Zaitian Gongye

An-Chieh Cheng, Yandong Ji, Zhaojing Yang et al.

This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes. However, it is non-trivial to translate human language instructions all the way to low-level leg joint actions. We propose NaVILA, a 2-level framework that unifies a Vision-Language-Action model (VLA) with locomotion skills. Instead of directly predicting low-level actions from VLA, NaVILA first generates mid-level actions with spatial information in the form of language, (e.g., "moving forward 75cm"), which serves as an input for a visual locomotion RL policy for execution. NaVILA substantially improves previous approaches on existing benchmarks. The same advantages are demonstrated in our newly developed benchmarks with IsaacLab, featuring more realistic scenes, low-level controls, and real-world robot experiments. We show more results at https://navila-bot.github.io/

Rui Yan, Zaitian Gongye, Lars Paulsen et al.

Collecting human demonstrations via teleoperation is a common approach for teaching robots task-specific skills. However, when only a limited number of demonstrations are available, policies are prone to entering out-of-distribution (OOD) states due to compounding errors or environmental stochasticity. Existing interactive imitation learning or human-in-the-loop methods try to address this issue by following the Human-Gated DAgger (HG-DAgger) paradigm, an approach that augments demonstrations through selective human intervention during policy execution. Nevertheless, these approaches struggle to balance dexterity and generality: they either provide fine-grained corrections but are limited to specific kinematic structures, or achieve generality at the cost of precise control. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Human-Robot Copilot framework that can leverage a scaling factor for dexterous teleoperation while maintaining compatibility with a wide range of industrial and research manipulators. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves higher performance with the same number of demonstration trajectories. Moreover, since corrective interventions are required only intermittently, the overall data collection process is more efficient and less time-consuming.