The Concept of Fordance in Robotics

Karol Hausman is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford working on robotics and machine learning. Karol is interested in enabling robots to acquire general-purpose skills with minimal supervision in real-world environments.

Fei Xia is a Research Scientist with Google Research. Fei Xia is mostly interested in robot learning in complex and unstructured environments. Previously he has been approaching this problem by learning in realistic and scalable simulation environments (GibsonEnv, iGibson). Most recently, he has been exploring using foundation models for those challenges.

Featured References

Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances [ website ]
Michael Ahn, Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Yevgen Chebotar, Omar Cortes, Byron David, Chelsea Finn, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Alex Herzog, Daniel Ho, Jasmine Hsu, Julian Ibarz, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Eric Jang, Rosario Jauregui Ruano, Kyle Jeffrey, Sally Jesmonth, Nikhil J Joshi, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Yuheng Kuang, Kuang-Huei Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Linda Luu, Carolina Parada, Peter Pastor, Jornell Quiambao, Kanishka Rao, Jarek Rettinghouse, Diego Reyes, Pierre Sermanet, Nicolas Sievers, Clayton Tan, Alexander Toshev, Vincent Vanhoucke, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Mengyuan Yan

Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models
Wenlong Huang, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Harris Chan, Jacky Liang, Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, Jonathan Tompson, Igor Mordatch, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Noah Brown, Tomas Jackson, Linda Luu, Sergey Levine, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter

Additional References

• Large-scale simulation for embodied perception and robot learning, Xia 2021
• QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, Kalashnikov et al 2018
• MT-Opt: Continuous Multi-Task Robotic Reinforcement Learning at Scale, Kalashnikov et al 2021
• ReLMoGen: Leveraging Motion Generation in Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Manipulation, Xia et al 2020
• Actionable Models: Unsupervised Offline Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Skills, Chebotar et al 2021  
• Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language, Zeng et al 2022

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