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We present a challenging new benchmark and learning-environment for robot learning: RLBench. The benchmark features 100 completely unique, hand-designed tasks ranging in difficulty, from simple target reaching and door opening, to longer multi-stage tasks, such as opening an oven and placing a tray in it. We provide an array of both proprioceptive observations and visual observations, which include rgb, depth, and segmentation masks from an over-the-shoulder stereo camera and an eye-in-hand monocular camera. Uniquely, each task comes with an infinite supply of demos through the use of motion planners operating on a series of waypoints given during task creation time; enabling an exciting flurry of demonstration-based learning. RLBench has been designed with scalability in mind; new tasks, along with their motion-planned demos, can be easily created and then verified by a series of tools, allowing users to submit their own tasks to the RLBench task repository. This large-scale benchmark aims to accelerate progress in a number of vision-guided manipulation research areas, including: reinforcement learning, imitation learning, multi-task learning, geometric computer vision, and in particular, few-shot learning. With the benchmarks breadth of tasks and demonstrations, we propose the first large-scale few-shot challenge in robotics. We hope that the scale and diversity of RLBench offers unparalleled research opportunities in the robot learning community and beyond.
In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and human-object-human) interactions, describing how body-parts of each agent move with respect to each other and what spatial relations they should maintain to complete each sub-event (i.e., sub-goal). This enables the robot to infer its own movement in reaction to the human body motion, allowing it to naturally replicate such interactions. We introduce the representation of social affordance and propose a generative model for its weakly supervised learning from human demonstration videos. Our approach discovers critical steps (i.e., latent sub-events) in an interaction and the typical motion associated with them, learning what body-parts should be involved and how. The experimental results demonstrate that our Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based learning algorithm automatically discovers semantically meaningful interactive affordance from RGB-D videos, which allows us to generate appropriate full body motion for an agent.
robosuite is a simulation framework for robot learning powered by the MuJoCo physics engine. It offers a modular design for creating robotic tasks as well as a suite of benchmark environments for reproducible research. This paper discusses the key system modules and the benchmark environments of our new release robosuite v1.0.
For robots to coexist with humans in a social world like ours, it is crucial that they possess human-like social interaction skills. Programming a robot to possess such skills is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Deep Q-Network (MDQN) to enable a robot to learn human-like interaction skills through a trial and error method. This paper aims to develop a robot that gathers data during its interaction with a human and learns human interaction behaviour from the high-dimensional sensory information using end-to-end reinforcement learning. This paper demonstrates that the robot was able to learn basic interaction skills successfully, after 14 days of interacting with people.
Recent research in embodied AI has been boosted by the use of simulation environments to develop and train robot learning approaches. However, the use of simulation has skewed the attention to tasks that only require what robotics simulators can simulate: motion and physical contact. We present iGibson 2.0, an open-source simulation environment that supports the simulation of a more diverse set of household tasks through three key innovations. First, iGibson 2.0 supports object states, including temperature, wetness level, cleanliness level, and toggled and sliced states, necessary to cover a wider range of tasks. Second, iGibson 2.0 implements a set of predicate logic functions that map the simulator states to logic states like Cooked or Soaked. Additionally, given a logic state, iGibson 2.0 can sample valid physical states that satisfy it. This functionality can generate potentially infinite instances of tasks with minimal effort from the users. The sampling mechanism allows our scenes to be more densely populated with small objects in semantically meaningful locations. Third, iGibson 2.0 includes a virtual reality (VR) interface to immerse humans in its scenes to collect demonstrations. As a result, we can collect demonstrations from humans on these new types of tasks, and use them for imitation learning. We evaluate the new capabilities of iGibson 2.0 to enable robot learning of novel tasks, in the hope of demonstrating the potential of this new simulator to support new research in embodied AI. iGibson 2.0 and its new dataset will be publicly available at http://svl.stanford.edu/igibson/.
In this paper, we present a general framework for learning social affordance grammar as a spatiotemporal AND-OR graph (ST-AOG) from RGB-D videos of human interactions, and transfer the grammar to humanoids to enable a real-time motion inference for human-robot interaction (HRI). Based on Gibbs sampling, our weakly supervised grammar learning can automatically construct a hierarchical representation of an interaction with long-term joint sub-tasks of both agents and short term atomic actions of individual agents. Based on a new RGB-D video dataset with rich instances of human interactions, our experiments of Baxter simulation, human evaluation, and real Baxter test demonstrate that the model learned from limited training data successfully generates human-like behaviors in unseen scenarios and outperforms both baselines.