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

TL;DR

VoxPoser introduces a framework that combines language models and vision-language models to synthesize robust, closed-loop robot trajectories for diverse manipulation tasks specified in natural language, enabling zero-shot generalization and online learning.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method that leverages LLMs and VLMs to generate 3D value maps for robot manipulation, allowing zero-shot planning and online adaptation in open-set scenarios.

Findings

Successful real-robot experiments with diverse tasks

Robust trajectory synthesis against dynamic perturbations

Efficient online learning of scene dynamics

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. Videos and code at https://voxposer.github.io