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Jeannette Bohg

Publications and source records attributed to Jeannette Bohg.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

TidyBot: Personalized Robot Assistance with Large Language Models

For a robot to personalize physical assistance effectively, it must learn user preferences that can be generally reapplied to future scenarios. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up rooms by picking up objects and putting them away. A key challenge is determining the proper place to put each object, as people's preferences can vary greatly depending on personal taste or cultural background. For instance, one person may prefer storing shirts in the drawer, while another may prefer them on the shelf. We aim to build systems that can learn such preferences from just a handful of examples via prior interactions with a particular person. We show that robots can combine language-based planning and perception with the few-shot summarization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to infer generalized user preferences that are broadly applicable to future interactions. This approach enables fast adaptation and achieves 91.2% accuracy on unseen objects in our benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate our approach on a real-world mobile manipulator called TidyBot, which successfully puts away 85.0% of objects in real-world test scenarios.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

ShaSTA-Fuse: Camera-LiDAR Sensor Fusion to Model Shape and Spatio-Temporal Affinities for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

The ObjectFolder Benchmark: Multisensory Learning with Neural and Real Objects

We introduce the ObjectFolder Benchmark, a benchmark suite of 10 tasks for multisensory object-centric learning, centered around object recognition, reconstruction, and manipulation with sight, sound, and touch. We also introduce the ObjectFolder Real dataset, including the multisensory measurements for 100 real-world household objects, building upon a newly designed pipeline for collecting the 3D meshes, videos, impact sounds, and tactile readings of real-world objects. We conduct systematic benchmarking on both the 1,000 multisensory neural objects from ObjectFolder, and the real multisensory data from ObjectFolder Real. Our results demonstrate the importance of multisensory perception and reveal the respective roles of vision, audio, and touch for different object-centric learning tasks. By publicly releasing our dataset and benchmark suite, we hope to catalyze and enable new research in multisensory object-centric learning in computer vision, robotics, and beyond. Project page: https://objectfolder.stanford.edu

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

STAP: Sequencing Task-Agnostic Policies

Advances in robotic skill acquisition have made it possible to build general-purpose libraries of learned skills for downstream manipulation tasks. However, naively executing these skills one after the other is unlikely to succeed without accounting for dependencies between actions prevalent in long-horizon plans. We present Sequencing Task-Agnostic Policies (STAP), a scalable framework for training manipulation skills and coordinating their geometric dependencies at planning time to solve long-horizon tasks never seen by any skill during training. Given that Q-functions encode a measure of skill feasibility, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the joint success of all skills sequenced in a plan, which we estimate by the product of their Q-values. Our experiments indicate that this objective function approximates ground truth plan feasibility and, when used as a planning objective, reduces myopic behavior and thereby promotes long-horizon task success. We further demonstrate how STAP can be used for task and motion planning by estimating the geometric feasibility of skill sequences provided by a task planner. We evaluate our approach in simulation and on a real robot. Qualitative results and code are made available at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/stap.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Deep Learning Approaches to Grasp Synthesis: A Review

Grasping is the process of picking up an object by applying forces and torques at a set of contacts. Recent advances in deep-learning methods have allowed rapid progress in robotic object grasping. In this systematic review, we surveyed the publications over the last decade, with a particular interest in grasping an object using all 6 degrees of freedom of the end-effector pose. Our review found four common methodologies for robotic grasping: sampling-based approaches, direct regression, reinforcement learning, and exemplar approaches. Additionally, we found two `supporting methods` around grasping that use deep-learning to support the grasping process, shape approximation, and affordances. We have distilled the publications found in this systematic review (85 papers) into ten key takeaways we consider crucial for future robotic grasping and manipulation research. An online version of the survey is available at https://rhys-newbury.github.io/projects/6dof/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Active Task Randomization: Learning Robust Skills via Unsupervised Generation of Diverse and Feasible Tasks

Solving real-world manipulation tasks requires robots to have a repertoire of skills applicable to a wide range of circumstances. When using learning-based methods to acquire such skills, the key challenge is to obtain training data that covers diverse and feasible variations of the task, which often requires non-trivial manual labor and domain knowledge. In this work, we introduce Active Task Randomization (ATR), an approach that learns robust skills through the unsupervised generation of training tasks. ATR selects suitable tasks, which consist of an initial environment state and manipulation goal, for learning robust skills by balancing the diversity and feasibility of the tasks. We propose to predict task diversity and feasibility by jointly learning a compact task representation. The selected tasks are then procedurally generated in simulation using graph-based parameterization. The active selection of these training tasks enables skill policies trained with our framework to robustly handle a diverse range of objects and arrangements at test time. We demonstrate that the learned skills can be composed by a task planner to solve unseen sequential manipulation problems based on visual inputs. Compared to baseline methods, ATR can achieve superior success rates in single-step and sequential manipulation tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

CARTO: Category and Joint Agnostic Reconstruction of ARTiculated Objects

We present CARTO, a novel approach for reconstructing multiple articulated objects from a single stereo RGB observation. We use implicit object-centric representations and learn a single geometry and articulation decoder for multiple object categories. Despite training on multiple categories, our decoder achieves a comparable reconstruction accuracy to methods that train bespoke decoders separately for each category. Combined with our stereo image encoder we infer the 3D shape, 6D pose, size, joint type, and the joint state of multiple unknown objects in a single forward pass. Our method achieves a 20.4% absolute improvement in mAP 3D IOU50 for novel instances when compared to a two-stage pipeline. Inference time is fast and can run on a NVIDIA TITAN XP GPU at 1 HZ for eight or less objects present. While only trained on simulated data, CARTO transfers to real-world object instances. Code and evaluation data is available at: http://carto.cs.uni-freiburg.de

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Visuomotor Control in Multi-Object Scenes Using Object-Aware Representations

Perceptual understanding of the scene and the relationship between its different components is important for successful completion of robotic tasks. Representation learning has been shown to be a powerful technique for this, but most of the current methodologies learn task specific representations that do not necessarily transfer well to other tasks. Furthermore, representations learned by supervised methods require large labeled datasets for each task that are expensive to collect in the real world. Using self-supervised learning to obtain representations from unlabeled data can mitigate this problem. However, current self-supervised representation learning methods are mostly object agnostic, and we demonstrate that the resulting representations are insufficient for general purpose robotics tasks as they fail to capture the complexity of scenes with many components. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of using object-aware representation learning techniques for robotic tasks. Our self-supervised representations are learned by observing the agent freely interacting with different parts of the environment and is queried in two different settings: (i) policy learning and (ii) object location prediction. We show that our model learns control policies in a sample-efficient manner and outperforms state-of-the-art object agnostic techniques as well as methods trained on raw RGB images. Our results show a 20 percent increase in performance in low data regimes (1000 trajectories) in policy training using implicit behavioral cloning (IBC). Furthermore, our method outperforms the baselines for the task of object localization in multi-object scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

In-Hand Manipulation of Unknown Objects with Tactile Sensing for Insertion

In this paper, we present a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing without relying on a known object model. In many cases, vision-only approaches may not be feasible; for example, due to occlusion in cluttered spaces. We address this limitation by introducing a method to reorient unknown objects using tactile sensing. It incrementally builds a probabilistic estimate of the object shape and pose during task-driven manipulation. Our approach uses Bayesian optimization to balance exploration of the global object shape with efficient task completion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to a simulated Tactile-Enabled Roller Grasper, a gripper that rolls objects in hand while collecting tactile data. We evaluate our method on an insertion task with randomly generated objects and find that it reliably reorients objects while significantly reducing the exploration time.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Learning Tool Morphology for Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks with Differentiable Simulation

When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from specialized tools that enable them to more easily complete a variety of tasks. We present an end-to-end framework to automatically learn tool morphology for contact-rich manipulation tasks by leveraging differentiable physics simulators. Previous work relied on manually constructed priors requiring detailed specification of a 3D object model, grasp pose and task description to facilitate the search or optimization process. Our approach only requires defining the objective with respect to task performance and enables learning a robust morphology through randomizing variations of the task. We make this optimization tractable by casting it as a continual learning problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for designing new tools in several scenarios, such as winding ropes, flipping a box and pushing peas onto a scoop in simulation. Additionally, experiments with real robots show that the tool shapes discovered by our method help them succeed in these scenarios.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

ShaSTA: Modeling Shape and Spatio-Temporal Affinities for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking is a cornerstone capability of any robotic system. The quality of tracking is largely dependent on the quality of the detector used. In many applications, such as autonomous vehicles, it is preferable to over-detect objects to avoid catastrophic outcomes due to missed detections. As a result, current state-of-the-art 3D detectors produce high rates of false-positives to ensure a low number of false-negatives. This can negatively affect tracking by making data association and track lifecycle management more challenging. Additionally, occasional false-negative detections due to difficult scenarios like occlusions can harm tracking performance. To address these issues in a unified framework, we propose to learn shape and spatio-temporal affinities between tracks and detections in consecutive frames. Our affinity provides a probabilistic matching that leads to robust data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and sequential track confidence refinement. Though past 3D MOT approaches address a subset of components in this problem domain, we offer the first self-contained framework that addresses all these aspects of the 3D MOT problem. We quantitatively evaluate our method on the nuScenes tracking benchmark where we achieve 1st place amongst LiDAR-only trackers using CenterPoint detections. Our method estimates accurate and precise tracks, while decreasing the overall number of false-positive and false-negative tracks and increasing the number of true-positive tracks. We analyze our performance with 5 metrics, giving a comprehensive overview of our approach to indicate how our tracking framework may impact the ultimate goal of an autonomous mobile agent. We also present ablative experiments and qualitative results that demonstrate our framework's capabilities in complex scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Category-Independent Articulated Object Tracking with Factor Graphs

Robots deployed in human-centric environments may need to manipulate a diverse range of articulated objects, such as doors, dishwashers, and cabinets. Articulated objects often come with unexpected articulation mechanisms that are inconsistent with categorical priors: for example, a drawer might rotate about a hinge joint instead of sliding open. We propose a category-independent framework for predicting the articulation models of unknown objects from sequences of RGB-D images. The prediction is performed by a two-step process: first, a visual perception module tracks object part poses from raw images, and second, a factor graph takes these poses and infers the articulation model including the current configuration between the parts as a 6D twist. We also propose a manipulation-oriented metric to evaluate predicted joint twists in terms of how well a compliant robot controller would be able to manipulate the articulated object given the predicted twist. We demonstrate that our visual perception and factor graph modules outperform baselines on simulated data and show the applicability of our factor graph on real world data.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2022

Whisker-Inspired Tactile Sensing for Contact Localization on Robot Manipulators

Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired sensors that attach to the surface of a robot manipulator to sense its surrounding through light contacts. We obtain a sensor model using a calibration process that applies to straight and curved whiskers. We then propose a sensing algorithm using Bayesian filtering to localize contact points. The algorithm combines the accurate proprioceptive sensing of the robot and sensor readings from the deflections of the whiskers. Our results show that our algorithm is able to track contact points with sub-millimeter accuracy, outperforming a baseline method. Finally, we demonstrate our sensor and perception method in a real-world system where a robot moves in between free-standing objects and uses the whisker sensors to track contacts tracing object contours.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2022

Minkowski Tracker: A Sparse Spatio-Temporal R-CNN for Joint Object Detection and Tracking

Recent research in multi-task learning reveals the benefit of solving related problems in a single neural network. 3D object detection and multi-object tracking (MOT) are two heavily intertwined problems predicting and associating an object instance location across time. However, most previous works in 3D MOT treat the detector as a preceding separated pipeline, disjointly taking the output of the detector as an input to the tracker. In this work, we present Minkowski Tracker, a sparse spatio-temporal R-CNN that jointly solves object detection and tracking. Inspired by region-based CNN (R-CNN), we propose to solve tracking as a second stage of the object detector R-CNN that predicts assignment probability to tracks. First, Minkowski Tracker takes 4D point clouds as input to generate a spatio-temporal Bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map through a 4D sparse convolutional encoder network. Then, our proposed TrackAlign aggregates the track region-of-interest (ROI) features from the BEV features. Finally, Minkowski Tracker updates the track and its confidence score based on the detection-to-track match probability predicted from the ROI features. We show in large-scale experiments that the overall performance gain of our method is due to four factors: 1. The temporal reasoning of the 4D encoder improves the detection performance 2. The multi-task learning of object detection and MOT jointly enhances each other 3. The detection-to-track match score learns implicit motion model to enhance track assignment 4. The detection-to-track match score improves the quality of the track confidence score. As a result, Minkowski Tracker achieved the state-of-the-art performance on Nuscenes dataset tracking task without hand-designed motion models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2022

Rethinking Optimization with Differentiable Simulation from a Global Perspective

Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth gradients has been relatively easy, such as systems with mostly smooth dynamics. In this work, we study the challenges that differentiable simulation presents when it is not feasible to expect that a single descent reaches a global optimum, which is often a problem in contact-rich scenarios. We analyze the optimization landscapes of diverse scenarios that contain both rigid bodies and deformable objects. In dynamic environments with highly deformable objects and fluids, differentiable simulators produce rugged landscapes with nonetheless useful gradients in some parts of the space. We propose a method that combines Bayesian optimization with semi-local 'leaps' to obtain a global search method that can use gradients effectively, while also maintaining robust performance in regions with noisy gradients. We show that our approach outperforms several gradient-based and gradient-free baselines on an extensive set of experiments in simulation, and also validate the method using experiments with a real robot and deformables. Videos and supplementary materials are available at https://tinyurl.com/globdiff

stat.ML↗
arXiv2022

Learning Periodic Tasks from Human Demonstrations

We develop a method for learning periodic tasks from visual demonstrations. The core idea is to leverage periodicity in the policy structure to model periodic aspects of the tasks. We use active learning to optimize parameters of rhythmic dynamic movement primitives (rDMPs) and propose an objective to maximize the similarity between the motion of objects manipulated by the robot and the desired motion in human video demonstrations. We consider tasks with deformable objects and granular matter whose states are challenging to represent and track: wiping surfaces with a cloth, winding cables/wires, and stirring granular matter with a spoon. Our method does not require tracking markers or manual annotations. The initial training data consists of 10-minute videos of random unpaired interactions with objects by the robot and human. We use these for unsupervised learning of a keypoint model to get task-agnostic visual correspondences. Then, we use Bayesian optimization to optimize rDMPs from a single human video demonstration within few robot trials. We present simulation and hardware experiments to validate our approach.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2022

ObjectFolder 2.0: A Multisensory Object Dataset for Sim2Real Transfer

Objects play a crucial role in our everyday activities. Though multisensory object-centric learning has shown great potential lately, the modeling of objects in prior work is rather unrealistic. ObjectFolder 1.0 is a recent dataset that introduces 100 virtualized objects with visual, acoustic, and tactile sensory data. However, the dataset is small in scale and the multisensory data is of limited quality, hampering generalization to real-world scenarios. We present ObjectFolder 2.0, a large-scale, multisensory dataset of common household objects in the form of implicit neural representations that significantly enhances ObjectFolder 1.0 in three aspects. First, our dataset is 10 times larger in the amount of objects and orders of magnitude faster in rendering time. Second, we significantly improve the multisensory rendering quality for all three modalities. Third, we show that models learned from virtual objects in our dataset successfully transfer to their real-world counterparts in three challenging tasks: object scale estimation, contact localization, and shape reconstruction. ObjectFolder 2.0 offers a new path and testbed for multisensory learning in computer vision and robotics. The dataset is available at https://github.com/rhgao/ObjectFolder.

cs.CV↗