VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models

Wenlong Huang, Chen Wang, Ruohan Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei

Keywords: Manipulation, Large Language Models, Model-based Planning

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction. More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can interact with a vision-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form natural language.

Student First Author: yes

Instructions: I have read the instructions for authors (https://corl2023.org/instructions-for-authors/)

Website: https://voxposer.github.io/

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvn4eR05A3M

Code: https://github.com/huangwl18/VoxPoser

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/voxposer-composable-3d-value-maps-for-robotic/code)