OVAL-Grasp: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Localization for Task Oriented Grasping

TL;DR

OVAL-Grasp is a zero-shot, open-vocabulary method that uses large-language and vision-language models to enable robots to perform task-oriented, affordance-based grasping on novel objects by identifying and segmenting target object parts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modular approach combining LLMs and VLMs for task-oriented grasping, outperforming existing methods in unstructured environments.

Findings

Achieved 95% accuracy in identifying correct object parts.

Successfully grasped correct actionable areas 78.3% of the time in real-world tests.

Maintained 80% success rate in cluttered scenes with occlusions.

Abstract

To manipulate objects in novel, unstructured environments, robots need task-oriented grasps that target object parts based on the given task. Geometry-based methods often struggle with visually defined parts, occlusions, and unseen objects. We introduce OVAL-Grasp, a zero-shot open-vocabulary approach to task-oriented, affordance based grasping that uses large-language models and vision-language models to allow a robot to grasp objects at the correct part according to a given task. Given an RGB image and a task, OVAL-Grasp identifies parts to grasp or avoid with an LLM, segments them with a VLM, and generates a 2D heatmap of actionable regions on the object. During our evaluations, we found that our method outperformed two task oriented grasping baselines on experiments with 20 household objects with 3 unique tasks for each. OVAL-Grasp successfully identifies and segments the correct object part 95% of the time and grasps the correct actionable area 78.3% of the time in real-world experiments with the Fetch mobile manipulator. Additionally, OVAL-Grasp finds correct object parts under partial occlusions, demonstrating a part selection success rate of 80% in cluttered scenes. We also demonstrate OVAL-Grasp's efficacy in scenarios that rely on visual features for part selection, and show the benefit of a modular design through our ablation experiments. Our project webpage is available at https://ekjt.github.io/OVAL-Grasp/