Efficiently learning and executing long-horizon mobile manipulation (MoMa) tasks is crucial for advancing robotics in household and workplace settings. However, current MoMa models are data-inefficient, underscoring the need for improved models that require realistic-sized benchmarks to evaluate their efficiency, which do not exist. To address this, we introduce the LAMBDA ({\lambda}) benchmark (Long-horizon Actions for Mobile-manipulation Benchmarking of Directed Activities), which evaluates the data efficiency of models on language-conditioned, long-horizon, multi-room, multi-floor, pick-and-place tasks using a dataset of manageable size, more feasible for collection. The benchmark includes 571 human-collected demonstrations that provide realism and diversity in simulated and real-world settings. Unlike planner-generated data, these trajectories offer natural variability and replay-verifiability, ensuring robust learning and evaluation. We benchmark several models, including learning-based models and a neuro-symbolic modular approach combining foundation models with task and motion planning. Learning-based models show suboptimal success rates, even when leveraging pretrained weights, underscoring significant data inefficiencies. However, the neuro-symbolic approach performs significantly better while being more data efficient. Findings highlight the need for more data-efficient learning-based MoMa approaches. {\lambda} addresses this gap by serving as a key benchmark for evaluating the data efficiency of those future models in handling household robotics tasks.

We present a novel Bayesian tomography approach for Coherence Imaging Spectroscopy (CIS) that simultaneously reconstructs ion temperature and velocity distributions in plasmas. Utilizing nonlinear Gaussian Process Tomography (GPT) with the Laplace approximation, we model prior distributions of log-emissivity, temperature, and velocity as Gaussian processes. This framework rigorously incorporates nonlinear effects and temperature dependencies often neglected in conventional CIS tomography, enabling robust reconstruction even in the region of high temperature and velocity. By applying a log-Gaussian process, we also address issues like velocity divergence in low-emissivity regions. Validated with phantom simulations and experimental data from the RT-1 device, our method reveals detailed spatial structures of ion temperature and toroidal ion flow characteristic of magnetospheric plasma. This work significantly broadens the scope of CIS tomography, offering a robust tool for plasma diagnostics and facilitating integration with complementary measurement techniques.

The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies broaden the spectrum of tasks they can perform. We identify control and visual disparities between real and simulated environments as key challenges for reliable simulated evaluation and propose approaches for mitigating these gaps without needing to craft full-fidelity digital twins of real-world environments. We then employ these approaches to create SIMPLER, a collection of simulated environments for manipulation policy evaluation on common real robot setups. Through paired sim-and-real evaluations of manipulation policies, we demonstrate strong correlation between policy performance in SIMPLER environments and in the real world. Additionally, we find that SIMPLER evaluations accurately reflect real-world policy behavior modes such as sensitivity to various distribution shifts. We open-source all SIMPLER environments along with our workflow for creating new environments at https://simpler-env.github.io to facilitate research on general-purpose manipulation policies and simulated evaluation frameworks.

Natural language and images are commonly used as goal representations in goal-conditioned imitation learning (IL). However, natural language can be ambiguous and images can be over-specified. In this work, we propose hand-drawn sketches as a modality for goal specification in visual imitation learning. Sketches are easy for users to provide on the fly like language, but similar to images they can also help a downstream policy to be spatially-aware and even go beyond images to disambiguate task-relevant from task-irrelevant objects. We present RT-Sketch, a goal-conditioned policy for manipulation that takes a hand-drawn sketch of the desired scene as input, and outputs actions. We train RT-Sketch on a dataset of paired trajectories and corresponding synthetically generated goal sketches. We evaluate this approach on six manipulation skills involving tabletop object rearrangements on an articulated countertop. Experimentally we find that RT-Sketch is able to perform on a similar level to image or language-conditioned agents in straightforward settings, while achieving greater robustness when language goals are ambiguous or visual distractors are present. Additionally, we show that RT-Sketch has the capacity to interpret and act upon sketches with varied levels of specificity, ranging from minimal line drawings to detailed, colored drawings. For supplementary material and videos, please refer to our website: http://rt-sketch.github.io.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer1.github.io

Major recent advances in multiple subfields of machine learning (ML) research, such as computer vision and natural language processing, have been enabled by a shared common approach that leverages large, diverse datasets and expressive models that can absorb all of the data effectively. Although there have been various attempts to apply this approach to robotics, robots have not yet leveraged highly-capable models as well as other subfields. Several factors contribute to this challenge. First, there's the lack of large-scale and diverse robotic data, which limits a model's ability to absorb a broad set of robotic experiences. Data collection is particularly expensive and challenging for robotics because dataset curation requires engineering-heavy autonomous operation, or demonstrations collected using human teleoperations. To address these challenges, we propose the Robotics Transformer 1 (RT-1), a multi-task model that tokenizes robot inputs and outputs actions (e.g., camera images, task instructions, and motor commands) to enable efficient inference at runtime, which makes real-time control feasible.