Jeremy A. Collins

Patrick Grady, Jeremy A. Collins, Chengcheng Tang et al. · gatech

Touch plays a fundamental role in manipulation for humans; however, machine perception of contact and pressure typically requires invasive sensors. Recent research has shown that deep models can estimate hand pressure based on a single RGB image. However, evaluations have been limited to controlled settings since collecting diverse data with ground-truth pressure measurements is difficult. We present a novel approach that enables diverse data to be captured with only an RGB camera and a cooperative participant. Our key insight is that people can be prompted to apply pressure in a certain way, and this prompt can serve as a weak label to supervise models to perform well under varied conditions. We collect a novel dataset with 51 participants making fingertip contact with diverse objects. Our network, PressureVision++, outperforms human annotators and prior work. We also demonstrate an application of PressureVision++ to mixed reality where pressure estimation allows everyday surfaces to be used as arbitrary touch-sensitive interfaces. Code, data, and models are available online.

Jeremy A. Collins, Cody Houff, You Liang Tan et al.

We present ForceSight, a system for text-guided mobile manipulation that predicts visual-force goals using a deep neural network. Given a single RGBD image combined with a text prompt, ForceSight determines a target end-effector pose in the camera frame (kinematic goal) and the associated forces (force goal). Together, these two components form a visual-force goal. Prior work has demonstrated that deep models outputting human-interpretable kinematic goals can enable dexterous manipulation by real robots. Forces are critical to manipulation, yet have typically been relegated to lower-level execution in these systems. When deployed on a mobile manipulator equipped with an eye-in-hand RGBD camera, ForceSight performed tasks such as precision grasps, drawer opening, and object handovers with an 81% success rate in unseen environments with object instances that differed significantly from the training data. In a separate experiment, relying exclusively on visual servoing and ignoring force goals dropped the success rate from 90% to 45%, demonstrating that force goals can significantly enhance performance. The appendix, videos, code, and trained models are available at https://force-sight.github.io/.

Ayush Agarwal, Ansh Gandhi, Jeremy A. Collins et al.

The scarcity of large-scale, high-quality demonstration data remains a bottleneck in scaling imitation learning for robotic manipulation. We present COBALT, a teleoperation platform designed to democratize robot learning at scale both in simulation and in the real world. By leveraging vectorized environments, our scalable, load-balanced infrastructure supports concurrent teleoperation by multiple users on a single GPU, yielding a significant reduction in teleoperation cost. Operators can connect from nearly anywhere on Earth using commonly available devices, including single or dual smartphones, VR headsets, 3D mice, and keyboards. An inmemory data cache and efficient video streaming keep control and rendering synchronous, sustaining dozens of concurrent users at 20 Hz with sub-100 ms end-to-end latency for up to 8 concurrent users per GPU. We also demonstrate stable operation supporting 256 simulated clients across 8 GPUs, underscoring the system's ability to scale across hardware and within individual servers. We perform a comprehensive user study showing that phone-based teleoperation performs comparably to or better than specialized hardware, enabling faster, more ergonomic data collection. To ensure data quality, COBALT logs a suite of real-time metrics to automatically filter suboptimal demonstrations. We further demonstrate that a structured user training curriculum significantly improves data collection quality. Guided by insights from our user study, we crowdsource the collection of a large-scale, high-quality pilot dataset with 7500+ demonstrations (50+ hours) collected with smartphones across nine countries over five days. We validate the dataset's quality by training state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms. Please visit \href{https://cobalt-teleop.github.io/}{cobalt-teleop.github.io} for more details.

Ezra Ameperosa, Jeremy A. Collins, Mrinal Jain et al.

Imitation learning in robotics faces significant challenges in generalization due to the complexity of robotic environments and the high cost of data collection. We introduce RoCoDA, a novel method that unifies the concepts of invariance, equivariance, and causality within a single framework to enhance data augmentation for imitation learning. RoCoDA leverages causal invariance by modifying task-irrelevant subsets of the environment state without affecting the policy's output. Simultaneously, we exploit SE(3) equivariance by applying rigid body transformations to object poses and adjusting corresponding actions to generate synthetic demonstrations. We validate RoCoDA through extensive experiments on five robotic manipulation tasks, demonstrating improvements in policy performance, generalization, and sample efficiency compared to state-of-the-art data augmentation methods. Our policies exhibit robust generalization to unseen object poses, textures, and the presence of distractors. Furthermore, we observe emergent behavior such as re-grasping, indicating policies trained with RoCoDA possess a deeper understanding of task dynamics. By leveraging invariance, equivariance, and causality, RoCoDA provides a principled approach to data augmentation in imitation learning, bridging the gap between geometric symmetries and causal reasoning. Project Page: https://rocoda.github.io

Jeremy A. Collins, Loránd Cheng, Kunal Aneja et al.

Action-labeled data for robotics is scarce and expensive, limiting the generalization of learned policies. In contrast, vast amounts of action-free video data are readily available, but translating these observations into effective policies remains a challenge. We introduce AMPLIFY, a novel framework that leverages large-scale video data by encoding visual dynamics into compact, discrete motion tokens derived from keypoint trajectories. Our modular approach separates visual motion prediction from action inference, decoupling the challenges of learning what motion defines a task from how robots can perform it. We train a forward dynamics model on abundant action-free videos and an inverse dynamics model on a limited set of action-labeled examples, allowing for independent scaling. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the learned dynamics are both accurate, achieving up to 3.7x better MSE and over 2.5x better pixel prediction accuracy compared to prior approaches, and broadly useful. In downstream policy learning, our dynamics predictions enable a 1.2-2.2x improvement in low-data regimes, a 1.4x average improvement by learning from action-free human videos, and the first generalization to LIBERO tasks from zero in-distribution action data. Beyond robotic control, we find the dynamics learned by AMPLIFY to be a versatile latent world model, enhancing video prediction quality. Our results present a novel paradigm leveraging heterogeneous data sources to build efficient, generalizable world models. More information can be found at https://amplify-robotics.github.io/.