Towards Open-World Mobile Manipulation in Homes: Lessons from the Neurips 2023 HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge

In order to develop robots that can effectively serve as versatile and capable home assistants, it is crucial for them to reliably perceive and interact with a wide variety of objects across diverse environments. To this end, we proposed Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation as a key benchmark task for robotics: finding any object in a novel environment and placing it on any receptacle surface within that environment. We organized a NeurIPS 2023 competition featuring both simulation and real-world components to evaluate solutions to this task. Our baselines on the most challenging version of this task, using real perception in simulation, achieved only an 0.8% success rate; by the end of the competition, the best participants achieved an 10.8\% success rate, a 13x improvement. We observed that the most successful teams employed a variety of methods, yet two common threads emerged among the best solutions: enhancing error detection and recovery, and improving the integration of perception with decision-making processes. In this paper, we detail the results and methodologies used, both in simulation and real-world settings. We discuss the lessons learned and their implications for future research. Additionally, we compare performance in real and simulated environments, emphasizing the necessity for robust generalization to novel settings.

HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge 2023 Participant Report (Team KuzHum)

We report an improvements to NeurIPS 2023 HomeRobot: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) Challenge reinforcement learning baseline. More specifically, we propose more accurate semantic segmentation module, along with better place skill policy, and high-level heuristic that outperforms the baseline by 2.4% of overall success rate (sevenfold improvement) and 8.2% of partial success rate (1.75 times improvement) on Test Standard split of the challenge dataset. With aforementioned enhancements incorporated our agent scored 3rd place in the challenge on both simulation and real-world stages.

Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots

We present Habitat 3.0: a simulation platform for studying collaborative human-robot tasks in home environments. Habitat 3.0 offers contributions across three dimensions: (1) Accurate humanoid simulation: addressing challenges in modeling complex deformable bodies and diversity in appearance and motion, all while ensuring high simulation speed. (2) Human-in-the-loop infrastructure: enabling real human interaction with simulated robots via mouse/keyboard or a VR interface, facilitating evaluation of robot policies with human input. (3) Collaborative tasks: studying two collaborative tasks, Social Navigation and Social Rearrangement. Social Navigation investigates a robot's ability to locate and follow humanoid avatars in unseen environments, whereas Social Rearrangement addresses collaboration between a humanoid and robot while rearranging a scene. These contributions allow us to study end-to-end learned and heuristic baselines for human-robot collaboration in-depth, as well as evaluate them with humans in the loop. Our experiments demonstrate that learned robot policies lead to efficient task completion when collaborating with unseen humanoid agents and human partners that might exhibit behaviors that the robot has not seen before. Additionally, we observe emergent behaviors during collaborative task execution, such as the robot yielding space when obstructing a humanoid agent, thereby allowing the effective completion of the task by the humanoid agent. Furthermore, our experiments using the human-in-the-loop tool demonstrate that our automated evaluation with humanoids can provide an indication of the relative ordering of different policies when evaluated with real human collaborators. Habitat 3.0 unlocks interesting new features in simulators for Embodied AI, and we hope it paves the way for a new frontier of embodied human-AI interaction capabilities.

Is Mapping Necessary for Realistic PointGoal Navigation?

Can an autonomous agent navigate in a new environment without building an explicit map? For the task of PointGoal navigation ('Go to $\Delta x$, $\Delta y$') under idealized settings (no RGB-D and actuation noise, perfect GPS+Compass), the answer is a clear 'yes' - map-less neural models composed of task-agnostic components (CNNs and RNNs) trained with large-scale reinforcement learning achieve 100% Success on a standard dataset (Gibson). However, for PointNav in a realistic setting (RGB-D and actuation noise, no GPS+Compass), this is an open question; one we tackle in this paper. The strongest published result for this task is 71.7% Success. First, we identify the main (perhaps, only) cause of the drop in performance: the absence of GPS+Compass. An agent with perfect GPS+Compass faced with RGB-D sensing and actuation noise achieves 99.8% Success (Gibson-v2 val). This suggests that (to paraphrase a meme) robust visual odometry is all we need for realistic PointNav; if we can achieve that, we can ignore the sensing and actuation noise. With that as our operating hypothesis, we scale the dataset and model size, and develop human-annotation-free data-augmentation techniques to train models for visual odometry. We advance the state of art on the Habitat Realistic PointNav Challenge from 71% to 94% Success (+23, 31% relative) and 53% to 74% SPL (+21, 40% relative). While our approach does not saturate or 'solve' this dataset, this strong improvement combined with promising zero-shot sim2real transfer (to a LoCoBot) provides evidence consistent with the hypothesis that explicit mapping may not be necessary for navigation, even in a realistic setting.