Translating Natural Language Instructions to Computer Programs for Robot Manipulation

It is highly desirable for robots that work alongside humans to be able to understand instructions in natural language. Existing language conditioned imitation learning methods predict the actuator commands from the image observation and the instruction text. Rather than directly predicting actuator commands, we propose translating the natural language instruction to a Python function which when executed queries the scene by accessing the output of the object detector and controls the robot to perform the specified task. This enables the use of non-differentiable modules such as a constraint solver when computing commands to the robot. Moreover, the labels in this setup are significantly more descriptive computer programs rather than teleoperated demonstrations. We show that the proposed method performs better than training a neural network to directly predict the robot actions.