Robot See Robot Do: Imitating Articulated Object Manipulation with
  Monocular 4D Reconstruction
Authors: name: Justin Kerr; name: Chung Min Kim; name: Mingxuan Wu; name: Brent Yi; name: Qianqian Wang; name: Ken Goldberg; name: Angjoo Kanazawa
Published: 2024-09-26 17:57:16

Abstract: Humans can learn to manipulate new objects by simply watching others;
providing robots with the ability to learn from such demonstrations would
enable a natural interface specifying new behaviors. This work develops Robot
See Robot Do (RSRD), a method for imitating articulated object manipulation
from a single monocular RGB human demonstration given a single static
multi-view object scan. We first propose 4D Differentiable Part Models
(4D-DPM), a method for recovering 3D part motion from a monocular video with
differentiable rendering. This analysis-by-synthesis approach uses part-centric
feature fields in an iterative optimization which enables the use of geometric
regularizers to recover 3D motions from only a single video. Given this 4D
reconstruction, the robot replicates object trajectories by planning bimanual
arm motions that induce the demonstrated object part motion. By representing
demonstrations as part-centric trajectories, RSRD focuses on replicating the
demonstration's intended behavior while considering the robot's own
morphological limits, rather than attempting to reproduce the hand's motion. We
evaluate 4D-DPM's 3D tracking accuracy on ground truth annotated 3D part
trajectories and RSRD's physical execution performance on 9 objects across 10
trials each on a bimanual YuMi robot. Each phase of RSRD achieves an average of
87% success rate, for a total end-to-end success rate of 60% across 90 trials.
Notably, this is accomplished using only feature fields distilled from large
pretrained vision models -- without any task-specific training, fine-tuning,
dataset collection, or annotation. Project page:
https://robot-see-robot-do.github.io