A Backbone for Long-Horizon Robot Task Understanding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Therblig-Based Backbone Framework (TBBF) that improves long-horizon robot task understanding by decomposing tasks at the therblig level, enhancing interpretability, data efficiency, and generalization.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel framework combining therblig-level task decomposition with a new segmentation network and trajectory transfer methods for better robot task learning.

Findings

Achieved 94.37% recall in therblig segmentation

Real-world success rate of 94.4% in simple scenarios

Real-world success rate of 80% in complex scenarios

Abstract

End-to-end robot learning, particularly for long-horizon tasks, often results in unpredictable outcomes and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Therblig-Based Backbone Framework (TBBF) as a fundamental structure to enhance interpretability, data efficiency, and generalization in robotic systems. TBBF utilizes expert demonstrations to enable therblig-level task decomposition, facilitate efficient action-object mapping, and generate adaptive trajectories for new scenarios. The approach consists of two stages: offline training and online testing. During the offline training stage, we developed the Meta-RGate SynerFusion (MGSF) network for accurate therblig segmentation across various tasks. In the online testing stage, after a one-shot demonstration of a new task is collected, our MGSF network extracts high-level knowledge, which is then encoded into the image using Action Registration (ActionREG). Additionally, Large Language Model (LLM)-Alignment Policy for Visual Correction (LAP-VC) is employed to ensure precise action registration, facilitating trajectory transfer in novel robot scenarios. Experimental results validate these methods, achieving 94.37% recall in therblig segmentation and success rates of 94.4% and 80% in real-world online robot testing for simple and complex scenarios, respectively. Supplementary material is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/therbligsbasedbackbone/home