In plain words: A cheap two-armed robot on wheels is driven by a person moving its arms and base at once, recording tasks like cooking and cabinet-opening, then copies the recordings. Mixing 50 demos per task with stationary-arm data raised its success rate by up to 90%.
Abstract · Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation
Imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown impressive performance in robotics. However, most results focus on table-top manipulation, lacking the mobility and dexterity necessary for generally useful tasks. In this work, we develop a system for imitating mobile manipulation tasks that are bimanual and require whole-body control. We first present Mobile ALOHA, a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. It augments the ALOHA system with a mobile base, and a whole-body teleoperation interface. Using data collected with Mobile ALOHA, we then perform supervised behavior cloning and find that co-training with existing static ALOHA datasets boosts performance on mobile manipulation tasks. With 50 demonstrations for each task, co-training can increase success rates by up to 90%, allowing Mobile ALOHA to autonomously complete complex mobile manipulation tasks such as sauteing and serving a piece of shrimp, opening a two-door wall cabinet to store heavy cooking pots, calling and entering an elevator, and lightly rinsing a used pan using a kitchen faucet. Project website: https://mobile-aloha.github.io
Zipeng Fu, Tony Z. Zhao, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2401.02117 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.SY · submitted Jan 4, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Project website: https://mobile-aloha.github.io (Zipeng Fu and Tony Z. Zhao are project co-leads, Chelsea Finn is the advisor)