MuBlE: MuJoCo and Blender simulation Environment and Benchmark for Task Planning in Robot Manipulation

Current embodied reasoning agents struggle to plan for long-horizon tasks that require to physically interact with the world to obtain the necessary information (e.g. 'sort the objects from lightest to heaviest'). The improvement of the capabilities of such an agent is highly dependent on the availability of relevant training environments. In order to facilitate the development of such systems, we introduce a novel simulation environment (built on top of robosuite) that makes use of the MuJoCo physics engine and high-quality renderer Blender to provide realistic visual observations that are also accurate to the physical state of the scene. It is the first simulator focusing on long-horizon robot manipulation tasks preserving accurate physics modeling. MuBlE can generate mutlimodal data for training and enable design of closed-loop methods through environment interaction on two levels: visual - action loop, and control - physics loop. Together with the simulator, we propose SHOP-VRB2, a new benchmark composed of 10 classes of multi-step reasoning scenarios that require simultaneous visual and physical measurements.

Closed Loop Interactive Embodied Reasoning for Robot Manipulation

Embodied reasoning systems integrate robotic hardware and cognitive processes to perform complex tasks typically in response to a natural language query about a specific physical environment. This usually involves changing the belief about the scene or physically interacting and changing the scene (e.g. 'Sort the objects from lightest to heaviest'). In order to facilitate the development of such systems we introduce a new simulating environment that makes use of MuJoCo physics engine and high-quality renderer Blender to provide realistic visual observations that are also accurate to the physical state of the scene. Together with the simulator we propose a new benchmark composed of 10 classes of multi-step reasoning scenarios that require simultaneous visual and physical measurements. Finally, we develop a new modular Closed Loop Interactive Reasoning (CLIER) approach that takes into account the measurements of non-visual object properties, changes in the scene caused by external disturbances as well as uncertain outcomes of robotic actions. We extensively evaluate our reasoning approach in simulation and in the real world manipulation tasks with a success rate above 76% and 64%, respectively.

SWAGS: Sampling Windows Adaptively for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting

Novel view synthesis has shown rapid progress recently, with methods capable of producing evermore photo-realistic results. 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a particularly promising method, producing high-quality renderings of static scenes and enabling interactive viewing at real-time frame rates. However, it is currently limited to static scenes only. In this work, we extend 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct dynamic scenes. We model the dynamics of a scene using a tunable MLP, which learns the deformation field from a canonical space to a set of 3D Gaussians per frame. To disentangle the static and dynamic parts of the scene, we learn a tuneable parameter for each Gaussian, which weighs the respective MLP parameters to focus attention on the dynamic parts. This improves the model's ability to capture dynamics in scenes with an imbalance of static to dynamic regions. To handle scenes of arbitrary length whilst maintaining high rendering quality, we introduce an adaptive window sampling strategy to partition the sequence into windows based on the amount of movement in the sequence. We train a separate dynamic Gaussian Splatting model for each window, allowing the canonical representation to change, thus enabling the reconstruction of scenes with significant geometric or topological changes. Temporal consistency is enforced using a fine-tuning step with self-supervising consistency loss on randomly sampled novel views. As a result, our method produces high-quality renderings of general dynamic scenes with competitive quantitative performance, which can be viewed in real-time with our dynamic interactive viewer.

Self-supervised HDR Imaging from Motion and Exposure Cues

Recent High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques extend the capabilities of current cameras where scenes with a wide range of illumination can not be accurately captured with a single low-dynamic-range (LDR) image. This is generally accomplished by capturing several LDR images with varying exposure values whose information is then incorporated into a merged HDR image. While such approaches work well for static scenes, dynamic scenes pose several challenges, mostly related to the difficulty of finding reliable pixel correspondences. Data-driven approaches tackle the problem by learning an end-to-end mapping with paired LDR-HDR training data, but in practice generating such HDR ground-truth labels for dynamic scenes is time-consuming and requires complex procedures that assume control of certain dynamic elements of the scene (e.g. actor pose) and repeatable lighting conditions (stop-motion capturing). In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised approach for learnable HDR estimation that alleviates the need for HDR ground-truth labels. We propose to leverage the internal statistics of LDR images to create HDR pseudo-labels. We separately exploit static and well-exposed parts of the input images, which in conjunction with synthetic illumination clipping and motion augmentation provide high quality training examples. Experimental results show that the HDR models trained using our proposed self-supervision approach achieve performance competitive with those trained under full supervision, and are to a large extent superior to previous methods that equally do not require any supervision.

SHOP-VRB: A Visual Reasoning Benchmark for Object Perception

In this paper we present an approach and a benchmark for visual reasoning in robotics applications, in particular small object grasping and manipulation. The approach and benchmark are focused on inferring object properties from visual and text data. It concerns small household objects with their properties, functionality, natural language descriptions as well as question-answer pairs for visual reasoning queries along with their corresponding scene semantic representations. We also present a method for generating synthetic data which allows to extend the benchmark to other objects or scenes and propose an evaluation protocol that is more challenging than in the existing datasets. We propose a reasoning system based on symbolic program execution. A disentangled representation of the visual and textual inputs is obtained and used to execute symbolic programs that represent a 'reasoning process' of the algorithm. We perform a set of experiments on the proposed benchmark and compare to results for the state of the art methods. These results expose the shortcomings of the existing benchmarks that may lead to misleading conclusions on the actual performance of the visual reasoning systems.