RPMArt: Towards Robust Perception and Manipulation for Articulated Objects

Articulated objects are commonly found in daily life. It is essential that robots can exhibit robust perception and manipulation skills for articulated objects in real-world robotic applications. However, existing methods for articulated objects insufficiently address noise in point clouds and struggle to bridge the gap between simulation and reality, thus limiting the practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework towards Robust Perception and Manipulation for Articulated Objects (RPMArt), which learns to estimate the articulation parameters and manipulate the articulation part from the noisy point cloud. Our primary contribution is a Robust Articulation Network (RoArtNet) that is able to predict both joint parameters and affordable points robustly by local feature learning and point tuple voting. Moreover, we introduce an articulation-aware classification scheme to enhance its ability for sim-to-real transfer. Finally, with the estimated affordable point and articulation joint constraint, the robot can generate robust actions to manipulate articulated objects. After learning only from synthetic data, RPMArt is able to transfer zero-shot to real-world articulated objects. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving state-of-the-art performance in both noise-added simulation and real-world environments. The code and data will be open-sourced for reproduction. More results are published on the project website at https://r-pmart.github.io .

GLC++: Source-Free Universal Domain Adaptation through Global-Local Clustering and Contrastive Affinity Learning

Deep neural networks often exhibit sub-optimal performance under covariate and category shifts. Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) presents a promising solution to this dilemma, yet most SFDA approaches are restricted to closed-set scenarios. In this paper, we explore Source-Free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA) aiming to accurately classify "known" data belonging to common categories and segregate them from target-private "unknown" data. We propose a novel Global and Local Clustering (GLC) technique, which comprises an adaptive one-vs-all global clustering algorithm to discern between target classes, complemented by a local k-NN clustering strategy to mitigate negative transfer. Despite the effectiveness, the inherent closed-set source architecture leads to uniform treatment of "unknown" data, impeding the identification of distinct "unknown" categories. To address this, we evolve GLC to GLC++, integrating a contrastive affinity learning strategy. We examine the superiority of GLC and GLC++ across multiple benchmarks and category shift scenarios. Remarkably, in the most challenging open-partial-set scenarios, GLC and GLC++ surpass GATE by 16.7% and 18.6% in H-score on VisDA, respectively. GLC++ enhances the novel category clustering accuracy of GLC by 4.3% in open-set scenarios on Office-Home. Furthermore, the introduced contrastive learning strategy not only enhances GLC but also significantly facilitates existing methodologies.

ManiPose: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Pose-aware Object Manipulation in Robotics

Robotic manipulation in everyday scenarios, especially in unstructured environments, requires skills in pose-aware object manipulation (POM), which adapts robots' grasping and handling according to an object's 6D pose. Recognizing an object's position and orientation is crucial for effective manipulation. For example, if a mug is lying on its side, it's more effective to grasp it by the rim rather than the handle. Despite its importance, research in POM skills remains limited, because learning manipulation skills requires pose-varying simulation environments and datasets. This paper introduces ManiPose, a pioneering benchmark designed to advance the study of pose-varying manipulation tasks. ManiPose encompasses: 1) Simulation environments for POM feature tasks ranging from 6D pose-specific pick-and-place of single objects to cluttered scenes, further including interactions with articulated objects. 2) A comprehensive dataset featuring geometrically consistent and manipulation-oriented 6D pose labels for 2936 real-world scanned rigid objects and 100 articulated objects across 59 categories. 3) A baseline for POM, leveraging the inferencing abilities of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) to analyze the relationship between 6D pose and task-specific requirements, offers enhanced pose-aware grasp prediction and motion planning capabilities. Our benchmark demonstrates notable advancements in pose estimation, pose-aware manipulation, and real-robot skill transfer, setting new standards for POM research. We will open-source the ManiPose benchmark with the final version paper, inviting the community to engage with our resources, available at our website:https://sites.google.com/view/manipose.

ShapeBoost: Boosting Human Shape Estimation with Part-Based Parameterization and Clothing-Preserving Augmentation

Accurate human shape recovery from a monocular RGB image is a challenging task because humans come in different shapes and sizes and wear different clothes. In this paper, we propose ShapeBoost, a new human shape recovery framework that achieves pixel-level alignment even for rare body shapes and high accuracy for people wearing different types of clothes. Unlike previous approaches that rely on the use of PCA-based shape coefficients, we adopt a new human shape parameterization that decomposes the human shape into bone lengths and the mean width of each part slice. This part-based parameterization technique achieves a balance between flexibility and validity using a semi-analytical shape reconstruction algorithm. Based on this new parameterization, a clothing-preserving data augmentation module is proposed to generate realistic images with diverse body shapes and accurate annotations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in diverse body shape situations as well as in varied clothing situations.

EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI

In the realm of computer vision and robotics, embodied agents are expected to explore their environment and carry out human instructions. This necessitates the ability to fully understand 3D scenes given their first-person observations and contextualize them into language for interaction. However, traditional research focuses more on scene-level input and output setups from a global view. To address the gap, we introduce EmbodiedScan, a multi-modal, ego-centric 3D perception dataset and benchmark for holistic 3D scene understanding. It encompasses over 5k scans encapsulating 1M ego-centric RGB-D views, 1M language prompts, 160k 3D-oriented boxes spanning over 760 categories, some of which partially align with LVIS, and dense semantic occupancy with 80 common categories. Building upon this database, we introduce a baseline framework named Embodied Perceptron. It is capable of processing an arbitrary number of multi-modal inputs and demonstrates remarkable 3D perception capabilities, both within the two series of benchmarks we set up, i.e., fundamental 3D perception tasks and language-grounded tasks, and in the wild. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks will be available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/EmbodiedScan.

PACE: Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments

Pose estimation is a crucial task in computer vision, enabling tracking and manipulating objects in images or videos. While several datasets exist for pose estimation, there is a lack of large-scale datasets specifically focusing on cluttered scenes with occlusions. This limitation is a bottleneck in the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods, particularly toward the goal of real-world application in environments where occlusions are common. Addressing this, we introduce PACE (Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments), a large-scale benchmark designed to advance the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods in cluttered scenarios. PACE encompasses 54,945 frames with 257,673 annotations across 300 videos, covering 576 objects from 44 categories and featuring a mix of rigid and articulated items in cluttered scenes. To annotate the real-world data efficiently, we developed an innovative annotation system utilizing a calibrated 3-camera setup. We test state-of-the-art algorithms in PACE along two tracks: pose estimation, and object pose tracking, revealing the benchmark's challenges and research opportunities. We plan to release PACE as a public evaluation benchmark, along the annotations tools we developed, to stimulate further advancements in the field. Our code and data is available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/PACE.

Primitive-based 3D Human-Object Interaction Modelling and Programming

Embedding Human and Articulated Object Interaction (HAOI) in 3D is an important direction for a deeper human activity understanding. Different from previous works that use parametric and CAD models to represent humans and objects, in this work, we propose a novel 3D geometric primitive-based language to encode both humans and objects. Given our new paradigm, humans and objects are all compositions of primitives instead of heterogeneous entities. Thus, mutual information learning may be achieved between the limited 3D data of humans and different object categories. Moreover, considering the simplicity of the expression and the richness of the information it contains, we choose the superquadric as the primitive representation. To explore an effective embedding of HAOI for the machine, we build a new benchmark on 3D HAOI consisting of primitives together with their images and propose a task requiring machines to recover 3D HAOI using primitives from images. Moreover, we propose a baseline of single-view 3D reconstruction on HAOI. We believe this primitive-based 3D HAOI representation would pave the way for 3D HAOI studies. Our code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/p3haoi.

Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future

We survey applications of pretrained foundation models in robotics. Traditional deep learning models in robotics are trained on small datasets tailored for specific tasks, which limits their adaptability across diverse applications. In contrast, foundation models pretrained on internet-scale data appear to have superior generalization capabilities, and in some instances display an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to problems that are not present in the training data. Foundation models may hold the potential to enhance various components of the robot autonomy stack, from perception to decision-making and control. For example, large language models can generate code or provide common sense reasoning, while vision-language models enable open-vocabulary visual recognition. However, significant open research challenges remain, particularly around the scarcity of robot-relevant training data, safety guarantees and uncertainty quantification, and real-time execution. In this survey, we study recent papers that have used or built foundation models to solve robotics problems. We explore how foundation models contribute to improving robot capabilities in the domains of perception, decision-making, and control. We discuss the challenges hindering the adoption of foundation models in robot autonomy and provide opportunities and potential pathways for future advancements. The GitHub project corresponding to this paper (Preliminary release. We are committed to further enhancing and updating this work to ensure its quality and relevance) can be found here: https://github.com/robotics-survey/Awesome-Robotics-Foundation-Models

Revisit Human-Scene Interaction via Space Occupancy

Human-scene Interaction (HSI) generation is a challenging task and crucial for various downstream tasks. However, one of the major obstacles is the limited data scale. High-quality data with simultaneously captured human and 3D environments is rare, resulting in limited data diversity and complexity. In this work, we argue that interaction with a scene is essentially interacting with the space occupancy of the scene from an abstract physical perspective, leading us to a unified novel view of Human-Occupancy Interaction. By treating pure motion sequences as records of humans interacting with invisible scene occupancy, we can aggregate motion-only data into a large-scale paired human-occupancy interaction database: Motion Occupancy Base (MOB). Thus, the need for costly paired motion-scene datasets with high-quality scene scans can be substantially alleviated. With this new unified view of Human-Occupancy interaction, a single motion controller is proposed to reach the target state given the surrounding occupancy. Once trained on MOB with complex occupancy layout, the controller could handle cramped scenes and generalize well to general scenes with limited complexity. With no GT 3D scenes for training, our method can generate realistic and stable HSI motions in diverse scenarios, including both static and dynamic scenes. Our code and data would be made publicly available at https://foruck.github.io/occu-page/.

Dancing with Images: Video Distillation via Static-Dynamic Disentanglement

Recently, dataset distillation has paved the way towards efficient machine learning, especially for image datasets. However, the distillation for videos, characterized by an exclusive temporal dimension, remains an underexplored domain. In this work, we provide the first systematic study of video distillation and introduce a taxonomy to categorize temporal compression. Our investigation reveals that the temporal information is usually not well learned during distillation , and the temporal dimension of synthetic data contributes little. The observations motivate our unified framework of disentangling the dynamic and static information in the videos. It first distills the videos into still images as static memory and then compensates the dynamic and motion information with a learnable dynamic memory block. Our method achieves state-of-the-art on video datasets at different scales, with notably smaller storage expenditure. Our code will be publicly available.