Jeff Bingham

ALOHA 2 Team, Jorge Aldaco, Travis Armstrong et al.

Diverse demonstration datasets have powered significant advances in robot learning, but the dexterity and scale of such data can be limited by the hardware cost, the hardware robustness, and the ease of teleoperation. We introduce ALOHA 2, an enhanced version of ALOHA that has greater performance, ergonomics, and robustness compared to the original design. To accelerate research in large-scale bimanual manipulation, we open source all hardware designs of ALOHA 2 with a detailed tutorial, together with a MuJoCo model of ALOHA 2 with system identification. See the project website at aloha-2.github.io.

Mohi Khansari, Daniel Kappler, Jianlan Luo et al.

This paper introduces Action Image, a new grasp proposal representation that allows learning an end-to-end deep-grasping policy. Our model achieves $84\%$ grasp success on $172$ real world objects while being trained only in simulation on $48$ objects with just naive domain randomization. Similar to computer vision problems, such as object detection, Action Image builds on the idea that object features are invariant to translation in image space. Therefore, grasp quality is invariant when evaluating the object-gripper relationship; a successful grasp for an object depends on its local context, but is independent of the surrounding environment. Action Image represents a grasp proposal as an image and uses a deep convolutional network to infer grasp quality. We show that by using an Action Image representation, trained networks are able to extract local, salient features of grasping tasks that generalize across different objects and environments. We show that this representation works on a variety of inputs, including color images (RGB), depth images (D), and combined color-depth (RGB-D). Our experimental results demonstrate that networks utilizing an Action Image representation exhibit strong domain transfer between training on simulated data and inference on real-world sensor streams. Finally, our experiments show that a network trained with Action Image improves grasp success ($84\%$ vs. $53\%$) over a baseline model with the same structure, but using actions encoded as vectors.