Title:
Realistic Mobile Manipulation Tasks for Evaluating Home-Assistant Robots
Realistic Mobile Manipulation Tasks for Evaluating Home-Assistant Robots
Author(s)
Yenamandra, Sriram Venkata
Advisor(s)
Batra, Dhruv
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Abstract
By assisting in household chores, robotic home assistants hold the potential to significantly enhance the quality of human lives. Mobile manipulation tasks can serve as test beds for evaluating the capabilities essential to the development of robotic home assistants: perception, language understanding, navigation, manipulation, and common-sense reasoning. However, it is imperative to use settings that closely resemble real-world deployment to ensure that progress made on these tasks is practically relevant. The thesis introduces three tasks, namely HomeRobot: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM), "GO To Any Thing" (GOAT) and Housekeep, to realsze the different dimensions of realism critical for evaluating embodied agents: 1) autonomy, the ability to operate without very specific instructions (e.g. the precise locations of goal objects), 2) exposure to realistic novel multi-room environments, 3) working with previously unseen objects, and 4) extended durations of deployment. Further, the thesis proposes baselines per task, which succeed in solving each task to a varying degree. The shortcomings of these baselines underscore the open challenges of open-vocabulary object detection and common-sense reasoning. By using test scenarios closer to real-world deployment, this work attempts to advance research in the development of robotic assistants.
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Date Issued
2023-12-14
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