ManipLLM: Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Xiaoqi Li, Mingxu Zhang, Yiran Geng, Haoran Geng, Yuxing Long, Yan Shen, Renrui Zhang, Jiaming Liu, Hao Dong

Robot manipulation relies on accurately predicting contact points and end-effector directions to ensure successful operation. However learning-based robot manipulation trained on a limited category within a simulator often struggles to achieve generalizability especially when confronted with extensive categories. Therefore we introduce an innovative approach for robot manipulation that leverages the robust reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance the stability and generalization of manipulation. By fine-tuning the injected adapters we preserve the inherent common sense and reasoning ability of the MLLMs while equipping them with the ability for manipulation. The fundamental insight lies in the introduced fine-tuning paradigm encompassing object category understanding affordance prior reasoning and object-centric pose prediction to stimulate the reasoning ability of MLLM in manipulation. During inference our approach utilizes an RGB image and text prompt to predict the end effector's pose in chain of thoughts. After the initial contact is established an active impedance adaptation policy is introduced to plan the upcoming waypoints in a closed-loop manner. Moreover in real world we design a test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for manipulation to enable the model better adapt to the current real-world scene configuration. Experiments in simulator and real-world show the promising performance of ManipLLM. More details and demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/manipllm.