Never-Ending Behavior-Cloning Agent for Robotic Manipulation

📅 2024-03-01
📈 Citations: 5
Influential: 0
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career value

215K/year
🤖 AI Summary
Embodied robots struggle with 3D scene understanding and human-level task generalization in unstructured environments due to reliance on multimodal observations. Method: This paper proposes a lifelong language-conditioned behavioral cloning framework tailored for real-world scenarios. It introduces the first lifelong behavioral cloning paradigm; designs a skill-sharing semantic rendering and representation distillation module to mitigate 3D representation blind spots; and develops a skill-specific evolutionary planner enabling human-like incremental knowledge embedding in a low-rank latent space. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on a newly established lifelong manipulation benchmark, the method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. The code, dataset, and visualization results are publicly released, demonstrating strong cross-task sequential adaptability and robustness to continual learning.

Technology Category

Application Category

📝 Abstract
Relying on multi-modal observations, embodied robots could perform multiple robotic manipulation tasks in unstructured real-world environments. However, most language-conditioned behavior-cloning agents still face existing long-standing challenges, i.e., 3D scene representation and human-level task learning, when adapting into new sequential tasks in practical scenarios. We here investigate these above challenges with NBAgent in embodied robots, a pioneering language-conditioned Never-ending Behavior-cloning Agent. It can continually learn observation knowledge of novel 3D scene semantics and robot manipulation skills from skill-shared and skill-specific attributes, respectively. Specifically, we propose a skill-sharedsemantic rendering module and a skill-shared representation distillation module to effectively learn 3D scene semantics from skill-shared attribute, further tackling 3D scene representation overlooking. Meanwhile, we establish a skill-specific evolving planner to perform manipulation knowledge decoupling, which can continually embed novel skill-specific knowledge like human from latent and low-rank space. Finally, we design a never-ending embodied robot manipulation benchmark, and expensive experiments demonstrate the significant performance of our method. Visual results, code, and dataset are provided at: https://neragent.github.io.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Addresses 3D scene representation challenges in robotic manipulation
Tackles human-level task learning for language-conditioned behavior cloning
Enables continual learning of novel skills in unstructured environments
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Skill-shared semantic rendering for 3D scene representation
Skill-specific evolving planner for knowledge decoupling
Never-ending benchmark for continual robotic manipulation learning