Manikantan Nambi

Chaitanya Mitash, Fan Wang, Shiyang Lu et al.

This paper introduces Amazon Robotic Manipulation Benchmark (ARMBench), a large-scale, object-centric benchmark dataset for robotic manipulation in the context of a warehouse. Automation of operations in modern warehouses requires a robotic manipulator to deal with a wide variety of objects, unstructured storage, and dynamically changing inventory. Such settings pose challenges in perceiving the identity, physical characteristics, and state of objects during manipulation. Existing datasets for robotic manipulation consider a limited set of objects or utilize 3D models to generate synthetic scenes with limitation in capturing the variety of object properties, clutter, and interactions. We present a large-scale dataset collected in an Amazon warehouse using a robotic manipulator performing object singulation from containers with heterogeneous contents. ARMBench contains images, videos, and metadata that corresponds to 235K+ pick-and-place activities on 190K+ unique objects. The data is captured at different stages of manipulation, i.e., pre-pick, during transfer, and after placement. Benchmark tasks are proposed by virtue of high-quality annotations and baseline performance evaluation are presented on three visual perception challenges, namely 1) object segmentation in clutter, 2) object identification, and 3) defect detection. ARMBench can be accessed at http://armbench.com

Carl Qi, Xiaojie Wang, Silong Yong et al.

Reasoning about failures is crucial for building reliable and trustworthy robotic systems. Prior approaches either treat failure reasoning as a closed-set classification problem or assume access to ample human annotations. Failures in the real world are typically subtle, combinatorial, and difficult to enumerate, whereas rich reasoning labels are expensive to acquire. We address this problem by introducing ARMOR: Adaptive Round-based Multi-task mOdel for Robotic failure detection and reasoning. We formulate detection and reasoning as a multi-task self-refinement process, where the model iteratively predicts detection outcomes and natural language reasoning conditioned on past outputs. During training, ARMOR learns from heterogeneous supervision - large-scale sparse binary labels and small-scale rich reasoning annotations - optimized via a combination of offline and online imitation learning. At inference time, ARMOR generates multiple refinement trajectories and selects the most confident prediction via a self-certainty metric. Experiments across diverse environments show that ARMOR achieves state-of-the-art performance by improving over the previous approaches by up to 30% on failure detection rate and up to 100% in reasoning measured through LLM fuzzy match score, demonstrating robustness to heterogeneous supervision and open-ended reasoning beyond predefined failure modes. We provide dditional visualizations on our website: https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/armor