Designing imitation learning (IL) policies involves many choices, such as selecting features, architecture, and policy representation. The field is advancing quickly, introducing many new techniques and increasing complexity, making it difficult to explore all possible designs and understand their impact. IL enables agents to learn through demonstrations rather than reward-based approaches. The increasing number of…

Robots are usually unsuitable for altering different tasks and environments. General-purpose models of robots are devised to circumvent this problem. They allow fine-tuning these general-purpose models for a wide scope of robotic tasks. However, it is challenging to maintain the consistency of shared open resources across various platforms. Success in real-world environments is far from…

In the rapidly evolving field of household robotics, a significant challenge has emerged in executing personalized organizational tasks, such as arranging groceries in a refrigerator. These tasks require robots to balance user preferences with physical constraints while avoiding collisions and maintaining stability. While Large Language Models (LLMs) enable natural language communication of user preferences, this…

In recent years, there has been significant development in the field of large pre-trained models for learning robot policies. The term “policy representation” here refers to the different ways of interfacing with the decision-making mechanisms of robots, which can potentially facilitate generalization to new tasks and environments. Vision-language-action (VLA) models are pre-trained with large-scale robot…

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLA) for robotics are trained by combining large language models with vision encoders and then fine-tuning them on various robot datasets; this allows generalization to new instructions, unseen objects, and distribution shifts. However, various real-world robot datasets mostly require human control, which makes scaling difficult. On the other hand, Internet video data offers…

Visual understanding is the abstracting of high-dimensional visual signals like images and videos. Many problems are involved in this process, ranging from depth prediction and vision-language correspondence to classification and object grounding, which include tasks defined along spatial and temporal axes and tasks defined along coarse to fine granularity, like object grounding. In light of…

Technological advancements in sensors, AI, and processing power have propelled robot navigation to new heights in the last several decades. To take robotics to the next level and make them a regular part of our lives, many studies suggest transferring the natural language space of ObjNav and VLN to the multimodal space so the robot…

In robotics, understanding the position and movement of a sensor suite within its environment is crucial. Traditional methods, called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), often face challenges with unsynchronized sensor data and require complex computations. These methods must estimate the position at discrete time intervals, making it difficult to handle data from various sensors that…

The field of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is expanding the capabilities of robotic control. However, there has been a growing trend of increasing algorithm complexity. As a result, the latest algorithms need many implementation details to perform well on different levels, causing issues with reproducibility. Moreover, even state-of-the-art DRL models have simple problems, like the…

A major weakness of current robotic manipulation policies is their inability to generalize beyond their training data. While these policies, trained for specific skills or language instructions, can adapt to new conditions like different object positions or lighting, they often fail when faced with scene distractors or new objects, and need help to follow unseen…