PokeNet: Learning Kinematic Models of Articulated Objects from Human Observations
Authors: Anmol Gupta, Weiwei Gu, Omkar Patil, Jun Ki Lee, Nakul Gopalan
Organizations: School of Computation and AI, ASU, Tempe · AI Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
Abstract
Articulation modeling enables robots to learn joint parameters of articulated objects for effective manipulation which can then be used downstream for skill learning or planning. Existing approaches often rely on prior knowledge about the objects, such as the number or type of joints. Some of these approaches also fail to recover occluded joints that are only revealed during interaction. Others require large numbers of multi-view images for every object, which is impractical in real-world settings. Furthermore, prior works neglect the order of manipulations, which is essential for many multi-DoF objects where one joint must be operated before another, such as a dishwasher. We introduce PokeNet, an end-to-end framework that estimates articulation models from a single human demonstration without prior object knowledge. Given a sequence of point cloud observations of a human manipulating an unknown object, PokeNet predicts joint parameters, infers manipulation order, and tracks joint states over time. PokeNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, improving joint axis and state estimation accuracy by an average of over 27% across diverse objects, including novel and unseen categories. We demonstrate these gains in both simulation and real-world environments.
Articulated object manipulation requires an understanding of kinematic structure that is difficult and costly to learn from robot demonstrations alone. We introduce the Kinematic-Aware Articulation Interface (KAI), a structured intermediate representation that captures the kinematic structure of articulated objects. By embedding interpretable geometric and kinematic priors into policy learning, KAI provides a strong inductive bias aligned with the underlying structure of articulated motion. This design effectively improves sample efficiency, with gains particularly pronounced in low-data regimes: across six simulation tasks, our method achieves an average success rate of 82.9%, matching or surpassing baseline performance while using only half the demonstration data. Our method also exhibits robust generalization to unseen backgrounds and visual distractors, transferring from a single clean training environment to cluttered real-world scenes. KAI's action-agnostic design further enables co-training with human interaction videos to enhance real-world robustness: under diverse visual distractions, our method with video co-training achieves over 70% average success rate.
Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.
Modeling articulated objects from sparse monocular views is challenging because each observation reveals only partial geometry and motion evidence. Most feed-forward methods infer articulation from a single observation and therefore rely heavily on learned category-level shape priors. We present FAMOS, a feed-forward model that predicts movable-part segmentation and joint parameters from a sparse, unordered set of partial point clouds. Our model jointly reasons over multiple observations and naturally supports a variable number of inputs, including a single view. To aggregate articulation cues across observations, we introduce a Multi-state Articulation Transformer with alternating state-wise and global attention. We further propose an observed articulation span objective that supervises the motion range each part exhibits across the input observations, encouraging the model to leverage the full observation set. To overcome the limited scale and diversity of existing datasets, we introduce a procedural data generator that synthesizes self-annotated assets during training. Experiments on PartNet-Mobility, ACD, and ArtiCraft-10K demonstrate consistent improvements over both feed-forward and optimization-based baselines. Project page: https://kevinqu7.github.io/famos