Towards Generalist Robot Policies: What Matters in Building Vision-Language-Action Models

Foundation Vision Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong capabilities in multi-modal representation learning, comprehension, and reasoning. By injecting action components into the VLMs, Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) can be naturally formed and also show promising performance. Existing work has demonstrated the effectiveness and generalization of VLAs in multiple scenarios and tasks. Nevertheless, the transfer from VLMs to VLAs is not trivial since existing VLAs differ in their backbones, action-prediction formulations, data distributions, and training recipes. This leads to a missing piece for a systematic understanding of the design choices of VLAs. In this work, we disclose the key factors that significantly influence the performance of VLA and focus on answering three essential design choices: which backbone to select, how to formulate the VLA architectures, and when to add cross-embodiment data. The obtained results convince us firmly to explain why we need VLA and develop a new family of VLAs, RoboVLMs, which require very few manual designs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance in three simulation tasks and real-world experiments. Through our extensive experiments, which include over 8 VLM backbones, 4 policy architectures, and over 600 distinct designed experiments, we provide a detailed guidebook for the future design of VLAs. In addition to the study, the highly flexible RoboVLMs framework, which supports easy integrations of new VLMs and free combinations of various design choices, is made public to facilitate future research. We open-source all details, including codes, models, datasets, and toolkits, along with detailed training and evaluation recipes at: robovlms.github.io.

RH20T: A Robotic Dataset for Learning Diverse Skills in One-Shot

A key challenge in robotic manipulation in open domains is how to acquire diverse and generalizable skills for robots. Recent research in one-shot imitation learning has shown promise in transferring trained policies to new tasks based on demonstrations. This feature is attractive for enabling robots to acquire new skills and improving task and motion planning. However, due to limitations in the training dataset, the current focus of the community has mainly been on simple cases, such as push or pick-place tasks, relying solely on visual guidance. In reality, there are many complex skills, some of which may even require both visual and tactile perception to solve. This paper aims to unlock the potential for an agent to generalize to hundreds of real-world skills with multi-modal perception. To achieve this, we have collected a dataset comprising over 110,000 \emph{contact-rich} robot manipulation sequences across diverse skills, contexts, robots, and camera viewpoints, all collected \emph{in the real world}. Each sequence in the dataset includes visual, force, audio, and action information, along with a corresponding human demonstration video. We have invested significant efforts in calibrating all the sensors and ensuring a high-quality dataset. The dataset is made publicly available at rh20t.github.io

AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains

As the basis for prehensile manipulation, it is vital to enable robots to grasp as robustly as humans. In daily manipulation, our grasping system is prompt, accurate, flexible and continuous across spatial and temporal domains. Few existing methods cover all these properties for robot grasping. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for grasp perception to enable robots these abilities. Specifically, we develop a dense supervision strategy with real perception and analytic labels in the spatial-temporal domain. Additional awareness of objects' center-of-mass is incorporated into the learning process to help improve grasping stability. Utilization of grasp correspondence across observations enables dynamic grasp tracking. Our model, AnyGrasp, can generate accurate, full-DoF, dense and temporally-smooth grasp poses efficiently, and works robustly against large depth sensing noise. Embedded with AnyGrasp, we achieve a 93.3% success rate when clearing bins with over 300 unseen objects, which is comparable with human subjects under controlled conditions. Over 900 MPPH is reported on a single-arm system. For dynamic grasping, we demonstrate catching swimming robot fish in the water.