OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to follow textual instructions to navigate through 3D environments. Traditional approaches use supervised learning methods, relying heavily on domain-specific datasets to train VLN models. Recent methods try to utilize closed-source large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to solve VLN tasks in zero-shot manners, but face challenges related to expensive token costs and potential data breaches in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce Open-Nav, a novel study that explores open-source LLMs for zero-shot VLN in the continuous environment. Open-Nav employs a spatial-temporal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning approach to break down tasks into instruction comprehension, progress estimation, and decision-making. It enhances scene perceptions with fine-grained object and spatial knowledge to improve LLM's reasoning in navigation. Our extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that Open-Nav achieves competitive performance compared to using closed-source LLMs.
NavigateDiff: Visual Predictors are Zero-Shot Navigation Assistants
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Navigating unfamiliar environments presents significant challenges for household robots, requiring the ability to recognize and reason about novel decoration and layout. Existing reinforcement learning methods cannot be directly transferred to new environments, as they typically rely on extensive mapping and exploration, leading to time-consuming and inefficient. To address these challenges, we try to transfer the logical knowledge and the generalization ability of pre-trained foundation models to zero-shot navigation. By integrating a large vision-language model with a diffusion network, our approach named \mname ~constructs a visual predictor that continuously predicts the agent's potential observations in the next step which can assist robots generate robust actions. Furthermore, to adapt the temporal property of navigation, we introduce temporal historical information to ensure that the predicted image is aligned with the navigation scene. We then carefully designed an information fusion framework that embeds the predicted future frames as guidance into goal-reaching policy to solve downstream image navigation tasks. This approach enhances navigation control and generalization across both simulated and real-world environments. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the robustness and versatility of our method, showcasing its potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of robotic navigation in diverse settings.
Joint 3D Point Cloud Segmentation Using Real-Sim Loop: From Panels to Trees and Branches
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Modern orchards are planted in structured rows with distinct panel divisions to improve management. Accurate and efficient joint segmentation of point cloud from Panel to Tree and Branch (P2TB) is essential for robotic operations. However, most current segmentation methods focus on single instance segmentation and depend on a sequence of deep networks to perform joint tasks. This strategy hinders the use of hierarchical information embedded in the data, leading to both error accumulation and increased costs for annotation and computation, which limits its scalability for real-world applications. In this study, we proposed a novel approach that incorporated a Real2Sim L-TreeGen for training data generation and a joint model (J-P2TB) designed for the P2TB task. The J-P2TB model, trained on the generated simulation dataset, was used for joint segmentation of real-world panel point clouds via zero-shot learning. Compared to representative methods, our model outperformed them in most segmentation metrics while using 40% fewer learnable parameters. This Sim2Real result highlighted the efficacy of L-TreeGen in model training and the performance of J-P2TB for joint segmentation, demonstrating its strong accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability for real-world applications. These improvements would not only greatly benefit the development of robots for automated orchard operations but also advance digital twin technology.
WildLMa: Long Horizon Loco-Manipulation in the Wild
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

'In-the-wild' mobile manipulation aims to deploy robots in diverse real-world environments, which requires the robot to (1) have skills that generalize across object configurations; (2) be capable of long-horizon task execution in diverse environments; and (3) perform complex manipulation beyond pick-and-place. Quadruped robots with manipulators hold promise for extending the workspace and enabling robust locomotion, but existing results do not investigate such a capability. This paper proposes WildLMa with three components to address these issues: (1) adaptation of learned low-level controller for VR-enabled whole-body teleoperation and traversability; (2) WildLMa-Skill -- a library of generalizable visuomotor skills acquired via imitation learning or heuristics and (3) WildLMa-Planner -- an interface of learned skills that allow LLM planners to coordinate skills for long-horizon tasks. We demonstrate the importance of high-quality training data by achieving higher grasping success rate over existing RL baselines using only tens of demonstrations. WildLMa exploits CLIP for language-conditioned imitation learning that empirically generalizes to objects unseen in training demonstrations. Besides extensive quantitative evaluation, we qualitatively demonstrate practical robot applications, such as cleaning up trash in university hallways or outdoor terrains, operating articulated objects, and rearranging items on a bookshelf.
Verifiably Following Complex Robot Instructions with Foundation Models
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

When instructing robots, users want to flexibly express constraints, refer to arbitrary landmarks, and verify robot behavior, while robots must disambiguate instructions into specifications and ground instruction referents in the real world. To address this problem, we propose Language Instruction grounding for Motion Planning (LIMP), an approach that enables robots to verifiably follow complex, open-ended instructions in real-world environments without prebuilt semantic maps. LIMP constructs a symbolic instruction representation that reveals the robot's alignment with an instructor's intended motives and affords the synthesis of correct-by-construction robot behaviors. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of LIMP on 150 instructions across five real-world environments, demonstrating its versatility and ease of deployment in diverse, unstructured domains. LIMP performs comparably to state-of-the-art baselines on standard open-vocabulary tasks and additionally achieves a 79\% success rate on complex spatiotemporal instructions, significantly outperforming baselines that only reach 38\%. See supplementary materials and demo videos at https://robotlimp.github.io
SurgPose: Generalisable Surgical Instrument Pose Estimation Using Zero-Shot Learning and Stereo Vision
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate pose estimation of surgical tools in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) is essential for surgical navigation and robot control. While traditional marker-based methods offer accuracy, they face challenges with occlusions, reflections, and tool-specific designs. Similarly, supervised learning methods require extensive training on annotated datasets, limiting their adaptability to new tools. Despite their success in other domains, zero-shot pose estimation models remain unexplored in RMIS for pose estimation of surgical instruments, creating a gap in generalising to unseen surgical tools. This paper presents a novel 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) pose estimation pipeline for surgical instruments, leveraging state-of-the-art zero-shot RGB-D models like the FoundationPose and SAM-6D. We advanced these models by incorporating vision-based depth estimation using the RAFT-Stereo method, for robust depth estimation in reflective and textureless environments. Additionally, we enhanced SAM-6D by replacing its instance segmentation module, Segment Anything Model (SAM), with a fine-tuned Mask R-CNN, significantly boosting segmentation accuracy in occluded and complex conditions. Extensive validation reveals that our enhanced SAM-6D surpasses FoundationPose in zero-shot pose estimation of unseen surgical instruments, setting a new benchmark for zero-shot RGB-D pose estimation in RMIS. This work enhances the generalisability of pose estimation for unseen objects and pioneers the application of RGB-D zero-shot methods in RMIS.
Rapid Online Learning of Hip Exoskeleton Assistance Preferences
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Hip exoskeletons are increasing in popularity due to their effectiveness across various scenarios and their ability to adapt to different users. However, personalizing the assistance often requires lengthy tuning procedures and computationally intensive algorithms, and most existing methods do not incorporate user feedback. In this work, we propose a novel approach for rapidly learning users' preferences for hip exoskeleton assistance. We perform pairwise comparisons of distinct randomly generated assistive profiles, and collect participants preferences through active querying. Users' feedback is integrated into a preference-learning algorithm that updates its belief, learns a user-dependent reward function, and changes the assistive torque profiles accordingly. Results from eight healthy subjects display distinct preferred torque profiles, and users' choices remain consistent when compared to a perturbed profile. A comprehensive evaluation of users' preferences reveals a close relationship with individual walking strategies. The tested torque profiles do not disrupt kinematic joint synergies, and participants favor assistive torques that are synchronized with their movements, resulting in lower negative power from the device. This straightforward approach enables the rapid learning of users preferences and rewards, grounding future studies on reward-based human-exoskeleton interaction.
PROBE: Proprioceptive Obstacle Detection and Estimation while Navigating in Clutter
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

In critical applications, including search-and-rescue in degraded environments, blockages can be prevalent and prevent the effective deployment of certain sensing modalities, particularly vision, due to occlusion and the constrained range of view of onboard camera sensors. To enable robots to tackle these challenges, we propose a new approach, Proprioceptive Obstacle Detection and Estimation while navigating in clutter PROBE, which instead relies only on the robot's proprioception to infer the presence or absence of occluded rectangular obstacles while predicting their dimensions and poses in SE(2). The proposed approach is a Transformer neural network that receives as input a history of applied torques and sensed whole-body movements of the robot and returns a parameterized representation of the obstacles in the environment. The effectiveness of PROBE is evaluated on simulated environments in Isaac Gym and with a real Unitree Go1 quadruped robot.
XMoP: Whole-Body Control Policy for Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Neural Motion Planning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Classical manipulator motion planners work across different robot embodiments. However they plan on a pre-specified static environment representation, and are not scalable to unseen dynamic environments. Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) are an appealing alternative to conventional planners as they incorporate different environmental constraints to learn motion policies directly from raw sensor observations. Contemporary state-of-the-art NMPs can successfully plan across different environments. However none of the existing NMPs generalize across robot embodiments. In this paper we propose Cross-Embodiment Motion Policy (XMoP), a neural policy for learning to plan over a distribution of manipulators. XMoP implicitly learns to satisfy kinematic constraints for a distribution of robots and $\textit{zero-shot}$ transfers the planning behavior to unseen robotic manipulators within this distribution. We achieve this generalization by formulating a whole-body control policy that is trained on planning demonstrations from over three million procedurally sampled robotic manipulators in different simulated environments. Despite being completely trained on synthetic embodiments and environments, our policy exhibits strong sim-to-real generalization across manipulators with different kinematic variations and degrees of freedom with a single set of frozen policy parameters. We evaluate XMoP on $7$ commercial manipulators and show successful cross-embodiment motion planning, achieving an average $70\%$ success rate on baseline benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate our policy sim-to-real on two unseen manipulators solving novel planning problems across three real-world domains even with dynamic obstacles.
SPINE: Online Semantic Planning for Missions with Incomplete Natural Language Specifications in Unstructured Environments
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

As robots become increasingly capable, users will want to describe high-level missions and have robots infer the relevant details. Because pre-built maps are difficult to obtain in many realistic settings, accomplishing such missions will require the robot to map and plan online. While many semantic planning methods operate online, they are typically designed for well specified missions such as object search or exploration. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful contextual reasoning abilities over a range of robotic tasks described in natural language. However, existing LLM-enabled planners typically do not consider online planning or complex missions; rather, relevant subtasks and semantics are provided by a pre-built map or a user. We address these limitations via SPINE, an online planner for missions with incomplete mission specifications provided in natural language. The planner uses an LLM to reason about subtasks implied by the mission specification and then realizes these subtasks in a receding horizon framework. Tasks are automatically validated for safety and refined online with new map observations. We evaluate SPINE in simulation and real-world settings with missions that require multiple steps of semantic reasoning and exploration in cluttered outdoor environments of over 20,000m$^2$. Compared to baselines that use existing LLM-enabled planning approaches, our method is over twice as efficient in terms of time and distance, requires less user interactions, and does not require a full map. Additional resources are provided at https://zacravichandran.github.io/SPINE.
QuickGrasp: Lightweight Antipodal Grasp Planning with Point Clouds
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Grasping has been a long-standing challenge in facilitating the final interface between a robot and the environment. As environments and tasks become complicated, the need to embed higher intelligence to infer from the surroundings and act on them has become necessary. Although most methods utilize techniques to estimate grasp pose by treating the problem via pure sampling-based approaches in the six-degree-of-freedom space or as a learning problem, they usually fail in real-life settings owing to poor generalization across domains. In addition, the time taken to generate the grasp plan and the lack of repeatability, owing to sampling inefficiency and the probabilistic nature of existing grasp planning approaches, severely limits their application in real-world tasks. This paper presents a lightweight analytical approach towards robotic grasp planning, particularly antipodal grasps, with little to no sampling in the six-degree-of-freedom space. The proposed grasp planning algorithm is formulated as an optimization problem towards estimating grasp points on the object surface instead of directly estimating the end-effector pose. To this extent, a soft-region-growing algorithm is presented for effective plane segmentation, even in the case of curved surfaces. An optimization-based quality metric is then used for the evaluation of grasp points to ensure indirect force closure. The proposed grasp framework is compared with the existing state-of-the-art grasp planning approach, Grasp pose detection (GPD), as a baseline over multiple simulated objects. The effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to GPD is also evaluated in a real-world setting using image and point-cloud data, with the planned grasps being executed using a ROBOTIQ gripper and UR5 manipulator.
Search-Based Path Planning in Interactive Environments Among Movable Obstacles
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates Path planning Among Movable Obstacles (PAMO), which seeks a minimum cost collision-free path among static obstacles from start to goal while allowing the robot to push away movable obstacles (i.e., objects) along its path when needed. To develop planners that are complete and optimal for PAMO, the planner has to search a giant state space involving both the location of the robot as well as the locations of the objects, which grows exponentially with respect to the number of objects. This paper leverages a simple yet under-explored idea that, only a small fraction of this giant state space needs to be searched during planning as guided by a heuristic, and most of the objects far away from the robot are intact, which thus leads to runtime efficient algorithms. Based on this idea, this paper introduces two PAMO formulations, i.e., bi-objective and resource constrained problems in an occupancy grid, and develops PAMO*, a planning method with completeness and solution optimality guarantees, to solve the two problems. We then further extend PAMO* to hybrid-state PAMO* to plan in continuous spaces with high-fidelity interaction between the robot and the objects. Our results show that, PAMO* can often find optimal solutions within a second in cluttered maps with up to 400 objects.
Motion Tracks: A Unified Representation for Human-Robot Transfer in Few-Shot Imitation Learning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Teaching robots to autonomously complete everyday tasks remains a challenge. Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful approach that imbues robots with skills via demonstrations, but is limited by the labor-intensive process of collecting teleoperated robot data. Human videos offer a scalable alternative, but it remains difficult to directly train IL policies from them due to the lack of robot action labels. To address this, we propose to represent actions as short-horizon 2D trajectories on an image. These actions, or motion tracks, capture the predicted direction of motion for either human hands or robot end-effectors. We instantiate an IL policy called Motion Track Policy (MT-pi) which receives image observations and outputs motion tracks as actions. By leveraging this unified, cross-embodiment action space, MT-pi completes tasks with high success given just minutes of human video and limited additional robot demonstrations. At test time, we predict motion tracks from two camera views, recovering 6DoF trajectories via multi-view synthesis. MT-pi achieves an average success rate of 86.5% across 4 real-world tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art IL baselines which do not leverage human data or our action space by 40%, and generalizes to scenarios seen only in human videos. Code and videos are available on our website https://portal-cornell.github.io/motion_track_policy/.
SCA3D: Enhancing Cross-Modal 3D Retrieval via 3D Shape and Caption Paired Data Augmentation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

The cross-modal 3D retrieval task aims to achieve mutual matching between text descriptions and 3D shapes. This has the potential to enhance the interaction between natural language and the 3D environment, especially within the realms of robotics and embodied artificial intelligence (AI) applications. However, the scarcity and expensiveness of 3D data constrain the performance of existing cross-modal 3D retrieval methods. These methods heavily rely on features derived from the limited number of 3D shapes, resulting in poor generalization ability across diverse scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce SCA3D, a novel 3D shape and caption online data augmentation method for cross-modal 3D retrieval. Our approach uses the LLaVA model to create a component library, captioning each segmented part of every 3D shape within the dataset. Notably, it facilitates the generation of extensive new 3D-text pairs containing new semantic features. We employ both inter and intra distances to align various components into a new 3D shape, ensuring that the components do not overlap and are closely fitted. Further, text templates are utilized to process the captions of each component and generate new text descriptions. Besides, we use unimodal encoders to extract embeddings for 3D shapes and texts based on the enriched dataset. We then calculate fine-grained cross-modal similarity using Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and enhance cross-modal matching with contrastive learning, enabling bidirectional retrieval between texts and 3D shapes. Extensive experiments show our SCA3D outperforms previous works on the Text2Shape dataset, raising the Shape-to-Text RR@1 score from 20.03 to 27.22 and the Text-to-Shape RR@1 score from 13.12 to 16.67. Codes can be found in https://github.com/3DAgentWorld/SCA3D.
Next-Best-Trajectory Planning of Robot Manipulators for Effective Observation and Exploration
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Visual observation of objects is essential for many robotic applications, such as object reconstruction and manipulation, navigation, and scene understanding. Machine learning algorithms constitute the state-of-the-art in many fields but require vast data sets, which are costly and time-intensive to collect. Automated strategies for observation and exploration are crucial to enhance the efficiency of data gathering. Therefore, a novel strategy utilizing the Next-Best-Trajectory principle is developed for a robot manipulator operating in dynamic environments. Local trajectories are generated to maximize the information gained from observations along the path while avoiding collisions. We employ a voxel map for environment modeling and utilize raycasting from perspectives around a point of interest to estimate the information gain. A global ergodic trajectory planner provides an optional reference trajectory to the local planner, improving exploration and helping to avoid local minima. To enhance computational efficiency, raycasting for estimating the information gain in the environment is executed in parallel on the graphics processing unit. Benchmark results confirm the efficiency of the parallelization, while real-world experiments demonstrate the strategy's effectiveness.