CLASP: Closed-loop Asynchronous Spatial Perception for Open-vocabulary Desktop Object Grasping

Practical robotic grasping in complex scenes requires both 3D spatial reasoning and alignment with task-specific requirements. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a natural way to specify these requirements using language, but existing approaches either use a VLM to predict the grasp directly with limited spatial awareness, or train the VLM together with the grasping model, which requires significantly more data and compute. These limitations impede performance and have prevented scaling to multiple embodiments in complex scenes. We address this by proposing SeededGrasp, a novel data-efficient framework that enables a VLM to predict a seed point to be used as conditioning for a subsequent lightweight grasp-generation model. Our architecture decouples high-level semantic reasoning from low-level geometric execution, enabling multi-embodiment support while bypassing the need for expensive end-to-end training. To enable training such models, we release the first multi-embodiment tabletop grasping dataset comprising over 2.5M grasps in cluttered scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines, achieving 72% success in simulation and 78% in real-world grasping experiments. See our project site for data and code: https://uoft-isl.github.io/seeded-grasp/

Generalizable robotic grasping in cluttered environments is essential for deploying manipulators in unstructured human spaces, yet existing VLM-based methods rely on visual similarity for object matching, neglecting physical affordances such as handle graspability and material fragility, and operate open-loop without spatial reasoning or failure recovery, limiting their effectiveness when objects are densely packed or physically diverse. We present Agentic RAG-VLM, a unified framework that bridges VLM-based semantic understanding and physically grounded grasp execution by integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic self-reflective planning. Agentic RAG-VLM introduces three tightly coupled components: (1) a Hierarchical Affordance-Aware RAG (HAA-RAG) that encodes four-dimensional affordance descriptors, including type, material, fragility, and graspable region, and retrieves strategies by functional affordance compatibility rather than visual appearance; (2) a Scene Graph Constraint Reasoner that constructs spatial relationship graphs from VLM perception and translates proximity, occlusion, and support constraints into concrete grasp parameter adjustments; and (3) an Agentic Self-Reflective Pipeline with a 14-type failure taxonomy and three-level adaptive retry for closed-loop grasp refinement. Evaluated on a 12-task benchmark spanning single-grasp, interactive, and long-horizon scenarios with 360 trials per configuration, Agentic RAG-VLM achieves 78.3 percent overall success, a 53.3 percentage-point absolute gain over VLM-only baselines, demonstrating that affordance-aware retrieval, scene graph reasoning, and agentic recovery are jointly essential for robust manipulation.

Visual-language grounding aims to establish semantic correspondences between natural language and visual entities, enabling models to accurately identify and localize target objects based on textual instructions. Existing VLG approaches focus on coarse-grained, object-level localization, while traditional robotic grasping methods rely predominantly on geometric cues and lack language guidance, which limits their applicability in language-driven manipulation scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose the RealVLG framework, which integrates the RealVLG-11B dataset and the RealVLG-R1 model to unify real-world visual-language grounding and grasping tasks. RealVLG-11B dataset provides multi-granularity annotations including bounding boxes, segmentation masks, grasp poses, contact points, and human-verified fine-grained language descriptions, covering approximately 165,000 images, over 800 object instances, 1.3 million segmentation, detection, and language annotations, and roughly 11 billion grasping examples. Building on this dataset, RealVLG-R1 employs Reinforcement Fine-tuning on pretrained large-scale vision-language models to predict bounding boxes, segmentation masks, grasp poses, and contact points in a unified manner given natural language instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that RealVLG supports zero-shot perception and manipulation in real-world unseen environments, establishing a unified semantic-visual multimodal benchmark that provides a comprehensive data and evaluation platform for language-driven robotic perception and grasping policy learning. All data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/lif314/RealVLG-R1.