Semantic Masking and Visual Feature Matching for Robust Localization

We are interested in long-term deployments of autonomous robots to aid astronauts with maintenance and monitoring operations in settings such as the International Space Station. Unfortunately, such environments tend to be highly dynamic and unstructured, and their frequent reconfiguration poses a challenge for robust long-term localization of robots. Many state-of-the-art visual feature-based localization algorithms are not robust towards spatial scene changes, and SLAM algorithms, while promising, cannot run within the low-compute budget available to space robots. To address this gap, we present a computationally efficient semantic masking approach for visual feature matching that improves the accuracy and robustness of visual localization systems during long-term deployment in changing environments. Our method introduces a lightweight check that enforces matches to be within long-term static objects and have consistent semantic classes. We evaluate this approach using both map-based relocalization and relative pose estimation and show that it improves Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) and correct match ratios on the publicly available Astrobee dataset. While this approach was originally developed for microgravity robotic freeflyers, it can be applied to any visual feature matching pipeline to improve robustness.

SPOT: SE(3) Pose Trajectory Diffusion for Object-Centric Manipulation

We introduce SPOT, an object-centric imitation learning framework. The key idea is to capture each task by an object-centric representation, specifically the SE(3) object pose trajectory relative to the target. This approach decouples embodiment actions from sensory inputs, facilitating learning from various demonstration types, including both action-based and action-less human hand demonstrations, as well as cross-embodiment generalization. Additionally, object pose trajectories inherently capture planning constraints from demonstrations without the need for manually crafted rules. To guide the robot in executing the task, the object trajectory is used to condition a diffusion policy. We show improvement compared to prior work on RLBench simulated tasks. In real-world evaluation, using only eight demonstrations shot on an iPhone, our approach completed all tasks while fully complying with task constraints. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/object_centric_diffusion

PACER: Preference-conditioned All-terrain Costmap Generation

In autonomous robot navigation, terrain cost assignment is typically performed using a semantics-based paradigm in which terrain is first labeled using a pre-trained semantic classifier and costs are then assigned according to a user-defined mapping between label and cost. While this approach is rapidly adaptable to changing user preferences, only preferences over the types of terrain that are already known by the semantic classifier can be expressed. In this paper, we hypothesize that a machine-learning-based alternative to the semantics-based paradigm above will allow for rapid cost assignment adaptation to preferences expressed over new terrains at deployment time without the need for additional training. To investigate this hypothesis, we introduce and study PACER, a novel approach to costmap generation that accepts as input a single birds-eye view (BEV) image of the surrounding area along with a user-specified preference context and generates a corresponding BEV costmap that aligns with the preference context. Using both real and synthetic data along with a combination of proposed training tasks, we find that PACER is able to adapt quickly to new user preferences while also exhibiting better generalization to novel terrains compared to both semantics-based and representation-learning approaches.

Creating and Repairing Robot Programs in Open-World Domains

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce robot programs from natural language has allowed for robot systems that can complete a higher diversity of tasks. However, LLM-generated programs may be faulty, either due to ambiguity in instructions, misinterpretation of the desired task, or missing information about the world state. As these programs run, the state of the world changes and they gather new information. When a failure occurs, it is important that they recover from the current world state and avoid repeating steps that they they previously completed successfully. We propose RoboRepair, a system which traces the execution of a program up until error, and then runs an LLM-produced recovery program that minimizes repeated actions. To evaluate the efficacy of our system, we create a benchmark consisting of eleven tasks with various error conditions that require the generation of a recovery program. We compare the efficiency of the recovery program to a plan built with an oracle that has foreknowledge of future errors.

X-MOBILITY: End-To-End Generalizable Navigation via World Modeling

General-purpose navigation in challenging environments remains a significant problem in robotics, with current state-of-the-art approaches facing myriad limitations. Classical approaches struggle with cluttered settings and require extensive tuning, while learning-based methods face difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution environments. This paper introduces X-Mobility, an end-to-end generalizable navigation model that overcomes existing challenges by leveraging three key ideas. First, X-Mobility employs an auto-regressive world modeling architecture with a latent state space to capture world dynamics. Second, a diverse set of multi-head decoders enables the model to learn a rich state representation that correlates strongly with effective navigation skills. Third, by decoupling world modeling from action policy, our architecture can train effectively on a variety of data sources, both with and without expert policies: off-policy data allows the model to learn world dynamics, while on-policy data with supervisory control enables optimal action policy learning. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that X-Mobility not only generalizes effectively but also surpasses current state-of-the-art navigation approaches. Additionally, X-Mobility also achieves zero-shot Sim2Real transferability and shows strong potential for cross-embodiment generalization.

Joint Verification and Refinement of Language Models for Safety-Constrained Planning

Although pre-trained language models can generate executable plans (e.g., programmatic policies) for solving robot tasks, the generated plans may violate task-relevant logical specifications due to the models' black-box nature. A significant gap remains between the language models' outputs and verifiable executions of plans. We develop a method to generate executable plans and formally verify them against task-relevant safety specifications. Given a high-level task description in natural language, the proposed method queries a language model to generate plans in the form of executable robot programs. It then converts the generated plan into an automaton-based representation, allowing formal verification of the automaton against the specifications. We prove that given a set of verified plans, the composition of these plans also satisfies the safety specifications. This proof ensures the safety of complex, multi-component plans, obviating the computation complexity of verifying the composed plan. We then propose an automated fine-tuning process that refines the language model to generate specification-compliant plans without the need for human labeling. The empirical results show a 30 percent improvement in the probability of generating plans that meet task specifications after fine-tuning.

Lessons Learned from Developing a Human-Centered Guide Dog Robot for Mobility Assistance

While guide dogs offer essential mobility assistance, their high cost, limited availability, and care requirements make them inaccessible to most blind or low vision (BLV) individuals. Recent advances in quadruped robots provide a scalable solution for mobility assistance, but many current designs fail to meet real-world needs due to a lack of understanding of handler and guide dog interactions. In this paper, we share lessons learned from developing a human-centered guide dog robot, addressing challenges such as optimal hardware design, robust navigation, and informative scene description for user adoption. By conducting semi-structured interviews and human experiments with BLV individuals, guide-dog handlers, and trainers, we identified key design principles to improve safety, trust, and usability in robotic mobility aids. Our findings lay the building blocks for future development of guide dog robots, ultimately enhancing independence and quality of life for BLV individuals.

KinScene: Model-Based Mobile Manipulation of Articulated Scenes

Sequentially interacting with articulated objects is crucial for a mobile manipulator to operate effectively in everyday environments. To enable long-horizon tasks involving articulated objects, this study explores building scene-level articulation models for indoor scenes through autonomous exploration. While previous research has studied mobile manipulation with articulated objects by considering object kinematic constraints, it primarily focuses on individual-object scenarios and lacks extension to a scene-level context for task-level planning. To manipulate multiple object parts sequentially, the robot needs to reason about the resultant motion of each part and anticipate its impact on future actions.We introduce \ourtool{}, a full-stack approach for long-horizon manipulation tasks with articulated objects. The robot maps the scene, detects and physically interacts with articulated objects, collects observations, and infers the articulation properties. For sequential tasks, the robot plans a feasible series of object interactions based on the inferred articulation model. We demonstrate that our approach repeatably constructs accurate scene-level kinematic and geometric models, enabling long-horizon mobile manipulation in a real-world scene. Code and additional results are available at https://chengchunhsu.github.io/KinScene/

CLOVER: Context-aware Long-term Object Viewpoint- and Environment- Invariant Representation Learning

In many applications, robots can benefit from object-level understanding of their environments, including the ability to distinguish object instances and re-identify previously seen instances. Object re-identification is challenging across different viewpoints and in scenes with significant appearance variation arising from weather or lighting changes. Most works on object re-identification focus on specific classes; approaches that address general object re-identification require foreground segmentation and have limited consideration of challenges such as occlusions, outdoor scenes, and illumination changes. To address this problem, we introduce CODa Re-ID: an in-the-wild object re-identification dataset containing 1,037,814 observations of 557 objects of 8 classes under diverse lighting conditions and viewpoints. Further, we propose CLOVER, a representation learning method for object observations that can distinguish between static object instances. Our results show that CLOVER achieves superior performance in static object re-identification under varying lighting conditions and viewpoint changes, and can generalize to unseen instances and classes.

Lift, Splat, Map: Lifting Foundation Masks for Label-Free Semantic Scene Completion

Autonomous mobile robots deployed in urban environments must be context-aware, i.e., able to distinguish between different semantic entities, and robust to occlusions. Current approaches like semantic scene completion (SSC) require pre-enumerating the set of classes and costly human annotations, while representation learning methods relax these assumptions but are not robust to occlusions and learn representations tailored towards auxiliary tasks. To address these limitations, we propose LSMap, a method that lifts masks from visual foundation models to predict a continuous, open-set semantic and elevation-aware representation in bird's eye view (BEV) for the entire scene, including regions underneath dynamic entities and in occluded areas. Our model only requires a single RGBD image, does not require human labels, and operates in real time. We quantitatively demonstrate our approach outperforms existing models trained from scratch on semantic and elevation scene completion tasks with finetuning. Furthermore, we show that our pre-trained representation outperforms existing visual foundation models at unsupervised semantic scene completion. We evaluate our approach using CODa, a large-scale, real-world urban robot dataset. Supplementary visualizations, code, data, and pre-trained models, will be publicly available soon.