RoboAug: One Annotation to Hundreds of Scenes via Region-Contrastive Data Augmentation for Robotic Manipulation

TL;DR

RoboAug introduces a minimal annotation-based generative data augmentation framework that significantly enhances robotic manipulation generalization across diverse unseen scenes, reducing reliance on large datasets and perfect recognition.

Contribution

The paper presents RoboAug, a novel data augmentation method using only bounding box annotations and pre-trained generative models to improve robotic manipulation in unseen environments.

Findings

Substantial increase in success rates across three robots in unseen scenes.

Outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation methods.

Effective in diverse real-world manipulation scenarios.

Abstract

Enhancing the generalization capability of robotic learning to enable robots to operate effectively in diverse, unseen scenes is a fundamental and challenging problem. Existing approaches often depend on pretraining with large-scale data collection, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, or on semantic data augmentation techniques that necessitate an impractical assumption of flawless upstream object detection in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose RoboAug, a novel generative data augmentation framework that significantly minimizes the reliance on large-scale pretraining and the perfect visual recognition assumption by requiring only the bounding box annotation of a single image during training. Leveraging this minimal information, RoboAug employs pre-trained generative models for precise semantic data augmentation and integrates a plug-and-play region-contrastive loss to help models focus on task-relevant regions, thereby improving generalization and boosting task success rates. We conduct extensive real-world experiments on three robots, namely UR-5e, AgileX, and Tien Kung 2.0, spanning over 35k rollouts. Empirical results demonstrate that RoboAug significantly outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation baselines. Specifically, when evaluating generalization capabilities in unseen scenes featuring diverse combinations of backgrounds, distractors, and lighting conditions, our method achieves substantial gains over the baseline without augmentation. The success rates increase from 0.09 to 0.47 on UR-5e, from 0.16 to 0.60 on AgileX, and from 0.19 to 0.67 on Tien Kung 2.0. These results highlight the superior generalization and effectiveness of RoboAug in real-world manipulation tasks. Our project is available at https://x-roboaug.github.io/.