Robotic Programmer: Video Instructed Policy Code Generation for Robotic Manipulation

Senwei Xie, Hongyu Wang, Zhanqi Xiao, Ruiping Wang, Xilin Chen

Keywords: robotic manipulation, vision language models, code generation

TL;DR: We propose RoboPro, a robotic foundation model that performs zero-shot robotic manipulation by following free-form instructions with policy code. To improve data efficiency, we propose Video2Code to synthesize executable code from videos.

Abstract: Zero-shot generalization across various robots, tasks and environments remains a significant challenge in robotic manipulation. Policy code generation methods use executable code to connect high-level task descriptions and low-level action sequences, leveraging the generalization capabilities of large language models and atomic skill libraries. In this work, we propose Robotic Programmer (RoboPro), a robotic foundation model, enabling the capability of perceiving visual information and following free-form instructions to perform robotic manipulation with policy code in a zero-shot manner. To address low efficiency and high cost in collecting runtime code data for robotic tasks, we devise Video2Code to synthesize executable code from extensive videos in-the-wild with off-the-shelf vision-language model and code-domain large language model. Extensive experiments show that RoboPro achieves the state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on robotic manipulation in both simulators and real-world environments. Specifically, the zero-shot success rate of RoboPro on RLBench surpasses the state-of-the-art model GPT-4o by 11.6\%, which is even comparable to a strong supervised training baseline. Furthermore, RoboPro is robust to different robotic configurations, and demonstrates broad visual understanding in general VQA tasks.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

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Submission Number: 4061