Marion Lepert

Marion Lepert, Jiaying Fang, Jeannette Bohg

Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation policies directly from human video demonstrations, requiring no robot data. Our method converts human demonstrations into robot-compatible observation-action pairs using hand pose estimation and visual data editing. We inpaint the human arm and overlay a rendered robot to align the visual domains. This enables zero-shot deployment on real hardware without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate strong success rates-up to 92%-on a range of tasks including deformable object manipulation, multi-object sweeping, and insertion. Our approach generalizes to novel environments and supports closed-loop execution. By demonstrating that effective policies can be trained using only human videos, our method broadens the path to scalable robot learning.

Marion Lepert, Jiaying Fang, Jeannette Bohg

Robot manipulation research still suffers from significant data scarcity: even the largest robot datasets are orders of magnitude smaller and less diverse than those that fueled recent breakthroughs in language and vision. We introduce Masquerade, a method that edits in-the-wild egocentric human videos to bridge the visual embodiment gap between humans and robots and then learns a robot policy with these edited videos. Our pipeline turns each human video into robotized demonstrations by (i) estimating 3-D hand poses, (ii) inpainting the human arms, and (iii) overlaying a rendered bimanual robot that tracks the recovered end-effector trajectories. Pre-training a visual encoder to predict future 2-D robot keypoints on 675K frames of these edited clips, and continuing that auxiliary loss while fine-tuning a diffusion policy head on only 50 robot demonstrations per task, yields policies that generalize significantly better than prior work. On three long-horizon, bimanual kitchen tasks evaluated in three unseen scenes each, Masquerade outperforms baselines by 5-6x. Ablations show that both the robot overlay and co-training are indispensable, and performance scales logarithmically with the amount of edited human video. These results demonstrate that explicitly closing the visual embodiment gap unlocks a vast, readily available source of data from human videos that can be used to improve robot policies.

Jimmy Wu, Rika Antonova, Adam Kan et al.

For a robot to personalize physical assistance effectively, it must learn user preferences that can be generally reapplied to future scenarios. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up rooms by picking up objects and putting them away. A key challenge is determining the proper place to put each object, as people's preferences can vary greatly depending on personal taste or cultural background. For instance, one person may prefer storing shirts in the drawer, while another may prefer them on the shelf. We aim to build systems that can learn such preferences from just a handful of examples via prior interactions with a particular person. We show that robots can combine language-based planning and perception with the few-shot summarization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to infer generalized user preferences that are broadly applicable to future interactions. This approach enables fast adaptation and achieves 91.2% accuracy on unseen objects in our benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate our approach on a real-world mobile manipulator called TidyBot, which successfully puts away 85.0% of objects in real-world test scenarios.

Claire Chen, Preston Culbertson, Marion Lepert et al.

Dexterous manipulation tasks often require contact switching, where fingers make and break contact with the object. We propose a method that plans trajectories for dexterous manipulation tasks involving contact switching using contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) augmented with a high-level discrete contact sequence planner. We first use the high-level planner to find a sequence of finger contact switches given a desired object trajectory. With this contact sequence plan, we impose additional constraints in the CITO problem. We show that our method finds trajectories approximately 7 times faster than a general CITO baseline for a four-finger planar manipulation scenario. Furthermore, when executing the planned trajectories in a full dynamics simulator, we are able to more closely track the object pose trajectories planned by our method than those planned by the baselines.