Jiyue Zhu

Runyu Ding, Yuzhe Qin, Jiyue Zhu et al.

Teleoperation is a crucial tool for collecting human demonstrations, but controlling robots with bimanual dexterous hands remains a challenge. Existing teleoperation systems struggle to handle the complexity of coordinating two hands for intricate manipulations. We introduce Bunny-VisionPro, a real-time bimanual dexterous teleoperation system that leverages a VR headset. Unlike previous vision-based teleoperation systems, we design novel low-cost devices to provide haptic feedback to the operator, enhancing immersion. Our system prioritizes safety by incorporating collision and singularity avoidance while maintaining real-time performance through innovative designs. Bunny-VisionPro outperforms prior systems on a standard task suite, achieving higher success rates and reduced task completion times. Moreover, the high-quality teleoperation demonstrations improve downstream imitation learning performance, leading to better generalizability. Notably, Bunny-VisionPro enables imitation learning with challenging multi-stage, long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks, which have rarely been addressed in previous work. Our system's ability to handle bimanual manipulations while prioritizing safety and real-time performance makes it a powerful tool for advancing dexterous manipulation and imitation learning.

Huijie Zhang, Anthony Opipari, Xiaotong Chen et al.

Transparent objects present multiple distinct challenges to visual perception systems. First, their lack of distinguishing visual features makes transparent objects harder to detect and localize than opaque objects. Even humans find certain transparent surfaces with little specular reflection or refraction, e.g. glass doors, difficult to perceive. A second challenge is that common depth sensors typically used for opaque object perception cannot obtain accurate depth measurements on transparent objects due to their unique reflective properties. Stemming from these challenges, we observe that transparent object instances within the same category (e.g. cups) look more similar to each other than to ordinary opaque objects of that same category. Given this observation, the present paper sets out to explore the possibility of category-level transparent object pose estimation rather than instance-level pose estimation. We propose TransNet, a two-stage pipeline that learns to estimate category-level transparent object pose using localized depth completion and surface normal estimation. TransNet is evaluated in terms of pose estimation accuracy on a recent, large-scale transparent object dataset and compared to a state-of-the-art category-level pose estimation approach. Results from this comparison demonstrate that TransNet achieves improved pose estimation accuracy on transparent objects and key findings from the included ablation studies suggest future directions for performance improvements.

Huijie Zhang, Anthony Opipari, Xiaotong Chen et al.

Transparent objects present multiple distinct challenges to visual perception systems. First, their lack of distinguishing visual features makes transparent objects harder to detect and localize than opaque objects. Even humans find certain transparent surfaces with little specular reflection or refraction, like glass doors, difficult to perceive. A second challenge is that depth sensors typically used for opaque object perception cannot obtain accurate depth measurements on transparent surfaces due to their unique reflective properties. Stemming from these challenges, we observe that transparent object instances within the same category, such as cups, look more similar to each other than to ordinary opaque objects of that same category. Given this observation, the present paper explores the possibility of category-level transparent object pose estimation rather than instance-level pose estimation. We propose \textit{\textbf{TransNet}}, a two-stage pipeline that estimates category-level transparent object pose using localized depth completion and surface normal estimation. TransNet is evaluated in terms of pose estimation accuracy on a large-scale transparent object dataset and compared to a state-of-the-art category-level pose estimation approach. Results from this comparison demonstrate that TransNet achieves improved pose estimation accuracy on transparent objects. Moreover, we use TransNet to build an autonomous transparent object manipulation system for robotic pick-and-place and pouring tasks.

Jianglong Ye, Keyi Wang, Chengjing Yuan et al.

Generating large-scale demonstrations for dexterous hand manipulation remains challenging, and several approaches have been proposed in recent years to address this. Among them, generative models have emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling the efficient creation of diverse and physically plausible demonstrations. In this paper, we introduce Dex1B, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality demonstration dataset produced with generative models. The dataset contains one billion demonstrations for two fundamental tasks: grasping and articulation. To construct it, we propose a generative model that integrates geometric constraints to improve feasibility and applies additional conditions to enhance diversity. We validate the model on both established and newly introduced simulation benchmarks, where it significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness through real-world robot experiments. Our project page is at https://jianglongye.com/dex1b

Guangqi Jiang, Haoran Chang, Ri-Zhao Qiu et al.

This paper presents GSWorld, a robust, photo-realistic simulator for robotics manipulation that combines 3D Gaussian Splatting with physics engines. Our framework advocates "closing the loop" of developing manipulation policies with reproducible evaluation of policies learned from real-robot data and sim2real policy training without using real robots. To enable photo-realistic rendering of diverse scenes, we propose a new asset format, which we term GSDF (Gaussian Scene Description File), that infuses Gaussian-on-Mesh representation with robot URDF and other objects. With a streamlined reconstruction pipeline, we curate a database of GSDF that contains 3 robot embodiments for single-arm and bimanual manipulation, as well as more than 40 objects. Combining GSDF with physics engines, we demonstrate several immediate interesting applications: (1) learning zero-shot sim2real pixel-to-action manipulation policy with photo-realistic rendering, (2) automated high-quality DAgger data collection for adapting policies to deployment environments, (3) reproducible benchmarking of real-robot manipulation policies in simulation, (4) simulation data collection by virtual teleoperation, and (5) zero-shot sim2real visual reinforcement learning. Website: https://3dgsworld.github.io/.

Amir-Hossein Shahidzadeh, Jiyue Zhu, Kezhou Chen et al.

Robust object pose estimation is essential for manipulation and interaction tasks in robotics, particularly in scenarios where visual data is limited or sensitive to lighting, occlusions, and appearances. Tactile sensors often offer limited and local contact information, making it challenging to reconstruct the pose from partial data. Our approach uses sensorimotor exploration to actively control a robot hand to interact with the object. We train with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to explore and collect tactile data. The collected 3D point clouds are used to iteratively refine the object's shape and pose. In our setup, one hand holds the object steady while the other performs active exploration. We show that our method can actively explore an object's surface to identify critical pose features without prior knowledge of the object's geometry. Supplementary material and more demonstrations will be provided at https://amirshahid.github.io/BimanualTactilePose .