Diffusing in Someone Else's Shoes: Robotic Perspective Taking with Diffusion

Humanoid robots can benefit from their similarity to the human shape by learning from humans. When humans teach other humans how to perform actions, they often demonstrate the actions and the learning human can try to imitate the demonstration. Being able to mentally transfer from a demonstration seen from a third-person perspective to how it should look from a first-person perspective is fundamental for this ability in humans. As this is a challenging task, it is often simplified for robots by creating a demonstration in the first-person perspective. Creating these demonstrations requires more effort but allows for an easier imitation. We introduce a novel diffusion model aimed at enabling the robot to directly learn from the third-person demonstrations. Our model is capable of learning and generating the first-person perspective from the third-person perspective by translating the size and rotations of objects and the environment between two perspectives. This allows us to utilise the benefits of easy-to-produce third-person demonstrations and easy-to-imitate first-person demonstrations. The model can either represent the first-person perspective in an RGB image or calculate the joint values. Our approach significantly outperforms other image-to-image models in this task.