Invited talk by Chris Paxton (Hello Robot): Towards Home Robots: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation in Unstructured Environments

Robots are increasingly an important part of our world, from working in factories and hospitals to driving on city streets. As robots move into more unstructured environments such as homes, however, we need new techniques that allow robots to perform complex operations with less information about the world around them. We propose a motivating north star: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation, wherein robots must be able to reliably perform pick and place tasks of any object in any location in an unknown environment.

Currently, a variety of powerful approaches exist for learning low-level skills or performing long-horizon manipulation, but these often assume access to model-based object detection and grasp generation. However, new approaches exist which allow for robots to plan and manipulate novel objects - building structures and rearranging scenes - while reducing these assumptions about task and object knowledge. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on how to learn these representations, combine them with robot task and motion planning, and use them to work towards robots that can operate in complex, human environments.