BiPreManip: Learning Affordance-Based Bimanual Preparatory Manipulation through Anticipatory Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual affordance-based framework for bimanual manipulation tasks requiring anticipatory coordination, enabling robots to perform preparatory actions that facilitate goal-directed tasks across diverse objects.

Contribution

The work presents a novel affordance-centric approach for anticipatory bimanual manipulation, improving coordination and generalization in complex preparatory tasks.

Findings

Significant improvement in task success rates over baselines.

Effective generalization across various object categories.

Successful real-world robot experiments demonstrating practical applicability.

Abstract

Many everyday objects are difficult to directly grasp (e.g., a flat iPad) or manipulate functionally (e.g., opening the cap of a pen lying on a desk). Such tasks require sequential, asymmetric coordination between two arms, where one arm performs preparatory manipulation that enables the other's goal-directed action - for instance, pushing the iPad to the table's edge before picking it up, or lifting the pen body to allow the other hand to remove its cap. In this work, we introduce Collaborative Preparatory Manipulation, a class of bimanual manipulation tasks that demand understanding object semantics and geometry, anticipating spatial relationships, and planning long-horizon coordinated actions between the two arms. To tackle this challenge, we propose a visual affordance-based framework that first envisions the final goal-directed action and then guides one arm to perform a sequence of preparatory manipulations that facilitate the other arm's subsequent operation. This affordance-centric representation enables anticipatory inter-arm reasoning and coordination, generalizing effectively across various objects spanning diverse categories. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that our approach substantially improves task success rates and generalization compared to competitive baselines.