FUNCTO: Function-Centric One-Shot Imitation Learning for Tool Manipulation

Learning tool use from a single human demonstration video offers a highly intuitive and efficient approach to robot teaching. While humans can effortlessly generalize a demonstrated tool manipulation skill to diverse tools that support the same function (e.g., pouring with a mug versus a teapot), current one-shot imitation learning (OSIL) methods struggle to achieve this. A key challenge lies in establishing functional correspondences between demonstration and test tools, considering significant geometric variations among tools with the same function (i.e., intra-function variations). To address this challenge, we propose FUNCTO (Function-Centric OSIL for Tool Manipulation), an OSIL method that establishes function-centric correspondences with a 3D functional keypoint representation, enabling robots to generalize tool manipulation skills from a single human demonstration video to novel tools with the same function despite significant intra-function variations. With this formulation, we factorize FUNCTO into three stages: (1) functional keypoint extraction, (2) function-centric correspondence establishment, and (3) functional keypoint-based action planning. We evaluate FUNCTO against exiting modular OSIL methods and end-to-end behavioral cloning methods through real-robot experiments on diverse tool manipulation tasks. The results demonstrate the superiority of FUNCTO when generalizing to novel tools with intra-function geometric variations. More details are available at https://sites.google.com/view/functo.

Robi Butler: Remote Multimodal Interactions with Household Robot Assistant

In this paper, we introduce Robi Butler, a novel household robotic system that enables multimodal interactions with remote users. Building on the advanced communication interfaces, Robi Butler allows users to monitor the robot's status, send text or voice instructions, and select target objects by hand pointing. At the core of our system is a high-level behavior module, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), that interprets multimodal instructions to generate action plans. These plans are composed of a set of open vocabulary primitives supported by Vision Language Models (VLMs) that handle both text and pointing queries. The integration of the above components allows Robi Butler to ground remote multimodal instructions in the real-world home environment in a zero-shot manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this system using a variety of daily household tasks that involve remote users giving multimodal instructions. Additionally, we conducted a user study to analyze how multimodal interactions affect efficiency and user experience during remote human-robot interaction and discuss the potential improvements.