VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with
  Language Models
Authors: name: Wenlong Huang; name: Chen Wang; name: Ruohan Zhang; name: Yunzhu Li; name: Jiajun Wu; name: Li Fei-Fei
Published: 2023-07-12 07:40:48

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable
knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning
and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion
primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which
remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot
trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a
large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an
open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at
inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction.
More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can
interact with a visual-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground
the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps
are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize
closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We
further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online
experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve
contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed
method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to
perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form
natural language. Project website: https://voxposer.github.io