Building Explicit World Model for Zero-Shot Open-World Object Manipulation
Organizations: Department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR), Delft University of Technology, 2628CD Delft, The Netherlands.
Abstract
Open-world object manipulation remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising results, they rely heavily on large-scale robot action demonstrations, which are costly to collect and can hinder out-of-distribution generalization. In this paper, we propose an explicit-world-model-based framework for open-world manipulation that achieves zero-shot generalization by constructing a physically grounded digital twin of the environment. The framework integrates open-set perception, digital-twin reconstruction, sampling and evaluation of interaction strategies. By constructing a digital twin of the environment, our approach efficiently explores and evaluates manipulation strategies in physic-enabled simulator and reliably deploys the chosen strategy to the real world. Experimentally, the proposed framework is able to perform multiple open-set manipulation tasks without any task-specific action demonstrations, proving strong zero-shot generalization on both the task and object levels. Project Page: https://bojack-bj.github.io/projects/thesis/
Figures & tables
| objects | valid sample | our method | direct alignment | ||
| success rate ↑ | RMSE ↓ | success rate | RMSE | ||
| without grasp in the gripper | |||||
| mug | 11 | 90.91% | 0.00457 | 27.27% | 0.00390 |
| box | 5 | 100.00% | 0.00564 | 100.00% | 0.00684 |
| foam box container | 5 | 40.00% | 0.00665 | 20.00% | 0.00745 |
| bottle | 8 | 100.00% | 0.00432 | 62.50% | 0.00367 |
| Task | Success Rate |
|---|---|
| Put the banana into the basket | 83.3% (10/12) |
| Put the lemon into the white cup | 75.0% (9/12) |
| Put the yellow cube into the white box | 91.7% (11/12) |
| Put the yellow cube into the blue can | 75.0% (9/12) |
| Stack the green cube onto the yellow cube | 50.0% (6/12) |
| Put the long cutlery box on the two boxes, like a bridge | 75.0% (9/12) |
Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation
Zero-shot robotic manipulation enables robots to perform unfamiliar tasks and handle unseen objects, scenes, or embodiments without task-specific training.
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