With large language models, robots can understand language more flexibly and more capably than ever before. This survey reviews and situates recent literature into a spectrum with two poles: 1) mapping between language and some manually defined formal representation of meaning, and 2) mapping between language and high-dimensional vector spaces that translate directly to low-level robot policy. Using a formal representation allows the meaning of the language to be precisely represented, limits the size of the learning problem, and leads to a framework for interpretability and formal safety guarantees. Methods that embed language and perceptual data into high-dimensional spaces avoid this manually specified symbolic structure and thus have the potential to be more general when fed enough data but require more data and computing to train. We discuss the benefits and trade-offs of each approach and finish by providing directions for future work that achieves the best of both worlds.

Read the paper here!

A person should be able to give a complex natural language command to a robot drone or self-driving car in a cityscale environment and have it be understood, such as “”walk along third street until the intersection with main street, then walk until you reach the charles river.” Existing approaches represent commands like these as expressions in Linear Temporal Logic, which can represent constraints such as “eventually X” and “avoid X”. This representation is powerful, but to use it requires a large dataset of language paired with LTL expressions for training the model. This paper represents the first ever framework for learning to map from English to LTL without requiring any LTL annotations at training time. We learn a semantic parsing model that does not require paired data of language and LTL logical forms, but instead learns from trajectories as a proxy. To collect trajectories on a large scale over a range

We release this data as well as the data collection procedure to simulate paths in large environments. We see the benefits of using a more expressive language such as LTL in instructions that require temporal ordering, and also see that the path taken with our approach more closely follows constraints specified in natural language. This dataset consists of 10 different environments, with up to 2,458 samples in each environment, giving us a total of 18,060 samples. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest dataset of temporal commands in existence.

You can read the paper here!

Imagine a robot trying to clean up a messy dinner table. Two main manipulation skills are required: grasping that enables the robot to pick up objects, and planar pushing that allows the robot to isolate objects in the dense clutter to find a good grasp pose. It is necessary to identify grasps within the full 6D space because top-down grasping is insufficient for objects with diverse shapes, e.g. a plate or a filled cup. Pushing operations are also essential because in real-world scenarios, the robot’s workspace can contain many objects and a collision-free direct grasp may not exist. Pushing operations can singulate objects in clutter, enabling future grasping of these isolated objects. We explore learning joint planar pushing and 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) grasping policies in a cluttered environment.

In a Q-learning framework, we jointly train two separate neural networks with reinforcement learning to maximize a reward function. The reward function is defined as only encouraging successful grasps; we do not directly reward pushing actions, because such intermediate rewards often lead to undesired behavior. We tackle the problem of limited top-down grasping
action space by integrating a 6-DoF grasping pose sampler rather than using dense pixel-wise sampling from visual inputs and only considering hard-coded top-down grasping candidates.

We evaluate our approach by task completion rate, action efficiency, and grasp accuracy in simulation and demonstrate performance on a real robot implementation. Our system shows 10% higher action efficiency and 20% higher grasp success rate than VPG, the current state-of-the-art, indicating significantly better performance in terms of both higher
prediction accuracy and quality of grasp pose selection.

This work was published at ICRA 2021. The code is here, and you can see a video here!

Humans use spatial language to describe object locations and their relations. Consider the following scenario. A tourist is looking for an ice cream truck in an amusement park. She asks a passer-by and gets the reply “the ice cream truck is behind the ticket booth.” The tourist looks at the amusement park map and locates the ticket booth. Then, she is able to infer a region corresponding to that statement and go there to search for the ice cream truck, even though the spatial preposition “behind” is inherently ambiguous.

If robots can understand spatial language, they can leverage prior knowledge possessed by humans to search for objects more efficiently, and interface with humans more naturally. This can be useful for applications such as autonomous delivery and search-and-rescue, where the customer or people at the scene communicate with the robot via natural language.

Unfortunately, humans produce diverse spatial language phrases based on their observation of the environment and knowledge of target locations, yet none of these factors are available to the robot. In addition, the robot may operate in a different area than where it was trained. The robot must generalize its ability to understand spatial language across environments.

Prior works on spatial language understanding assume referenced objects already exist in the robot’s world model or within the robot’s field of view. Works that consider partial observability do not handle ambiguous spatial prepositions or assume a robot-centric frame of reference, limiting the ability to understand diverse spatial relations that provide critical disambiguating information, such as behind the ticket booth.

We present Spatial Language Object-Oriented POMDP (SLOOP), which extends OO-POMDP (a recent work in our lab) by considering spatial language as an additional perceptual modality. To interpret ambiguous, context-dependent prepositions (e.g. behind), we design a simple convolutional neural network that predicts the language provider’s latent frame of reference (FoR) given the environment context.

We apply SLOOP to object search in city-scale environments given a spatial language description of target locations. Search strategies are computed via an online POMDP planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search.

Evaluation based on crowdsourced language data, collected over areas of five cities in OpenStreetMap, shows that our approach achieves faster search and higher success rate compared to baselines, with a wider margin as the spatial language becomes more complex.

Finally, we demonstrate the proposed method in AirSim, a realistic simulator where a drone is tasked to find cars in a neighborhood environment.

For future work, we plan to investigate compositionality in spatial language for partially observable domains.

See our video!

And download the paper!

Robots operating in human spaces must find objects such as glasses, books, or cleaning supplies that could be on the floor, shelves, or tables. This search space is naturally 3D.

When multiple objects must be searched for, such as a cup and a mobile phone, an intuitive strategy is to first hypothesize likely search regions for each target object based on semantic knowledge or past experience, then search carefully within those regions by moving the robot’s camera around the 3D environment. To be successful, it is essential for the robot to produce an efficient search policy within a designated search region under limited field of view (FOV), where target objects could be partially or completely blocked by other objects. In this work, we consider the problem setting where a robot must search for multiple objects in a search region by actively moving its camera, with as few steps as possible.

Searching for objects in a large search region requires acting over long horizons under various sources of uncertainty in a partially observable environment. For this reason, previous works have used Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) as a principled decision-theoretic framework for object search. However, to ensure the POMDP is manageable to solve, previous works reduce the search space or robot mobility to 2D, although objects exist in rich 3D environments. The key challenges lie in the intractability of maintaining exact belief due to large state space, and the high branching factor for planning due to large observation space.

In this paper, we present a POMDP formulation for multi-object search in a 3D region with a frustum-shaped field-of-view. To efficiently solve this POMDP, we propose a multi-resolution planning algorithm based on online Monte-Carlo tree search. In this approach, we design a novel octree-based belief representation to capture uncertainty of the target objects at different resolution levels, then derive abstract POMDPs at lower resolutions with dramatically smaller state and observation spaces.

Evaluation in a simulated 3D domain shows that our approach finds objects more efficiently and successfully compared to a set of baselines without resolution hierarchy in larger instances under the same computational requirement.

Finally, we demonstrate our approach on a torso-actuated mobile robot in a lab environment. The robot finds 3 out of 6 objects placed at different heights in two 10m² x 2m² regions in around 15 minutes.

You can download the paper here! The code is available at https://zkytony.github.io/3D-MOS/.

This demonstrates that such challenging POMDPs can be solved online efficiently and scalably with practicality for a real robot by extending existing general POMDP solvers with domain-specific structure and belief representation. This paper won RoboCup Best Paper Award!

Security is particularly important in robotics. A robot can sense the physical world using sensors, or directly change it with its actuators. Thus, it can leak sensitive information about its environment, or even cause physical harm if accessed by an unauthorized party. Existing work has assessed the state of industrial robot security and found a number of vulnerabilities. However, we are unaware of any studies that gauge the state of security in robotics research.

To address this problem we conducted several scans of the whole IPv4 address space, in order to identify unprotected hosts using the Robot Operating System (ROS), which is widely used in robotics research. Like many research platforms, the ROS designers made a conscious decision to exclude security mechanisms because they did not have a clear model of security threats and were not security experts themselves. The ROS master node trusts all nodes that connect to it, and thus should not be exposed to the public Internet. Nonetheless, our scans identified over 100 publicly-accessible hosts running a ROS master. Of those we found, a number of them are connected to simulators, such as Gazebo, while others appear to be real robots capable of being remotely moved in ways dangerous both to the robot and those around it.

As a qualitative case study, we also present a proof-of-concept “takeover” of one of the robots (with the consent of its owner), to demonstrate that an open ROS master indicates a robot whose sensors can be remotely accessed, and whose actuators can be remotely controlled.
This scan was eye-opening for us, too—we found two of our own robots as part of the scan, one Baxter [5] robot and one drone. Neither was intentionally made available on the public Internet, and both have the potential to cause physical harm if used inappropriately. Read more in our 2019 ICRA paper!