ManiBox: Enhancing Spatial Grasping Generalization via Scalable Simulation Data Generation

Learning a precise robotic grasping policy is crucial for embodied agents operating in complex real-world manipulation tasks. Despite significant advancements, most models still struggle with accurate spatial positioning of objects to be grasped. We first show that this spatial generalization challenge stems primarily from the extensive data requirements for adequate spatial understanding. However, collecting such data with real robots is prohibitively expensive, and relying on simulation data often leads to visual generalization gaps upon deployment. To overcome these challenges, we then focus on state-based policy generalization and present \textbf{ManiBox}, a novel bounding-box-guided manipulation method built on a simulation-based teacher-student framework. The teacher policy efficiently generates scalable simulation data using bounding boxes, which are proven to uniquely determine the objects' spatial positions. The student policy then utilizes these low-dimensional spatial states to enable zero-shot transfer to real robots. Through comprehensive evaluations in simulated and real-world environments, ManiBox demonstrates a marked improvement in spatial grasping generalization and adaptability to diverse objects and backgrounds. Further, our empirical study into scaling laws for policy performance indicates that spatial volume generalization scales positively with data volume. For a certain level of spatial volume, the success rate of grasping empirically follows Michaelis-Menten kinetics relative to data volume, showing a saturation effect as data increases. Our videos and code are available in https://thkkk.github.io/manibox.

RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation is essential in robotics, yet developing foundation models is extremely challenging due to the inherent complexity of coordinating two robot arms (leading to multi-modal action distributions) and the scarcity of training data. In this paper, we present the Robotics Diffusion Transformer (RDT), a pioneering diffusion foundation model for bimanual manipulation. RDT builds on diffusion models to effectively represent multi-modality, with innovative designs of a scalable Transformer to deal with the heterogeneity of multi-modal inputs and to capture the nonlinearity and high frequency of robotic data. To address data scarcity, we further introduce a Physically Interpretable Unified Action Space, which can unify the action representations of various robots while preserving the physical meanings of original actions, facilitating learning transferrable physical knowledge. With these designs, we managed to pre-train RDT on the largest collection of multi-robot datasets to date and scaled it up to 1.2B parameters, which is the largest diffusion-based foundation model for robotic manipulation. We finally fine-tuned RDT on a self-created multi-task bimanual dataset with over 6K+ episodes to refine its manipulation capabilities. Experiments on real robots demonstrate that RDT significantly outperforms existing methods. It exhibits zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and scenes, understands and follows language instructions, learns new skills with just 1~5 demonstrations, and effectively handles complex, dexterous tasks. We refer to https://rdt-robotics.github.io/rdt-robotics/ for the code and videos.

Fourier Controller Networks for Real-Time Decision-Making in Embodied Learning

Reinforcement learning is able to obtain generalized low-level robot policies on diverse robotics datasets in embodied learning scenarios, and Transformer has been widely used to model time-varying features. However, it still suffers from the issues of low data efficiency and high inference latency. In this paper, we propose to investigate the task from a new perspective of the frequency domain. We first observe that the energy density in the frequency domain of a robot's trajectory is mainly concentrated in the low-frequency part. Then, we present the Fourier Controller Network (FCNet), a new network that utilizes the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to extract and encode time-varying features through frequency domain interpolation. We further achieve parallel training and efficient recurrent inference by using FFT and Sliding DFT methods in the model architecture for real-time decision-making. Comprehensive analyses in both simulated (e.g., D4RL) and real-world environments (e.g., robot locomotion) demonstrate FCNet's substantial efficiency and effectiveness over existing methods such as Transformer, e.g., FCNet outperforms Transformer on multi-environmental robotics datasets of all types of sizes (from 1.9M to 120M). The project page and code can be found https://thkkk.github.io/fcnet.