Kazuhiro Sasabuchi

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

We introduce a pipeline that enhances a general-purpose Vision Language Model, GPT-4V(ision), to facilitate one-shot visual teaching for robotic manipulation. This system analyzes videos of humans performing tasks and outputs executable robot programs that incorporate insights into affordances. The process begins with GPT-4V analyzing the videos to obtain textual explanations of environmental and action details. A GPT-4-based task planner then encodes these details into a symbolic task plan. Subsequently, vision systems spatially and temporally ground the task plan in the videos. Objects are identified using an open-vocabulary object detector, and hand-object interactions are analyzed to pinpoint moments of grasping and releasing. This spatiotemporal grounding allows for the gathering of affordance information (e.g., grasp types, waypoints, and body postures) critical for robot execution. Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate the method's efficacy in enabling real robots to operate from one-shot human demonstrations. Meanwhile, quantitative tests have revealed instances of hallucination in GPT-4V, highlighting the importance of incorporating human supervision within the pipeline. The prompts of GPT-4V/GPT-4 are available at this project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GPT4Vision-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts/

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

This technical report explores the ability of ChatGPT in recognizing emotions from text, which can be the basis of various applications like interactive chatbots, data annotation, and mental health analysis. While prior research has shown ChatGPT's basic ability in sentiment analysis, its performance in more nuanced emotion recognition is not yet explored. Here, we conducted experiments to evaluate its performance of emotion recognition across different datasets and emotion labels. Our findings indicate a reasonable level of reproducibility in its performance, with noticeable improvement through fine-tuning. However, the performance varies with different emotion labels and datasets, highlighting an inherent instability and possible bias. The choice of dataset and emotion labels significantly impacts ChatGPT's emotion recognition performance. This paper sheds light on the importance of dataset and label selection, and the potential of fine-tuning in enhancing ChatGPT's emotion recognition capabilities, providing a groundwork for better integration of emotion analysis in applications using ChatGPT.

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

Video action localization aims to find the timings of specific actions from a long video. Although existing learning-based approaches have been successful, they require annotating videos, which comes with a considerable labor cost. This paper proposes a training-free, open-vocabulary approach based on emerging off-the-shelf vision-language models (VLMs). The challenge stems from the fact that VLMs are neither designed to process long videos nor tailored for finding actions. We overcome these problems by extending an iterative visual prompting technique. Specifically, we sample video frames and create a concatenated image with frame index labels, allowing a VLM to identify the frames that most likely correspond to the start and end of the action. By iteratively narrowing the sampling window around the selected frames, the estimation gradually converges to more precise temporal boundaries. We demonstrate that this technique yields reasonable performance, achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot action localization. These results support the use of VLMs as a practical tool for understanding videos. Sample code is available at https://microsoft.github.io/VLM-Video-Action-Localization/

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

This technical paper introduces a chatting robot system that utilizes recent advancements in large-scale language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT. The system is integrated with a co-speech gesture generation system, which selects appropriate gestures based on the conceptual meaning of speech. Our motivation is to explore ways of utilizing the recent progress in LLMs for practical robotic applications, which benefits the development of both chatbots and LLMs. Specifically, it enables the development of highly responsive chatbot systems by leveraging LLMs and adds visual effects to the user interface of LLMs as an additional value. The source code for the system is available on GitHub for our in-house robot (https://github.com/microsoft/LabanotationSuite/tree/master/MSRAbotChatSimulation) and GitHub for Toyota HSR (https://github.com/microsoft/GPT-Enabled-HSR-CoSpeechGestures).

Naoki Wake, Daichi Saito, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

This study investigates how text-driven object affordance, which provides prior knowledge about grasp types for each object, affects image-based grasp-type recognition in robot teaching. The researchers created labeled datasets of first-person hand images to examine the impact of object affordance on recognition performance. They evaluated scenarios with real and illusory objects, considering mixed reality teaching conditions where visual object information may be limited. The results demonstrate that object affordance improves image-based recognition by filtering out unlikely grasp types and emphasizing likely ones. The effectiveness of object affordance was more pronounced when there was a stronger bias towards specific grasp types for each object. These findings highlight the significance of object affordance in multimodal robot teaching, regardless of whether real objects are present in the images. Sample code is available on https://github.com/microsoft/arr-grasp-type-recognition.

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Jun Takamatsu et al.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating Behavior Trees (BTs) has recently gained attention in the robotics community, yet remains in its early stages of development. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interactively generate and edit BTs that address visual conditions, enabling context-aware robot operations in visually complex environments. A key feature of our approach lies in the conditional control through self-prompted visual conditions. Specifically, the VLM generates BTs with visual condition nodes, where conditions are expressed as free-form text. Another VLM process integrates the text into its prompt and evaluates the conditions against real-world images during robot execution. We validated our framework in a real-world cafe scenario, demonstrating both its feasibility and limitations.

Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira et al.

Recent large language models (LLMs) are capable of planning robot actions. In this paper, we explore how LLMs can be used for planning actions with tasks involving situational human-robot interaction (HRI). A key problem of applying LLMs in situational HRI is balancing between "respecting the current human's activity" and "prioritizing the robot's task," as well as understanding the timing of when to use the LLM to generate an action plan. In this paper, we propose a necessary plan-and-act skill design to solve the above problems. We show that a critical factor for enabling a robot to switch between passive / active interaction behavior is to provide the LLM with an action text about the current robot's action. We also show that a second-stage question to the LLM (about the next timing to call the LLM) is necessary for planning actions at an appropriate timing. The skill design is applied to an Engage skill and is tested on four distinct interaction scenarios. We show that by using the skill design, LLMs can be leveraged to easily scale to different HRI scenarios with a reasonable success rate reaching 90% on the test scenarios.

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Daichi Saito et al.

Multi-step dexterous manipulation is a fundamental skill in household scenarios, yet remains an underexplored area in robotics. This paper proposes a modular approach, where each step of the manipulation process is addressed with dedicated policies based on effective modality input, rather than relying on a single end-to-end model. To demonstrate this, a dexterous robotic hand performs a manipulation task involving picking up and rotating a box. Guided by insights from neuroscience, the task is decomposed into three sub-skills, 1)reaching, 2)grasping and lifting, and 3)in-hand rotation, based on the dominant sensory modalities employed in the human brain. Each sub-skill is addressed using distinct methods from a practical perspective: a classical controller, a Vision-Language-Action model, and a reinforcement learning policy with force feedback, respectively. We tested the pipeline on a real robot to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. The key contribution of this study lies in presenting a neuroscience-inspired, modality-driven methodology for multi-step dexterous manipulation.

Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira et al.

In human-robot interaction (HRI), the beginning of an interaction is often complex. Whether the robot should communicate with the human is dependent on several situational factors (e.g., the current human's activity, urgency of the interaction, etc.). We test whether large language models (LLM) and vision language models (VLM) can provide solutions to this problem. We compare four different system-design patterns using LLMs and VLMs, and test on a test set containing 84 human-robot situations. The test set mixes several publicly available datasets and also includes situations where the appropriate action to take is open-ended. Our results using the GPT-4o and Phi-3 Vision model indicate that LLMs and VLMs are capable of handling interaction beginnings when the desired actions are clear, however, challenge remains in the open-ended situations where the model must balance between the human and robot situation.

Jun Takamatsu, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

Robots are strongly expected as a means of replacing human tasks. If a robot has a human-like physicality, the possibility of replacing human tasks increases. In the case of household service robots, it is desirable for them to be on a human-like size so that they do not become excessively large in order to coexist with humans in their operating environment. However, robots with size limitations tend to have difficulty solving inverse kinematics (IK) due to mechanical limitations, such as joint angle limitations. Conversely, if the difficulty coming from this limitation could be mitigated, one can expect that the use of such robots becomes more valuable. In numerical IK solver, which is commonly used for robots with higher degrees-of-freedom (DOF), the solvability of IK depends on the initial guess given to the solver. Thus, this paper proposes a method for generating a good initial guess for a numerical IK solver given the target hand configuration. For the purpose, we define the goodness of an initial guess using the scaled Jacobian matrix, which can calculate the manipulability index considering the joint limits. These two factors are related to the difficulty of solving IK. We generate the initial guess by optimizing the goodness using the genetic algorithm (GA). To enumerate much possible IK solutions, we use the reachability map that represents the reachable area of the robot hand in the arm-base coordinate system. We conduct quantitative evaluation and prove that using an initial guess that is judged to be better using the goodness value increases the probability that IK is solved. Finally, as an application of the proposed method, we show that by generating good initial guesses for IK a robot actually achieves three typical scenarios.

Naoki Wake, Atsushi Kanehira, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

Self-handover, transferring an object between one's own hands, is a common but understudied bimanual action. While it facilitates seamless transitions in complex tasks, the strategies underlying its execution remain largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the first systematic taxonomy of self-handover, derived from manual annotation of over 12 hours of cooking activity performed by 21 participants. Our analysis reveals that self-handover is not merely a passive transition, but a highly coordinated action involving anticipatory adjustments by both hands. As a step toward automated analysis of human manipulation, we further demonstrate the feasibility of classifying self-handover types using a state-of-the-art vision-language model. These findings offer fresh insights into bimanual coordination, underscoring the role of self-handover in enabling smooth task transitions-an ability essential for adaptive dual-arm robotics.

Katsushi Ikeuchi, Naoki Wake, Riku Arakawa et al.

The paradigm of learning-from-observation (LfO) enables a robot to learn how to perform actions by observing human-demonstrated actions. Previous research in LfO have mainly focused on the industrial domain which only consist of the observable physical constraints between a manipulating tool and the robot's working environment. In order to extend this paradigm to the household domain which consists non-observable constraints derived from a human's common sense; we introduce the idea of semantic constraints. The semantic constraints are represented similar to the physical constraints by defining a contact with an imaginary semantic environment. We thoroughly investigate the necessary and sufficient set of contact state and state transitions to understand the different types of physical and semantic constraints. We then apply our constraint representation to analyze various actions in top hit household YouTube videos and real home cooking recordings. We further categorize the frequently appearing constraint patterns into physical, semantic, and multistage task groups and verify that these groups are not only necessary but a sufficient set for covering standard household actions. Finally, we conduct a preliminary experiment using textual input to explore the possibilities of combining verbal and visual input for recognizing the task groups. Our results provide promising directions for incorporating common sense in the literature of robot teaching.

Iori Yanokura, Naoki Wake, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

Learning actions from human demonstration video is promising for intelligent robotic systems. Extracting the exact section and re-observing the extracted video section in detail is important for imitating complex skills because human motions give valuable hints for robots. However, the general video understanding methods focus more on the understanding of the full frame,lacking consideration on extracting accurate sections and aligning them with the human's intent. We propose a Learning-from-Observation framework that splits and understands a video of a human demonstration with verbal instructions to extract accurate action sequences. The splitting is done based on local minimum points of the hand velocity, which align human daily-life actions with object-centered face contact transitions required for generating robot motion. Then, we extract a motion description on the split videos using video captioning techniques that are trained from our new daily-life action video dataset. Finally, we match the motion descriptions with the verbal instructions to understand the correct human intent and ignore the unintended actions inside the video. We evaluate the validity of hand velocity-based video splitting and demonstrate that it is effective. The experimental results on our new video captioning dataset focusing on daily-life human actions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code, trained models, and the dataset will be made available.

Naoki Wake, Machiko Sato, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

Mapping spoken text to gestures is an important research topic for robots with conversation capabilities. According to studies on human co-speech gestures, a reasonable solution for mapping is using a concept-based approach in which a text is first mapped to a semantic cluster (i.e., a concept) containing texts with similar meanings. Subsequently, each concept is mapped to a predefined gesture. By using a concept-based approach, this paper discusses the practical issue of obtaining concepts for a unique vocabulary personalized for a conversational agent. Using Microsoft Rinna as an agent, we qualitatively compare concepts obtained automatically through a natural language processing (NLP) approach to those obtained manually through a sociological approach. We then identify three limitations of the NLP approach: at the semantic level with emojis and symbols; at the semantic level with slang, new words, and buzzwords; and at the pragmatic level. We attribute these limitations to the personalized vocabulary of Rinna. A follow-up experiment demonstrates that robot gestures selected using a concept-based approach leave a better impression than randomly selected gestures for the Rinna vocabulary, suggesting the usefulness of a concept-based gesture generation system for personalized vocabularies. This study provides insights into the development of gesture generation systems for conversational agents with personalized vocabularies.

Naoki Wake, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Katsushi Ikeuchi

A key challenge in robot teaching is grasp-type recognition with a single RGB image and a target object name. Here, we propose a simple yet effective pipeline to enhance learning-based recognition by leveraging a prior distribution of grasp types for each object. In the pipeline, a convolutional neural network (CNN) recognizes the grasp type from an RGB image. The recognition result is further corrected using the prior distribution (i.e., affordance), which is associated with the target object name. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms both a CNN-only and an affordance-only method. The results highlight the effectiveness of linguistically-driven object affordance for enhancing grasp-type recognition in robot teaching.

Naoki Wake, Riku Arakawa, Iori Yanokura et al.

A household robot is expected to perform various manipulative operations with an understanding of the purpose of the task. To this end, a desirable robotic application should provide an on-site robot teaching framework for non-experts. Here we propose a Learning-from-Observation (LfO) framework for grasp-manipulation-release class household operations (GMR-operations). The framework maps human demonstrations to predefined task models through one-shot teaching. Each task model contains both high-level knowledge regarding the geometric constraints and low-level knowledge related to human postures. The key idea is to design a task model that 1) covers various GMR-operations and 2) includes human postures to achieve tasks. We verify the applicability of our framework by testing an operational LfO system with a real robot. In addition, we quantify the coverage of the task model by analyzing online videos of household operations. In the context of one-shot robot teaching, the contribution of this study is a framework that 1) covers various GMR-operations and 2) mimics human postures during the operations.

Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Naoki Wake, Katsushi Ikeuchi

Many works in robot teaching either focus only on teaching task knowledge, such as geometric constraints, or motion knowledge, such as the motion for accomplishing a task. However, to effectively teach a complex task sequence to a robot, it is important to take advantage of both task and motion knowledge. The task knowledge provides the goals of each individual task within the sequence and reduces the number of required human demonstrations, whereas the motion knowledge contain the task-to-task constraints that would otherwise require expert knowledge to model the problem. In this paper, we propose a body role division approach that combines both types of knowledge using a single human demonstration. The method is inspired by facts on human body motion and uses a body structural analogy to decompose a robot's body configuration into different roles: body parts that are dominant for imitating the human motion and body parts that are substitutional for adjusting the imitation with respect to the task knowledge. Our results show that our method scales to robots of different number of arm links, guides a robot's configuration to one that achieves an upcoming task, and is potentially beneficial for teaching a range of task sequences.

Naoki Wake, Iori Yanokura, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi et al.

The learning-from-observation (LfO) framework aims to map human demonstrations to a robot to reduce programming effort. To this end, an LfO system encodes a human demonstration into a series of execution units for a robot, which are referred to as task models. Although previous research has proposed successful task-model encoders, there has been little discussion on how to guide a task-model encoder in a scene with spatio-temporal noises, such as cluttered objects or unrelated human body movements. Inspired by the function of verbal instructions guiding an observer's visual attention, we propose a verbal focus-of-attention (FoA) system (i.e., spatio-temporal filters) to guide a task-model encoder. For object manipulation, the system first recognizes the name of a target object and its attributes from verbal instructions. The information serves as a where-to-look FoA filter to confine the areas in which the target object existed in the demonstration. The system then detects the timings of grasp and release that occurred in the filtered areas. The timings serve as a when-to-look FoA filter to confine the period of object manipulation. Finally, a task-model encoder recognizes the task models by employing FoA filters. We demonstrate the robustness of the verbal FoA in attenuating spatio-temporal noises by comparing it with an existing action localization network. The contributions of this study are as follows: (1) to propose a verbal FoA for LfO, (2) to design an algorithm to calculate FoA filters from verbal input, and (3) to demonstrate the effectiveness of a verbal FoA in localizing an action by comparing it with a state-of-the-art vision system.