Bridging Language and Action: A Survey of Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation
It addresses the problem of enabling seamless human-robot communication through natural language for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it reviews existing work.
This survey systematically explores recent advancements in language-conditioned robot manipulation, categorizing methods based on how language integrates into robot systems and analyzing techniques across five axes such as action granularity and system cost.
Language-conditioned robot manipulation is an emerging field aimed at enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents by teaching robots to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language. This interdisciplinary area integrates scene understanding, language processing, and policy learning to bridge the gap between human instructions and robot actions. In this comprehensive survey, we systematically explore recent advancements in language-conditioned robot manipulation. We categorize existing methods based on the primary ways language is integrated into the robot system, namely language for state evaluation, language as a policy condition, language for cognitive planning and reasoning, and language in unified vision-language-action models. Specifically, we further analyze state-of-the-art techniques from five axes of action granularity, data and supervision regimes, system cost and latency, environments and evaluations, and cross-modal task specification. Additionally, we highlight the key debates in the field. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions, focusing on potentially enhancing generalization capabilities and addressing safety issues in language-conditioned robot manipulators.