Articulated 3D Scene Graphs for Open-World Mobile Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MoMa-SG, a framework for creating semantic-kinematic 3D scene graphs from RGB-D data, enabling robots to understand and manipulate articulated objects in complex environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unified twist estimation method for modeling object articulation and introduces the Arti4D-Semantic dataset for articulated scene understanding.

Findings

MoMa-SG accurately infers object kinematics from RGB-D sequences.

The approach enables robust manipulation of articulated objects in real-world settings.

Extensive evaluation shows high performance on multiple datasets.

Abstract

Semantics has enabled 3D scene understanding and affordance-driven object interaction. However, robots operating in real-world environments face a critical limitation: they cannot anticipate how objects move. Long-horizon mobile manipulation requires closing the gap between semantics, geometry, and kinematics. In this work, we present MoMa-SG, a novel framework for building semantic-kinematic 3D scene graphs of articulated scenes containing a myriad of interactable objects. Given RGB-D sequences containing multiple object articulations, we temporally segment object interactions and infer object motion using occlusion-robust point tracking. We then lift point trajectories into 3D and estimate articulation models using a novel unified twist estimation formulation that robustly estimates revolute and prismatic joint parameters in a single optimization pass. Next, we associate objects with estimated articulations and detect contained objects by reasoning over parent-child relations at identified opening states. We also introduce the novel Arti4D-Semantic dataset, which uniquely combines hierarchical object semantics including parent-child relation labels with object axis annotations across 62 in-the-wild RGB-D sequences containing 600 object interactions and three distinct observation paradigms. We extensively evaluate the performance of MoMa-SG on two datasets and ablate key design choices of our approach. In addition, real-world experiments on both a quadruped and a mobile manipulator demonstrate that our semantic-kinematic scene graphs enable robust manipulation of articulated objects in everyday home environments. We provide code and data at: https://momasg.cs.uni-freiburg.de.