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Sushil Samuel Dinesh

Publications and source records attributed to Sushil Samuel Dinesh.

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Selective Commitment for Language-Guided Object Retrieval under Partial Observability

Language-guided object retrieval under partial observability requires deciding whether to gather more evidence, interact with the scene, grasp a candidate, or abstain. We present a closed-loop framework that coordinates these decisions for retrieving a target specified in relation to a reference container. The framework maintains a persistent joint belief over target identity, container relation, and presence through tracked-object, unobserved-target, and target-absent hypotheses. View-conditioned categorical VLM observations update this belief; conformal grasp eligibility and robot feasibility govern commitment, while finite-horizon belief-space planning selects information-gathering actions. Across five different scenarios, our proposed method succeeds in 19/25 simulation episodes versus 12/25 for the best-performing task-adapted baseline and is the only evaluated policy to achieve at least one success in each scenario. Ablations show that cross-view memory improves success under partial occlusion, while the full system does not consistently outperform simplified variants. Real-robot trials demonstrate closed-loop re-observation and autonomous recovery from injected grasp failures, while injected viewpoint failures end in false defer. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of coordinating evidence gathering and selective grasp commitment within a unified framework for retrieval under partial observability.

cs.RO

FlipToSee: A Probabilistic Stable Placement Prior for Active Visual Exploration via Regrasping

Active visual exploration of tabletop objects often requires reorienting an unknown resting object onto a different stable support face to expose occluded surfaces. To identify such placements without exhaustive physical search, we learn a probabilistic placement prior from a single-view point cloud. Stable placement prediction is inherently multimodal, and conventional 6-DoF regression introduces further ambiguity by modeling translation and in-plane yaw. We therefore propose FlipToSee, a probabilistic framework that removes this representational ambiguity by parameterizing placements as unit support normals on $S^2$ while modeling their multimodal conditional distribution via a von Mises--Fisher mixture density network. To decouple mode diversity from physical robustness, FlipToSee deterministically extracts a compact candidate set from the mixture components and applies robustness-aware reranking using an auxiliary head trained with candidate-aligned supervision. In simulation, FlipToSee achieves $98.4\%$ first-proposal success on in-distribution objects, $95.3\%$ on out-of-distribution shapes, and $90.0\%$ under zero-shot transfer to household YCB objects. We further demonstrate the learned placement prior on a physical robot by integrating it with grasp and motion planning for exploratory regrasping.

cs.RO

Toward Accurate Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation: Language-to-Action with Foundation Models via Scene Graphs

This paper presents a framework that leverages pre-trained foundation models for robotic manipulation without domain-specific training. The framework integrates off-the-shelf models, combining multimodal perception from foundation models with a general-purpose reasoning model capable of robust task sequencing. Scene graphs, dynamically maintained within the framework, provide spatial awareness and enable consistent reasoning about the environment. The framework is evaluated through a series of tabletop robotic manipulation experiments, and the results highlight its potential for building robotic manipulation systems directly on top of off-the-shelf foundation models.

cs.RO