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Speaker
Thursday, September 21, 2023 - 14:30 to 15:20
Gates Hall 122 and streaming via Zoom
Host:
Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Categories:
Towards Home Robots: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation in Unstructured Environments
Abstract: Robots are increasingly an important part of our world, from working in factories and hospitals to driving on city streets. As robots move into more unstructured environments such as homes, however, we need new techniques that allow robots to perform complex operations with less information about the world around them. We propose a motivating north star: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation, wherein robots must be able to reliably perform pick and place tasks of any object in any location in an unknown environment. Currently, a variety of powerful approaches exist for learning low-level skills or performing long-horizon manipulation, but these often assume access to model-based object detection and grasp generation. However, new approaches exist which allow for robots to plan and manipulate novel objects - building structures and rearranging scenes - while reducing these assumptions about task and object knowledge. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on how to learn these representations, combine them with robot task and motion planning, and use them to work towards robots that can operate in complex, human environments. Finally, I will discuss how we can benchmark and improve robotics research going forward with a look at the HomeRobot challenge at Neurips 2023.
Bio: Chris Paxton is a research scientist at Meta AI, in FAIR Labs. He previously did robotics research at NVIDIA. He got his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, focusing on using learning to create powerful task and motion planning capabilities for robots operating in human environments. His work won the ICRA 2021 best human-robot interaction paper award, and was nominated for best systems paper at CoRL 2021, among other things. His research looks at using language, perception, planning, and policy learning to make robots into general-purpose assistants.