquely positioned to close this gap: they can act in physical environments to collect large-scale, real-world data that enriches FM training with precisely the examples current models lack. We introduce the Robot-Powered Data Flywheel, a framework that transforms robots from FM consumers into data generators. By deploying robots equipped with FMs in the wild, we enable a virtuous cycle: robots perform useful tasks while collecting real-world data that improves both domain-specific adaptation and domain-adjacent generalization. We instantiate this framework with Scanford, a mobile manipulator deployed in the East Asia Library for 2 weeks. Scanford autonomously scans shelves, identifies books using a vision-language model (VLM), and leverages the library catalog to label images without human annotation. This deployment both aids librarians and produces a dataset to finetune the underlying VLM, improving performance on the domain-specific in-the-wild library setting and on domain-adjacent multilingual OCR benchmarks. Using data collected from 2103 shelves, Scanford improves VLM performance on book identification from 32.0% to 71.8% and boosts domain-adjacent multilingual OCR from 24.8% to 46.6% (English) and 30.8% to 38.0% (Chinese), while saving an ~18.7 hrs of human time. These results highlight how robot-powered data flywheels can both reduce human effort in real deployments and unlock new pathways for continually adapting FMs to the messiness of reality. More details are at: https://scanford-robot.github.io

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents

We present Magma, a foundation model that serves multimodal AI agentic tasks in both the digital and physical worlds. Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that it not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial-temporal intelligence) and complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. To endow the agentic capabilities, Magma is pretrained on large amounts of heterogeneous datasets spanning from images, videos to robotics data, where the actionable visual objects (e.g., clickable buttons in GUI) in images are labeled by Set-of-Mark (SoM) for action grounding, and the object movements (e.g., the trace of human hands or robotic arms) in videos are labeled by Trace-of-Mark (ToM) for action planning. Extensive experiments show that SoM and ToM reach great synergy and facilitate the acquisition of spatial-temporal intelligence for our Magma model, which is fundamental to a wide range of tasks as shown in Fig.1. In particular, Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are specifically tailored to these tasks. On image and video-related multimodal tasks, Magma also compares favorably to popular large multimodal models that are trained on much larger datasets. We make our model and code public for reproducibility at https://microsoft.github.io/Magma.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025 6

Open-World Object Manipulation using Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

For robots to follow instructions from people, they must be able to connect the rich semantic information in human vocabulary, e.g. "can you get me the pink stuffed whale?" to their sensory observations and actions. This brings up a notably difficult challenge for robots: while robot learning approaches allow robots to learn many different behaviors from first-hand experience, it is impractical for robots to have first-hand experiences that span all of this semantic information. We would like a robot's policy to be able to perceive and pick up the pink stuffed whale, even if it has never seen any data interacting with a stuffed whale before. Fortunately, static data on the internet has vast semantic information, and this information is captured in pre-trained vision-language models. In this paper, we study whether we can interface robot policies with these pre-trained models, with the aim of allowing robots to complete instructions involving object categories that the robot has never seen first-hand. We develop a simple approach, which we call Manipulation of Open-World Objects (MOO), which leverages a pre-trained vision-language model to extract object-identifying information from the language command and image, and conditions the robot policy on the current image, the instruction, and the extracted object information. In a variety of experiments on a real mobile manipulator, we find that MOO generalizes zero-shot to a wide range of novel object categories and environments. In addition, we show how MOO generalizes to other, non-language-based input modalities to specify the object of interest such as finger pointing, and how it can be further extended to enable open-world navigation and manipulation. The project's website and evaluation videos can be found at https://robot-moo.github.io/

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 1, 2023