Shailesh | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

GRIM: Task-Oriented Grasping with Conditioning on Generative Examples

Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG) requires robots to select grasps that are functionally appropriate for a specified task - a challenge that demands an understanding of task semantics, object affordances, and functional constraints. We present GRIM (Grasp Re-alignment via Iterative Matching), a training-free framework that addresses these challenges by leveraging Video Generation Models (VGMs) together with a retrieve-align-transfer pipeline. Beyond leveraging VGMs, GRIM can construct a memory of object-task exemplars sourced from web images, human demonstrations, or generative models. The retrieved task-oriented grasp is then transferred and refined by evaluating it against a set of geometrically stable candidate grasps to ensure both functional suitability and physical feasibility. GRIM demonstrates strong generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard TOG benchmarks. Project website: https://grim-tog.github.io

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Search-TTA: A Multimodal Test-Time Adaptation Framework for Visual Search in the Wild

To perform outdoor visual navigation and search, a robot may leverage satellite imagery to generate visual priors. This can help inform high-level search strategies, even when such images lack sufficient resolution for target recognition. However, many existing informative path planning or search-based approaches either assume no prior information, or use priors without accounting for how they were obtained. Recent work instead utilizes large Vision Language Models (VLMs) for generalizable priors, but their outputs can be inaccurate due to hallucination, leading to inefficient search. To address these challenges, we introduce Search-TTA, a multimodal test-time adaptation framework with a flexible plug-and-play interface compatible with various input modalities (e.g., image, text, sound) and planning methods (e.g., RL-based). First, we pretrain a satellite image encoder to align with CLIP's visual encoder to output probability distributions of target presence used for visual search. Second, our TTA framework dynamically refines CLIP's predictions during search using uncertainty-weighted gradient updates inspired by Spatial Poisson Point Processes. To train and evaluate Search-TTA, we curate AVS-Bench, a visual search dataset based on internet-scale ecological data containing 380k images and taxonomy data. We find that Search-TTA improves planner performance by up to 30.0%, particularly in cases with poor initial CLIP predictions due to domain mismatch and limited training data. It also performs comparably with significantly larger VLMs, and achieves zero-shot generalization via emergent alignment to unseen modalities. Finally, we deploy Search-TTA on a real UAV via hardware-in-the-loop testing, by simulating its operation within a large-scale simulation that provides onboard sensing.

cs.RO↗