BestMan: A Modular Mobile Manipulator Platform for Embodied AI with Unified Simulation-Hardware APIs

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) emphasizes agents' ability to perceive, understand, and act in physical environments. Simulation platforms play a crucial role in advancing this field by enabling the validation and optimization of algorithms. However, existing platforms face challenges such as multilevel technical integration complexity, insufficient modularity, interface heterogeneity, and adaptation to diverse hardware. We present BestMan, a simulation platform based on PyBullet, designed to address these issues. BestMan introduces an integrated multilevel skill chain for seamless coordination across perception, planning, and control; a highly modular architecture for flexible algorithm integration; unified interfaces for smooth simulation-to-reality transfer; and a hardware-agnostic approach for adapting to various mobile manipulator configurations. These features collectively simplify development and enhance platform expandability, making BestMan a valuable tool for Embodied AI research.

Fast-UMI: A Scalable and Hardware-Independent Universal Manipulation Interface

Collecting real-world manipulation trajectory data involving robotic arms is essential for developing general-purpose action policies in robotic manipulation, yet such data remains scarce. Existing methods face limitations such as high costs, labor intensity, hardware dependencies, and complex setup requirements involving SLAM algorithms. In this work, we introduce Fast-UMI, an interface-mediated manipulation system comprising two key components: a handheld device operated by humans for data collection and a robot-mounted device used during policy inference. Our approach employs a decoupled design compatible with a wide range of grippers while maintaining consistent observation perspectives, allowing models trained on handheld-collected data to be directly applied to real robots. By directly obtaining the end-effector pose using existing commercial hardware products, we eliminate the need for complex SLAM deployment and calibration, streamlining data processing. Fast-UMI provides supporting software tools for efficient robot learning data collection and conversion, facilitating rapid, plug-and-play functionality. This system offers an efficient and user-friendly tool for robotic learning data acquisition.

AlignBot: Aligning VLM-powered Customized Task Planning with User Reminders Through Fine-Tuning for Household Robots

This paper presents AlignBot, a novel framework designed to optimize VLM-powered customized task planning for household robots by effectively aligning with user reminders. In domestic settings, aligning task planning with user reminders poses significant challenges due to the limited quantity, diversity, and multimodal nature of the reminders. To address these challenges, AlignBot employs a fine-tuned LLaVA-7B model, functioning as an adapter for GPT-4o. This adapter model internalizes diverse forms of user reminders-such as personalized preferences, corrective guidance, and contextual assistance-into structured instruction-formatted cues that prompt GPT-4o in generating customized task plans. Additionally, AlignBot integrates a dynamic retrieval mechanism that selects task-relevant historical successes as prompts for GPT-4o, further enhancing task planning accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of AlignBot, experiments are conducted in real-world household environments, which are constructed within the laboratory to replicate typical household settings. A multimodal dataset with over 1,500 entries derived from volunteer reminders is used for training and evaluation. The results demonstrate that AlignBot significantly improves customized task planning, outperforming existing LLM- and VLM-powered planners by interpreting and aligning with user reminders, achieving 86.8% success rate compared to the vanilla GPT-4o baseline at 21.6%, reflecting a 65% improvement and over four times greater effectiveness. Supplementary materials are available at: https://yding25.com/AlignBot/

Learning 2D Invariant Affordance Knowledge for 3D Affordance Grounding

3D Object Affordance Grounding aims to predict the functional regions on a 3D object and has laid the foundation for a wide range of applications in robotics. Recent advances tackle this problem via learning a mapping between 3D regions and a single human-object interaction image. However, the geometric structure of the 3D object and the object in the human-object interaction image are not always consistent, leading to poor generalization. To address this issue, we propose to learn generalizable invariant affordance knowledge from multiple human-object interaction images within the same affordance category. Specifically, we introduce the \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{I}mage Guided Invariant-\textbf{F}eature-Aware 3D \textbf{A}ffordance \textbf{G}rounding (\textbf{MIFAG}) framework. It grounds 3D object affordance regions by identifying common interaction patterns across multiple human-object interaction images. First, the Invariant Affordance Knowledge Extraction Module (\textbf{IAM}) utilizes an iterative updating strategy to gradually extract aligned affordance knowledge from multiple images and integrate it into an affordance dictionary. Then, the Affordance Dictionary Adaptive Fusion Module (\textbf{ADM}) learns comprehensive point cloud representations that consider all affordance candidates in multiple images. Besides, the Multi-Image and Point Affordance (\textbf{MIPA}) benchmark is constructed and our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on various experimental comparisons. Project page: \url{https://goxq.github.io/mifag}

A New Clustering-based View Planning Method for Building Inspection with Drone

With the rapid development of drone technology, the application of drones equipped with visual sensors for building inspection and surveillance has attracted much attention. View planning aims to find a set of near-optimal viewpoints for vision-related tasks to achieve the vision coverage goal. This paper proposes a new clustering-based two-step computational method using spectral clustering, local potential field method, and hyper-heuristic algorithm to find near-optimal views to cover the target building surface. In the first step, the proposed method generates candidate viewpoints based on spectral clustering and corrects the positions of candidate viewpoints based on our newly proposed local potential field method. In the second step, the optimization problem is converted into a Set Covering Problem (SCP), and the optimal viewpoint subset is solved using our proposed hyper-heuristic algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to obtain better solutions with fewer viewpoints and higher coverage.

DKPROMPT: Domain Knowledge Prompting Vision-Language Models for Open-World Planning

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to robot task planning problems, where the robot receives a task in natural language and generates plans based on visual inputs. While current VLMs have demonstrated strong vision-language understanding capabilities, their performance is still far from being satisfactory in planning tasks. At the same time, although classical task planners, such as PDDL-based, are strong in planning for long-horizon tasks, they do not work well in open worlds where unforeseen situations are common. In this paper, we propose a novel task planning and execution framework, called DKPROMPT, which automates VLM prompting using domain knowledge in PDDL for classical planning in open worlds. Results from quantitative experiments show that DKPROMPT outperforms classical planning, pure VLM-based and a few other competitive baselines in task completion rate.

A Survey of Optimization-based Task and Motion Planning: From Classical To Learning Approaches

Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) integrates high-level task planning and low-level motion planning to equip robots with the autonomy to effectively reason over long-horizon, dynamic tasks. Optimization-based TAMP focuses on hybrid optimization approaches that define goal conditions via objective functions and are capable of handling open-ended goals, robotic dynamics, and physical interaction between the robot and the environment. Therefore, optimization-based TAMP is particularly suited to solve highly complex, contact-rich locomotion and manipulation problems. This survey provides a comprehensive review on optimization-based TAMP, covering (i) planning domain representations, including action description languages and temporal logic, (ii) individual solution strategies for components of TAMP, including AI planning and trajectory optimization (TO), and (iii) the dynamic interplay between logic-based task planning and model-based TO. A particular focus of this survey is to highlight the algorithm structures to efficiently solve TAMP, especially hierarchical and distributed approaches. Additionally, the survey emphasizes the synergy between the classical methods and contemporary learning-based innovations such as large language models. Furthermore, the future research directions for TAMP is discussed in this survey, highlighting both algorithmic and application-specific challenges.

MoMa-Pos: Where Should Mobile Manipulators Stand in Cluttered Environment Before Task Execution?

Mobile manipulators always need to determine feasible base positions prior to carrying out navigation-manipulation tasks. Real-world environments are often cluttered with various furniture, obstacles, and dozens of other objects. Efficiently computing base positions poses a challenge. In this work, we introduce a framework named MoMa-Pos to address this issue. MoMa-Pos first learns to predict a small set of objects that, taken together, would be sufficient for finding base positions using a graph embedding architecture. MoMa-Pos then calculates standing positions by considering furniture structures, robot models, and obstacles comprehensively. We have extensively evaluated the proposed MoMa-Pos across different settings (e.g., environment and algorithm parameters) and with various mobile manipulators. Our empirical results show that MoMa-Pos demonstrates remarkable effectiveness and efficiency in its performance, surpassing the methods in the literature. %, but also is adaptable to cluttered environments and different robot models. Supplementary material can be found at \url{https://yding25.com/MoMa-Pos}.

Adjustable Molecular Representation for Unified Pre-training Strategy

We propose a new large-scale molecular model, named AdaMR, which stands for Adjustable Molecular Representation for Unified Pre-training Strategy. Unlike recent large-scale molecular models that use a single molecular encoding, AdaMR employs a granularity-adjustable molecular encoder, learning molecular representations at both the atomic and substructure levels. For the pre-training process, we designed a task for molecular canonicalization, which involves transforming ltiple generic molecular representations into canonical representations. By adjusting the granularity of molecular encoding, the trained model can improve the effects on multiple downstream tasks, such as model attribute prediction and molecule generation. Substructure-level molecular representation retains information of specific atom groups or arrangements that determine chemical properties and have similar functions, which is beneficial for tasks like property prediction. Meanwhile, atomic-level representation, combined with generative molecular canonicalization pre-training tasks, enhances the validity, novelty, and uniqueness in generative tasks. These features of AdaMR demonstrate its strong performance in numerous downstream tasks. We use different molecular properties prediction tasks on six different datasets on MoleculeNet and two generative tasks on ZINC250K dataset to evaluate our proposed molecular encoding and pre-training methods, and obtain state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on five of these tasks.

Automatic nodule identification and differentiation in ultrasound videos to facilitate per-nodule examination

Ultrasound is a vital diagnostic technique in health screening, with the advantages of non-invasive, cost-effective, and radiation free, and therefore is widely applied in the diagnosis of nodules. However, it relies heavily on the expertise and clinical experience of the sonographer. In ultrasound images, a single nodule might present heterogeneous appearances in different cross-sectional views which makes it hard to perform per-nodule examination. Sonographers usually discriminate different nodules by examining the nodule features and the surrounding structures like gland and duct, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. To address this problem, we collected hundreds of breast ultrasound videos and built a nodule reidentification system that consists of two parts: an extractor based on the deep learning model that can extract feature vectors from the input video clips and a real-time clustering algorithm that automatically groups feature vectors by nodules. The system obtains satisfactory results and exhibits the capability to differentiate ultrasound videos. As far as we know, it's the first attempt to apply re-identification technique in the ultrasonic field.