Data-augmented Learning of Geodesic Distances in Irregular Domains through Soner Boundary Conditions

Geodesic distances play a fundamental role in robotics, as they efficiently encode global geometric information of the domain. Recent methods use neural networks to approximate geodesic distances by solving the Eikonal equation through physics-informed approaches. While effective, these approaches often suffer from unstable convergence during training in complex environments. We propose a framework to learn geodesic distances in irregular domains by using the Soner boundary condition, and systematically evaluate the impact of data losses on training stability and solution accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating data losses significantly improves convergence robustness, reducing training instabilities and sensitivity to initialization. These findings suggest that hybrid data-physics approaches can effectively enhance the reliability of learning-based geodesic distance solvers with sparse data.

T-DOM: A Taxonomy for Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

Robotic grasp and manipulation taxonomies, inspired by observing human manipulation strategies, can provide key guidance for tasks ranging from robotic gripper design to the development of manipulation algorithms. The existing grasp and manipulation taxonomies, however, often assume object rigidity, which limits their ability to reason about the complex interactions in the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. Hence, to assist in tasks involving deformable objects, taxonomies need to capture more comprehensively the interactions inherent in deformable object manipulation. To this end, we introduce T-DOM, a taxonomy that analyses key aspects involved in the manipulation of deformable objects, such as robot motion, forces, prehensile and non-prehensile interactions and, for the first time, a detailed classification of object deformations. To evaluate T-DOM, we curate a dataset of ten tasks involving a variety of deformable objects, such as garments, ropes, and surgical gloves, as well as diverse types of deformations. We analyse the proposed tasks comparing the T-DOM taxonomy with previous well established manipulation taxonomies. Our analysis demonstrates that T-DOM can effectively distinguish between manipulation skills that were not identified in other taxonomies, across different deformable objects and manipulation actions, offering new categories to characterize a skill. The proposed taxonomy significantly extends past work, providing a more fine-grained classification that can be used to describe the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. This work establishes a foundation for advancing deformable object manipulation, bridging theoretical understanding and practical implementation in robotic systems.

PACA: Perspective-Aware Cross-Attention Representation for Zero-Shot Scene Rearrangement

Scene rearrangement, like table tidying, is a challenging task in robotic manipulation due to the complexity of predicting diverse object arrangements. Web-scale trained generative models such as Stable Diffusion can aid by generating natural scenes as goals. To facilitate robot execution, object-level representations must be extracted to match the real scenes with the generated goals and to calculate object pose transformations. Current methods typically use a multi-step design that involves separate models for generation, segmentation, and feature encoding, which can lead to a low success rate due to error accumulation. Furthermore, they lack control over the viewing perspectives of the generated goals, restricting the tasks to 3-DoF settings. In this paper, we propose PACA, a zero-shot pipeline for scene rearrangement that leverages perspective-aware cross-attention representation derived from Stable Diffusion. Specifically, we develop a representation that integrates generation, segmentation, and feature encoding into a single step to produce object-level representations. Additionally, we introduce perspective control, thus enabling the matching of 6-DoF camera views and extending past approaches that were limited to 3-DoF top-down views. The efficacy of our method is demonstrated through its zero-shot performance in real robot experiments across various scenes, achieving an average matching accuracy and execution success rate of 87% and 67%, respectively.

Feature Extractor or Decision Maker: Rethinking the Role of Visual Encoders in Visuomotor Policies

An end-to-end (E2E) visuomotor policy is typically treated as a unified whole, but recent approaches using out-of-domain (OOD) data to pretrain the visual encoder have cleanly separated the visual encoder from the network, with the remainder referred to as the policy. We propose Visual Alignment Testing, an experimental framework designed to evaluate the validity of this functional separation. Our results indicate that in E2E-trained models, visual encoders actively contribute to decision-making resulting from motor data supervision, contradicting the assumed functional separation. In contrast, OOD-pretrained models, where encoders lack this capability, experience an average performance drop of 42% in our benchmark results, compared to the state-of-the-art performance achieved by E2E policies. We believe this initial exploration of visual encoders' role can provide a first step towards guiding future pretraining methods to address their decision-making ability, such as developing task-conditioned or context-aware encoders.

Co-Designing Tools and Control Policies for Robust Manipulation

Inherent robustness in manipulation is prevalent in biological systems and critical for robotic manipulation systems due to real-world uncertainties and disturbances. This robustness relies not only on robust control policies but also on the design characteristics of the end-effectors. This paper introduces a bi-level optimization approach to co-designing tools and control policies to achieve robust manipulation. The approach employs reinforcement learning for lower-level control policy learning and multi-task Bayesian optimization for upper-level design optimization. Diverging from prior approaches, we incorporate caging-based robustness metrics into both levels, ensuring manipulation robustness against disturbances and environmental variations. Our method is evaluated in four non-prehensile manipulation environments, demonstrating improvements in task success rate under disturbances and environment changes. A real-world experiment is also conducted to validate the framework's practical effectiveness.

Forward Invariance in Trajectory Spaces for Safety-critical Control

Useful robot control algorithms should not only achieve performance objectives but also adhere to hard safety constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been developed to provably ensure system safety through forward invariance. However, they often unnecessarily sacrifice performance for safety since they are purely reactive. Receding horizon control (RHC), on the other hand, consider planned trajectories to account for the future evolution of a system. This work provides a new perspective on safety-critical control by introducing Forward Invariance in Trajectory Spaces (FITS). We lift the problem of safe RHC into the trajectory space and describe the evolution of planned trajectories as a controlled dynamical system. Safety constraints defined over states can be converted into sets in the trajectory space which we render forward invariant via a CBF framework. We derive an efficient quadratic program (QP) to synthesize trajectories that provably satisfy safety constraints. Our experiments support that FITS improves the adherence to safety specifications without sacrificing performance over alternative CBF and NMPC methods.

Adaptive Distance Functions via Kelvin Transformation

The term safety in robotics is often understood as a synonym for avoidance. Although this perspective has led to progress in path planning and reactive control, a generalization of this perspective is necessary to include task semantics relevant to contact-rich manipulation tasks, especially during teleoperation and to ensure the safety of learned policies. We introduce the semantics-aware distance function and a corresponding computational method based on the Kelvin Transformation. The semantics-aware distance generalizes signed distance functions by allowing the zero level set to lie inside of the object in regions where contact is allowed, effectively incorporating task semantics -- such as object affordances and user intent -- in an adaptive implicit representation of safe sets. In validation experiments we show the capability of our method to adapt to time-varying semantic information, and to perform queries in sub-microsecond, enabling applications in reinforcement learning, trajectory optimization, and motion planning.

Walk on Spheres for PDE-based Path Planning

In this paper, we investigate the Walk on Spheres algorithm (WoS) for motion planning in robotics. WoS is a Monte Carlo method to solve the Dirichlet problem developed in the 50s by Muller and has recently been repopularized by Sawhney and Crane, who showed its applicability for geometry processing in volumetric domains. This paper provides a first study into the applicability of WoS for robot motion planning in configuration spaces, with potential fields defined as the solution of screened Poisson equations. The experiments in this paper empirically indicate the method's trivial parallelization, its dimension-independent convergence characteristic of $O(1/N)$ in the number of walks, and a validation experiment on the RR platform.

Caging in Motion: Characterizing Robustness in Manipulation through Energy Margin and Dynamic Caging Analysis

To develop robust manipulation policies, quantifying robustness is essential. Evaluating robustness in general dexterous manipulation, nonetheless, poses significant challenges due to complex hybrid dynamics, combinatorial explosion of possible contact interactions, global geometry, etc. This paper introduces ``caging in motion'', an approach for analyzing manipulation robustness through energy margins and caging-based analysis. Our method assesses manipulation robustness by measuring the energy margin to failure and extends traditional caging concepts for a global analysis of dynamic manipulation. This global analysis is facilitated by a kinodynamic planning framework that naturally integrates global geometry, contact changes, and robot compliance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in the simulation and real-world experiments of multiple dynamic manipulation scenarios, highlighting its potential to predict manipulation success and robustness.

RealCraft: Attention Control as A Solution for Zero-shot Long Video Editing

Although large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown promising performance in synthesizing high-quality images, directly applying these models to image editing remains a significant challenge. This challenge is further amplified in video editing due to the additional dimension of time. Especially for editing real videos as it necessitates maintaining a stable semantic layout across the frames while executing localized edits precisely without disrupting the existing backgrounds. In this paper, we propose RealCraft, an attention-control-based method for zero-shot editing in real videos. By employing the object-centric manipulation of cross-attention between prompts and frames and spatial-temporal attention within the frames, we achieve precise shape-wise editing along with enhanced consistency. Our model can be used directly with Stable Diffusion and operates without the need for additional localized information. We showcase our zero-shot attention-control-based method across a range of videos, demonstrating localized, high-fidelity, shape-precise and time-consistent editing in videos of various lengths, up to 64 frames.