Robotics

'In-the-wild' mobile manipulation aims to deploy robots in diverse real-world environments, which requires the robot to (1) have skills that generalize across object configurations; (2) be capable of long-horizon task execution in diverse environments; and (3) perform complex manipulation beyond pick-and-place. Quadruped robots with manipulators hold promise for extending the workspace and enabling robust locomotion, but existing results do not investigate such a capability. This paper proposes ...

Many modern robotic systems such as multi-robot systems and manipulators exhibit redundancy, a property owing to which they are capable of executing multiple tasks. This work proposes a novel method, based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm, to train redundant robots to be able to execute multiple tasks concurrently. Our approach differs from typical multi-objective RL methods insofar as the learned tasks can be combined and executed in possibly time-varying prioritized stacks. We do so...

We present RoboHive, a comprehensive software platform and ecosystem for research in the field of Robot Learning and Embodied Artificial Intelligence. Our platform encompasses a diverse range of pre-existing and novel environments, including dexterous manipulation with the Shadow Hand, whole-arm manipulation tasks with Franka and Fetch robots, quadruped locomotion, among others. Included environments are organized within and cover multiple domains such as hand manipulation, locomotion, multi-tas...

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 ...

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for enabling autonomous acquisition of complex robotic manipulation skills, but realizing this potential in real-world settings has been challenging. We present a human-in-the-loop vision-based RL system that demonstrates impressive performance on a diverse set of dexterous manipulation tasks, including dynamic manipulation, precision assembly, and dual-arm coordination. Our approach integrates demonstrations and human corrections, efficient RL alg...

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators. In addition to speed, such simulators need to model the physics of the robots and their interaction with the environment to a level acceptable for transferring policies learned in simulation to reali...

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a multi-modal, cooperative task requiring agents to interpret human instructions, navigate 3D environments, and communicate effectively under ambiguity. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent VLN advancements in robotics and outlines promising directions to improve multi-robot coordination. Despite progress, current models struggle with bidirectional communication, ambiguity resolution, and collaborative decision-making in the multi-agent sys...

Natural language interaction provides an intuitive way for non-expert users to communicate with robotic platforms. However, transforming user requests into executable navigation actions remains a challenging task, requiring the integration of language understanding, environment perception, and autonomous navigation. This work presents a language-driven navigation framework that enables mobile robots to interpret user requests in natural language to move the robot to a destination and autonomousl...

Robotics Reinforcement Learning (RL) often relies on carefully engineered auxiliary rewards to supplement sparse primary learning objectives to compensate for the lack of large-scale, real-world, trial-and-error data. While these auxiliary rewards accelerate learning, they require significant engineering effort, may introduce human biases, and cannot adapt to the robot's evolving capabilities during training. In this paper, we introduce Reward Training Wheels (RTW), a teacher-student framework t...

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal policies due to sample inefficiency of RL. In this work, we introduce Confidence-Controlled Exploration (CCE), a novel method that improves sample efficiency in RL-based robotic navigation without modifying the reward function. Unlike existing approaches, ...

The human ability to learn, generalize, and control complex manipulation tasks through multi-modality feedback suggests a unique capability, which we refer to as dexterity intelligence. Understanding and assessing this intelligence is a complex task. Amidst the swift progress and extensive proliferation of large language models (LLMs), their applications in the field of robotics have garnered increasing attention. LLMs possess the ability to process and generate natural language, facilitating ef...

We explore how scalable robot data can address real-world challenges for generalized robotic manipulation. Introducing AgiBot World, a large-scale platform comprising over 1 million trajectories across 217 tasks in five deployment scenarios, we achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in data scale compared to existing datasets. Accelerated by a standardized collection pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, AgiBot World guarantees high-quality and diverse data distribution. It is extensible...

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks, can easily be specified to align well with our intended goal: -1 reward every time step with termination upon reaching the goal state, called minimum-time tasks. Despite this simplicity, such formulations are often overlooked in favor of dense rewards due to th...

Intuitive Teleoperation interfaces are essential for mobile manipulation robots to ensure high quality data collection while reducing operator workload. A strong sense of embodiment combined with minimal physical and cognitive demands not only enhances the user experience during large-scale data collection, but also helps maintain data quality over extended periods. This becomes especially crucial for challenging long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks that require whole-body coordination. We com...

Reinforcement learning has become an essential algorithm for generating complex robotic behaviors. However, to learn such behaviors, it is necessary to design a reward function that describes the task, which often consists of multiple objectives that needs to be balanced. This tuning process is known as reward engineering and typically involves extensive trial-and-error. In this paper, to avoid this trial-and-error process, we propose the concept of Constraints as Rewards (CaR). CaR formulates t...

Robotic manipulation requires accurate motion and physical interaction control. However, current robot learning approaches focus on motion-centric action spaces that do not explicitly give the policy control over the interaction. In this paper, we discuss the repercussions of this choice and argue for more interaction-explicit action spaces in robot learning.

Successful mobile manipulation requires coordinated base and arm motion while maintaining accurate spatial positioning. However, demonstration-trained policies can struggle to realise the intended base motion reliably, leading to spatial misalignment and subsequent manipulation failures. We present MAVP (Map-Aware Visuomotor Policies), a framework that improves execution reliability by predicting explicit base-pose targets and tracking them using localisation feedback. MAVP reconstructs a static...

In this paper, we introduce RoboMIND (Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation), a dataset containing 107k demonstration trajectories across 479 diverse tasks involving 96 object classes. RoboMIND is collected through human teleoperation and encompasses comprehensive robotic-related information, including multi-view observations, proprioceptive robot state information, and linguistic task descriptions. To ensure data consistency and reliability for imitation learning, ...

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies, especially for complex multi-fingered humanoids, remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on extensive data collection and imitation learning, which are expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale. Sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative, but has mostly succeeded in simpler state-based or single-hand setups. How to effectively extend this to vision-based, contact-rich bimanual man...

As intelligent robots become more integrated into human environments, there is a growing need for intuitive and reliable Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interfaces that are adaptable and more natural to interact with. Traditional robot control methods often require users to adapt to interfaces or memorize predefined commands, limiting usability in dynamic, unstructured environments. This paper presents a novel framework that bridges natural language understanding and robotic execution by combining...