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Rishik Sathua

Publications and source records attributed to Rishik Sathua.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

ARGUS: Aligning Robot Scene Geometry Under Shifting Views with Large 3D Vision Models

Large-scale visuomotor policies have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of robot manipulation tasks. However, despite this success, manipulation polices often entangle scene geometry with the corresponding viewpoint, learning where objects lie in an image rather than where it lies in the task space. This entanglement inherently limits the corresponding policy's ability to learn from viewpoint-diverse datasets (ex. DROID, BridgeV2) and generalize beyond the viewpoints captured in their training data. In this work, we present ARGUS, an observation pre-processing pipeline that uses large-scale 3D vision models to align image observations from arbitrary camera viewpoints into a canonical viewpoint before passing it to downstream visuomotor policies. Experiments across training datasets with varying levels of viewpoint diversity, from fixed multi-view camera configurations to highly varied camera placements, show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches across both limited-view and view-diverse training regimes. In efficiency comparisons, ARGUS demonstrates an ability to learn from view-diverse data, converging to high success rates 4-6x faster than previous methods by leveraging a simplified observation space. Overall, our findings show that leveraging large-scale 3D vision models reduces the learning burden on visuomotor policies, enabling more efficient learning from large-scale, viewpoint-diverse robot datasets.

cs.RO

Precise Mobile Manipulation of Small Everyday Objects

Many everyday mobile manipulation tasks require precise interaction with small objects, such as grasping a knob to open a cabinet or pressing a light switch. In this paper, we develop Servoing with Vision Models (SVM), a closed-loop framework that enables a mobile manipulator to tackle such precise tasks involving the manipulation of small objects. SVM uses state-of-the-art vision foundation models to generate 3D targets for visual servoing to enable diverse tasks in novel environments. Naively doing so fails because of occlusion by the end-effector. SVM mitigates this using vision models that out-paint the end-effector, thereby significantly enhancing target localization. We demonstrate that aided by out-painting methods, open-vocabulary object detectors can serve as a drop-in module for SVM to seek semantic targets (e.g. knobs) and point tracking methods can help SVM reliably pursue interaction sites indicated by user clicks. We conduct a large-scale evaluation spanning experiments in 10 novel environments across 6 buildings including 72 different object instances. SVM obtains a 71% zero-shot success rate on manipulating unseen objects in novel environments in the real world, outperforming an open-loop control method by an absolute 42% and an imitation learning baseline trained on 1000+ demonstrations also by an absolute success rate of 50%.

cs.RO

Opening Articulated Structures in the Real World

What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? This work answers this question using opening of articulated structures as a mobile manipulation testbed. Specifically, our focus is on the end-to-end performance on this task without any privileged information, i.e. the robot starts at a location with the novel target articulated object in view, and has to approach the object and successfully open it. We first develop a system for this task, and then conduct 100+ end-to-end system tests across 13 real world test sites. Our large-scale study reveals a number of surprising findings: a) modular systems outperform end-to-end learned systems for this task, even when the end-to-end learned systems are trained on 1000+ demonstrations, b) perception, and not precise end-effector control, is the primary bottleneck to task success, and c) state-of-the-art articulation parameter estimation models developed in isolation struggle when faced with robot-centric viewpoints. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of developing components of the pipeline in isolation and underscore the need for system-level research, providing a pragmatic roadmap for building generalizable mobile manipulation systems. Videos, code, and models are available on the project website: https://arjung128.github.io/opening-articulated-structures/

cs.RO