A practical navigation agent must be capable of handling a wide range of interaction demands, such as following instructions, searching objects, answering questions, tracking people, and more. Existing models for embodied navigation fall short of serving as practical generalists in the real world, as they are often constrained by specific task configurations or pre-defined maps with discretized waypoints. In this work, we present Uni-NaVid, the first video-based vision-language-action (VLA) model designed to unify diverse embodied navigation tasks and enable seamless navigation for mixed long-horizon tasks in unseen real-world environments. Uni-NaVid achieves this by harmonizing the input and output data configurations for all commonly used embodied navigation tasks and thereby integrating all tasks in one model. For training Uni-NaVid, we collect 3.6 million navigation data samples in total from four essential navigation sub-tasks and foster synergy in learning across them. Extensive experiments on comprehensive navigation benchmarks clearly demonstrate the advantages of unification modeling in Uni-NaVid and show it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, real-world experiments confirm the model's effectiveness and efficiency, shedding light on its strong generalizability.

For the task of hanging clothes, learning how to insert a hanger into a garment is crucial but has been seldom explored in robotics. In this work, we address the problem of inserting a hanger into various unseen garments that are initially laid out flat on a table. This task is challenging due to its long-horizon nature, the high degrees of freedom of the garments, and the lack of data. To simplify the learning process, we first propose breaking the task into several stages. Then, we formulate each stage as a policy learning problem and propose low-dimensional action parameterization. To overcome the challenge of limited data, we build our own simulator and create 144 synthetic clothing assets to effectively collect high-quality training data. Our approach uses single-view depth images and object masks as input, which mitigates the Sim2Real appearance gap and achieves high generalization capabilities for new garments. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world validate our proposed method. By training on various garments in the simulator, our method achieves a 75\% success rate with 8 different unseen garments in the real world.

Effectively manipulating articulated objects in household scenarios is a crucial step toward achieving general embodied artificial intelligence. Mainstream research in 3D vision has primarily focused on manipulation through depth perception and pose detection. However, in real-world environments, these methods often face challenges due to imperfect depth perception, such as with transparent lids and reflective handles. Moreover, they generally lack the diversity in part-based interactions required for flexible and adaptable manipulation. To address these challenges, we introduced a large-scale part-centric dataset for articulated object manipulation that features both photo-realistic material randomizations and detailed annotations of part-oriented, scene-level actionable interaction poses. We evaluated the effectiveness of our dataset by integrating it with several state-of-the-art methods for depth estimation and interaction pose prediction. Additionally, we proposed a novel modular framework that delivers superior and robust performance for generalizable articulated object manipulation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves the performance of depth perception and actionable interaction pose prediction in both simulation and real-world scenarios.

Depth sensing is an important problem for 3D vision-based robotics. Yet, a real-world active stereo or ToF depth camera often produces noisy and incomplete depth which bottlenecks robot performances. In this work, we propose D3RoMa, a learning-based depth estimation framework on stereo image pairs that predicts clean and accurate depth in diverse indoor scenes, even in the most challenging scenarios with translucent or specular surfaces where classical depth sensing completely fails. Key to our method is that we unify depth estimation and restoration into an image-to-image translation problem by predicting the disparity map with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model. At inference time, we further incorporated a left-right consistency constraint as classifier guidance to the diffusion process. Our framework combines recently advanced learning-based approaches and geometric constraints from traditional stereo vision. For model training, we create a large scene-level synthetic dataset with diverse transparent and specular objects to compensate for existing tabletop datasets. The trained model can be directly applied to real-world in-the-wild scenes and achieve state-of-the-art performance in multiple public depth estimation benchmarks. Further experiments in real environments show that accurate depth prediction significantly improves robotic manipulation in various scenarios.

Generalizable manipulation of articulated objects remains a challenging problem in many real-world scenarios, given the diverse object structures, functionalities, and goals. In these tasks, both semantic interpretations and physical plausibilities are crucial for a policy to succeed. To address this problem, we propose SAGE, a novel framework that bridges the understanding of semantic and actionable parts of articulated objects to achieve generalizable manipulation under language instructions. Given a manipulation goal specified by natural language, an instruction interpreter with Large Language Models (LLMs) first translates them into programmatic actions on the object's semantic parts. This process also involves a scene context parser for understanding the visual inputs, which is designed to generate scene descriptions with both rich information and accurate interaction-related facts by joining the forces of generalist Visual-Language Models (VLMs) and domain-specialist part perception models. To further convert the action programs into executable policies, a part grounding module then maps the object semantic parts suggested by the instruction interpreter into so-called Generalizable Actionable Parts (GAParts). Finally, an interactive feedback module is incorporated to respond to failures, which greatly increases the robustness of the overall framework. Experiments both in simulation environments and on real robots show that our framework can handle a large variety of articulated objects with diverse language-instructed goals. We also provide a new benchmark for language-guided articulated-object manipulation in realistic scenarios.