DataPlatter: Boosting Robotic Manipulation Generalization with Minimal Costly Data

The growing adoption of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in embodied AI intensifies the demand for diverse manipulation demonstrations. However, high costs associated with data collection often result in insufficient data coverage across all scenarios, which limits the performance of the models. It is observed that the spatial reasoning phase (SRP) in large workspace dominates the failure cases. Fortunately, this data can be collected with low cost, underscoring the potential of leveraging inexpensive data to improve model performance. In this paper, we introduce the DataPlatter method, a framework that decouples training trajectories into distinct task stages and leverages abundant easily collectible SRP data to enhance VLA model's generalization. Through analysis we demonstrate that sub-task-specific training with additional SRP data with proper proportion can act as a performance catalyst for robot manipulation, maximizing the utilization of costly physical interaction phase (PIP) data. Experiments show that through introducing large proportion of cost-effective SRP trajectories into a limited set of PIP data, we can achieve a maximum improvement of 41\% on success rate in zero-shot scenes, while with the ability to transfer manipulation skill to novel targets.

RoboMM: All-in-One Multimodal Large Model for Robotic Manipulation

In recent years, robotics has advanced significantly through the integration of larger models and large-scale datasets. However, challenges remain in applying these models to 3D spatial interactions and managing data collection costs. To address these issues, we propose the multimodal robotic manipulation model, RoboMM, along with the comprehensive dataset, RoboData. RoboMM enhances 3D perception through camera parameters and occupancy supervision. Building on OpenFlamingo, it incorporates Modality-Isolation-Mask and multimodal decoder blocks, improving modality fusion and fine-grained perception. RoboData offers the complete evaluation system by integrating several well-known datasets, achieving the first fusion of multi-view images, camera parameters, depth maps, and actions, and the space alignment facilitates comprehensive learning from diverse robotic datasets. Equipped with RoboData and the unified physical space, RoboMM is the generalist policy that enables simultaneous evaluation across all tasks within multiple datasets, rather than focusing on limited selection of data or tasks. Its design significantly enhances robotic manipulation performance, increasing the average sequence length on the CALVIN from 1.7 to 3.3 and ensuring cross-embodiment capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets.

RoboCAS: A Benchmark for Robotic Manipulation in Complex Object Arrangement Scenarios

Foundation models hold significant potential for enabling robots to perform long-horizon general manipulation tasks. However, the simplicity of tasks and the uniformity of environments in existing benchmarks restrict their effective deployment in complex scenarios. To address this limitation, this paper introduces the \textit{RoboCAS} benchmark, the first benchmark specifically designed for complex object arrangement scenarios in robotic manipulation. This benchmark employs flexible and concise scripted policies to efficiently collect a diverse array of demonstrations, showcasing scattered, orderly, and stacked object arrangements within a highly realistic physical simulation environment. It includes complex processes such as target retrieval, obstacle clearance, and robot manipulation, testing agents' abilities to perform long-horizon planning for spatial reasoning and predicting chain reactions under ambiguous instructions. Extensive experiments on multiple baseline models reveal their limitations in managing complex object arrangement scenarios, underscoring the urgent need for intelligent agents capable of performing long-horizon operations in practical deployments and providing valuable insights for future research directions. Project website: \url{https://github.com/notFoundThisPerson/RoboCAS-v0}.

RoboUniView: Visual-Language Model with Unified View Representation for Robotic Manipulaiton

Utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic manipulation represents a novel paradigm, aiming to enhance the model's ability to generalize to new objects and instructions. However, due to variations in camera specifications and mounting positions, existing methods exhibit significant performance disparities across different robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose RoboUniView in this paper, an innovative approach that decouples visual feature extraction from action learning. We first learn a unified view representation from multi-perspective views by pre-training on readily accessible data, and then derive actions from this unified view representation to control robotic manipulation. This unified view representation more accurately mirrors the physical world and is not constrained by the robotic platform's camera parameters. Thanks to this methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the demanding CALVIN benchmark, enhancing the success rate in the $D \to D$ setting from 88.7% to 96.2%, and in the $ABC \to D$ setting from 82.4% to 94.2%. Moreover, our model exhibits outstanding adaptability and flexibility: it maintains high performance under unseen camera parameters, can utilize multiple datasets with varying camera parameters, and is capable of joint cross-task learning across datasets. Code is provided for re-implementation. https://github.com/liufanfanlff/RoboUniview