Wenhai Liu

Qiaojun Yu, Junbo Wang, Wenhai Liu et al.

Articulated objects like cabinets and doors are widespread in daily life. However, directly manipulating 3D articulated objects is challenging because they have diverse geometrical shapes, semantic categories, and kinetic constraints. Prior works mostly focused on recognizing and manipulating articulated objects with specific joint types. They can either estimate the joint parameters or distinguish suitable grasp poses to facilitate trajectory planning. Although these approaches have succeeded in certain types of articulated objects, they lack generalizability to unseen objects, which significantly impedes their application in broader scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Generalizable Articulation Modeling and Manipulating for Articulated Objects (GAMMA), which learns both articulation modeling and grasp pose affordance from diverse articulated objects with different categories. In addition, GAMMA adopts adaptive manipulation to iteratively reduce the modeling errors and enhance manipulation performance. We train GAMMA with the PartNet-Mobility dataset and evaluate with comprehensive experiments in SAPIEN simulation and real-world Franka robot. Results show that GAMMA significantly outperforms SOTA articulation modeling and manipulation algorithms in unseen and cross-category articulated objects. We will open-source all codes and datasets in both simulation and real robots for reproduction in the final version. Images and videos are published on the project website at: http://sites.google.com/view/gamma-articulation

Guangrui Bai, Yifan Mei, Yahui Deng et al.

Explicit reconstruction constraints derived from the decoupled representation are further imposed to suppress abnormal channel amplification and chromatic noise. Experiments on LOLv2-Real, MIT-Adobe FiveK, and LSRW show that the proposed method achieves competitive or superior quantitative and visual performance, reaching 29.71 dB PSNR and 0.89 SSIM on LOLv2-Real. DarkFace experiments further indicate improved downstream face detection under low-light conditions. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/mubaisam/ICD.

Qiaojun Yu, Ce Hao, Junbo Wang et al.

Robotic manipulation in everyday scenarios, especially in unstructured environments, requires skills in pose-aware object manipulation (POM), which adapts robots' grasping and handling according to an object's 6D pose. Recognizing an object's position and orientation is crucial for effective manipulation. For example, if a mug is lying on its side, it's more effective to grasp it by the rim rather than the handle. Despite its importance, research in POM skills remains limited, because learning manipulation skills requires pose-varying simulation environments and datasets. This paper introduces ManiPose, a pioneering benchmark designed to advance the study of pose-varying manipulation tasks. ManiPose encompasses: 1) Simulation environments for POM feature tasks ranging from 6D pose-specific pick-and-place of single objects to cluttered scenes, further including interactions with articulated objects. 2) A comprehensive dataset featuring geometrically consistent and manipulation-oriented 6D pose labels for 2936 real-world scanned rigid objects and 100 articulated objects across 59 categories. 3) A baseline for POM, leveraging the inferencing abilities of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) to analyze the relationship between 6D pose and task-specific requirements, offers enhanced pose-aware grasp prediction and motion planning capabilities. Our benchmark demonstrates notable advancements in pose estimation, pose-aware manipulation, and real-robot skill transfer, setting new standards for POM research. We will open-source the ManiPose benchmark with the final version paper, inviting the community to engage with our resources, available at our website:https://sites.google.com/view/manipose.

Yi Zhang, Yinda Chen, Che Liu et al.

We present Pelican-Unified 1.0, the first embodied foundation model trained according to the principle of unification. Pelican-Unified 1.0 uses a single VLM as a unified understanding module, mapping scenes, instructions, visual contexts, and action histories into a shared semantic space. The same VLM also serves as a unified reasoning module, autoregressively producing task-, action-, and future-oriented chains of thought in a single forward pass and projecting the final hidden state into a dense latent variable. A Unified Future Generator (UFG) then conditions on this latent variable and jointly generates future videos and future actions through two modality-specific output heads within the same denoising process. The language, video, and action losses are all backpropagated into the shared representation, enabling the model to jointly optimize understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action during training, rather than training three isolated expert systems. Experiments demonstrate that unification does not imply compromise. With a single checkpoint, Pelican-Unified 1.0 achieves strong performance across all three capabilities: 64.7 on eight VLM benchmarks, the best among comparable-scale models; 66.03 on WorldArena, ranking first; and 93.5 on RoboTwin, the second-best average among compared action methods. These results show that the unified paradigm succeeds in preserving specialist strength while bringing understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action into one model.

Yang You, Wenhai Liu, Yanjie Ze et al.

Keypoint detection is an essential component for the object registration and alignment. In this work, we reckon keypoint detection as information compression, and force the model to distill out irrelevant points of an object. Based on this, we propose UKPGAN, a general self-supervised 3D keypoint detector where keypoints are detected so that they could reconstruct the original object shape. Two modules: GAN-based keypoint sparsity control and salient information distillation modules are proposed to locate those important keypoints. Extensive experiments show that our keypoints align well with human annotated keypoint labels, and can be applied to SMPL human bodies under various non-rigid deformations. Furthermore, our keypoint detector trained on clean object collections generalizes well to real-world scenarios, thus further improves geometric registration when combined with off-the-shelf point descriptors. Repeatability experiments show that our model is stable under both rigid and non-rigid transformations, with local reference frame estimation. Our code is available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/UKPGAN.

Junbo Wang, Wenhai Liu, Qiaojun Yu et al.

Articulated objects are commonly found in daily life. It is essential that robots can exhibit robust perception and manipulation skills for articulated objects in real-world robotic applications. However, existing methods for articulated objects insufficiently address noise in point clouds and struggle to bridge the gap between simulation and reality, thus limiting the practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework towards Robust Perception and Manipulation for Articulated Objects (RPMArt), which learns to estimate the articulation parameters and manipulate the articulation part from the noisy point cloud. Our primary contribution is a Robust Articulation Network (RoArtNet) that is able to predict both joint parameters and affordable points robustly by local feature learning and point tuple voting. Moreover, we introduce an articulation-aware classification scheme to enhance its ability for sim-to-real transfer. Finally, with the estimated affordable point and articulation joint constraint, the robot can generate robust actions to manipulate articulated objects. After learning only from synthetic data, RPMArt is able to transfer zero-shot to real-world articulated objects. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving state-of-the-art performance in both noise-added simulation and real-world environments. Code, data and more results can be found on the project website at https://r-pmart.github.io.

Guangrui Bai, Hailong Yan, Wenhai Liu et al.

Real-time low-light image enhancement on mobile and embedded devices requires models that balance visual quality and computational efficiency. Existing deep learning methods often rely on large networks and labeled datasets, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained platforms. In this paper, we propose LiteIE, an ultra-lightweight unsupervised enhancement framework that eliminates dependence on large-scale supervision and generalizes well across diverse conditions. We design a backbone-agnostic feature extractor with only two convolutional layers to produce compact image features enhancement tensors. In addition, we develop a parameter-free Iterative Restoration Module, which reuses the extracted features to progressively recover fine details lost in earlier enhancement steps, without introducing any additional learnable parameters. We further propose an unsupervised training objective that integrates exposure control, edge-aware smoothness, and multi-scale color consistency losses. Experiments on the LOL dataset, LiteIE achieves 19.04 dB PSNR, surpassing SOTA by 1.4 dB while using only 0.07\% of its parameters. On a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile processor, LiteIE runs at 30 FPS for 4K images with just 58 parameters, enabling real-time deployment on edge devices. These results establish LiteIE as an efficient and practical solution for low-light enhancement on resource-limited platforms.

Jun Lv, Qiaojun Yu, Lin Shao et al.

Building general-purpose robots to perform a diverse range of tasks in a large variety of environments in the physical world at the human level is extremely challenging. It requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable, compositional, and incremental. In this work, we introduce a systematic learning framework called SAGCI-system towards achieving these above four requirements. Our system first takes the raw point clouds gathered by the camera mounted on the robot's wrist as the inputs and produces initial modeling of the surrounding environment represented as a file of Unified Robot Description Format (URDF). Our system adopts a learning-augmented differentiable simulation that loads the URDF. The robot then utilizes the interactive perception to interact with the environment to online verify and modify the URDF. Leveraging the differentiable simulation, we propose a model-based learning algorithm combining object-centric and robot-centric stages to efficiently produce policies to accomplish manipulation tasks. We apply our system to perform articulated object manipulation tasks, both in the simulation and the real world. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning framework. Supplemental materials and videos are available on https://sites.google.com/view/egci.

Hanwen Cao, Hao-Shu Fang, Wenhai Liu et al.

Suction is an important solution for the longstanding robotic grasping problem. Compared with other kinds of grasping, suction grasping is easier to represent and often more reliable in practice. Though preferred in many scenarios, it is not fully investigated and lacks sufficient training data and evaluation benchmarks. To address that, firstly, we propose a new physical model to analytically evaluate seal formation and wrench resistance of a suction grasping, which are two key aspects of grasp success. Secondly, a two-step methodology is adopted to generate annotations on a large-scale dataset collected in real-world cluttered scenarios. Thirdly, a standard online evaluation system is proposed to evaluate suction poses in continuous operation space, which can benchmark different algorithms fairly without the need of exhaustive labeling. Real-robot experiments are conducted to show that our annotations align well with real world. Meanwhile, we propose a method to predict numerous suction poses from an RGB-D image of a cluttered scene and demonstrate our superiority against several previous methods. Result analyses are further provided to help readers better understand the challenges in this area. Data and source code are publicly available at www.graspnet.net.

Teng Xue, Wenhai Liu, Mingshuo Han et al.

Robotic grasp detection is a fundamental capability for intelligent manipulation in unstructured environments. Previous work mainly employed visual and tactile fusion to achieve stable grasp, while, the whole process depending heavily on regrasping, which wastes much time to regulate and evaluate. We propose a novel way to improve robotic grasping: by using learned tactile knowledge, a robot can achieve a stable grasp from an image. First, we construct a prior tactile knowledge learning framework with novel grasp quality metric which is determined by measuring its resistance to external perturbations. Second, we propose a multi-phases Bayesian Grasp architecture to generate stable grasp configurations through a single RGB image based on prior tactile knowledge. Results show that this framework can classify the outcome of grasps with an average accuracy of 86% on known objects and 79% on novel objects. The prior tactile knowledge improves the successful rate of 55% over traditional vision-based strategies.

Quanquan Shao, Jie Hu, Weiming Wang et al.

This paper focuses on robotic picking tasks in cluttered scenario. Because of the diversity of poses, types of stack and complicated background in bin picking situation, it is much difficult to recognize and estimate their pose before grasping them. Here, this paper combines Resnet with U-net structure, a special framework of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), to predict picking region without recognition and pose estimation. And it makes robotic picking system learn picking skills from scratch. At the same time, we train the network end to end with online samples. In the end of this paper, several experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of our methods.