RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation
Authors: name: Ankit Goyal, name: Jie Xu, name: Yijie Guo, name: Valts Blukis, name: Yu-Wei Chao, name: Dieter Fox

For 3D object manipulation, methods that build an explicit 3D representation
perform better than those relying only on camera images. But using explicit 3D
representations like voxels comes at large computing cost, adversely affecting
scalability. In this work, we propose RVT, a multi-view transformer for 3D
manipulation that is both scalable and accurate. Some key features of RVT are
an attention mechanism to aggregate information across views and re-rendering
of the camera input from virtual views around the robot workspace. In
simulations, we find that a single RVT model works well across 18 RLBench tasks
with 249 task variations, achieving 26% higher relative success than the
existing state-of-the-art method (PerAct). It also trains 36X faster than
PerAct for achieving the same performance and achieves 2.3X the inference speed
of PerAct. Further, RVT can perform a variety of manipulation tasks in the real
world with just a few (sim10) demonstrations per task. Visual results, code,
and trained model are provided at https://robotic-view-transformer.github.io/.