You Only Teach Once: Learn One-Shot Bimanual Robotic Manipulation from Video Demonstrations

TL;DR

This paper introduces YOTO, a novel method enabling robots to learn complex bimanual manipulation tasks from a single video demonstration, significantly improving efficiency and generalization over existing methods.

Contribution

YOTO is the first approach to extract and transfer bimanual manipulation patterns from just one video, using keyframe-based trajectories and diffusion policies for versatile robot learning.

Findings

YOTO successfully mimics 5 complex long-horizon tasks.

It generalizes well across different visual and spatial conditions.

It outperforms existing imitation learning methods in accuracy and efficiency.

Abstract

Bimanual robotic manipulation is a long-standing challenge of embodied intelligence due to its characteristics of dual-arm spatial-temporal coordination and high-dimensional action spaces. Previous studies rely on pre-defined action taxonomies or direct teleoperation to alleviate or circumvent these issues, often making them lack simplicity, versatility and scalability. Differently, we believe that the most effective and efficient way for teaching bimanual manipulation is learning from human demonstrated videos, where rich features such as spatial-temporal positions, dynamic postures, interaction states and dexterous transitions are available almost for free. In this work, we propose the YOTO (You Only Teach Once), which can extract and then inject patterns of bimanual actions from as few as a single binocular observation of hand movements, and teach dual robot arms various complex tasks. Furthermore, based on keyframes-based motion trajectories, we devise a subtle solution for rapidly generating training demonstrations with diverse variations of manipulated objects and their locations. These data can then be used to learn a customized bimanual diffusion policy (BiDP) across diverse scenes. In experiments, YOTO achieves impressive performance in mimicking 5 intricate long-horizon bimanual tasks, possesses strong generalization under different visual and spatial conditions, and outperforms existing visuomotor imitation learning methods in accuracy and efficiency. Our project link is https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/YOTO.