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Philipp Wu

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8 papers
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8

TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Interactive Task Planning with Language Models

  • Boyi Li
  • Philipp Wu
  • Pieter Abbeel
  • Jitendra Malik

An interactive robot framework accomplishes long-horizon task planning and can easily generalize to new goals or distinct tasks, even during execution. However, most traditional methods require predefined module design, which makes it hard to generalize to different goals. Recent large language model based approaches can allow for more open-ended planning but often require heavy prompt engineering or domain specific pretrained models. To tackle this, we propose a simple framework that achieves interactive task planning with language models by incorporating both high-level planning and low-level skill execution through function calling, leveraging pretrained vision models to ground the scene in language. We verify the robustness of our system on the real world task of making milk tea drinks. Our system is able to generate novel high-level instructions for unseen objectives and successfully accomplishes user tasks. Furthermore, when the user sends a new request, our system is able to replan accordingly with precision based on the new request, task guidelines and previously executed steps. Our approach is easy to adapt to different tasks by merely substituting the task guidelines, without the need for additional complex prompt engineering.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

From LLMs to Actions: Latent Codes as Bridges in Hierarchical Robot Control

  • Yide Shentu
  • Philipp Wu
  • Aravind Rajeswaran
  • Pieter Abbeel

Hierarchical control for robotics has long been plagued by the need to have a well defined interface layer to communicate between high-level task planners and low-level policies. With the advent of LLMs, language has been emerging as a prospective interface layer. However, this has several limitations. Not all tasks can be decomposed into steps that are easily expressible in natural language (e. g. performing a dance routine). Further, it makes end-to-end finetuning on embodied data challenging due to domain shift and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce our method – Latent Codes as Bridges (LCB) – as an alternate architecture to overcome these limitations. LCB uses a learnable latent code to act as a bridge between LLMs and low-level policies. This enables LLMs to flexibly communicate goals in the task plan without being entirely constrained by language limitations. Additionally, it enables end-to-end finetuning without destroying the embedding space of word tokens learned during pre-training. Through experiments on Language Table and Calvin, two common language based benchmarks for embodied agents, we find that LCB outperforms baselines (including those w/ GPT-4V) that leverage pure language as the interface layer on tasks that require reasoning and multi-step behaviors.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulators

  • Philipp Wu
  • Yide Shentu
  • Zhongke Yi
  • Xingyu Lin
  • Pieter Abbeel

Humans can teleoperate robots to accomplish complex manipulation tasks. Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful framework that leverages human teleoperated demonstrations to teach robots new skills. However, the performance of the learned policies is bottlenecked by the quality, scale, and variety of the demonstration data. In this paper, we aim to lower the barrier to collecting large and high-quality human demonstration data by proposing a GEneraL framework for building LOw-cost and intuitive teleoperation systems for robotic manipulation (GELLO). Given a target robot arm, we build a GELLO controller device that has the same kinematic structure as the target arm, leveraging 3D-printed parts and economical off-the-shelf motors. GELLO is easy to build and intuitive to use. Through an extensive user study, we show that GELLO enables more reliable and efficient demonstration collection compared to other cost efficient teleoperation devices commonly used in the imitation learning literature such as virtual reality controllers and 3D spacemouses. We further demonstrate the capabilities of GELLO for performing complex bi-manual and contact-rich manipulation tasks. To make GELLO accessible to everyone, we have designed and built GELLO systems for 3 commonly used robotic arms: Franka, UR5, and xArm. All software and hardware are open-sourced and can be found on our website: https://wuphilipp.github.io/gello/.

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RLC Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Semi-Supervised One Shot Imitation Learning

  • Philipp Wu
  • Kourosh Hakhamaneshi
  • Yuqing Du
  • Igor Mordatch
  • Aravind Rajeswaran
  • Pieter Abbeel

One-shot Imitation Learning (OSIL) aims to imbue AI agents with the ability to learn a new task from a single demonstration. To supervise the learning, OSIL requires a prohibitively large number of paired expert demonstrations: trajectories corresponding to different variations of the same semantic task. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the semi-supervised OSIL problem setting, where the learning agent is presented with a large dataset of tasks with only one demonstration each (unpaired dataset), along with a small dataset of tasks with multiple demonstrations (paired dataset). This presents a more realistic and practical embodiment of few-shot learning and requires the agent to effectively leverage weak supervision. Subsequently, we develop an algorithm applicable to this semi-supervised OSIL setting. Our approach first learns an embedding space where different tasks cluster uniquely. We utilize this embedding space and the clustering it supports to self-generate pairings between trajectories in the large unpaired dataset. Through empirical results, we demonstrate that OSIL models trained on such self-generated pairings (labels) are competitive with OSIL models trained with ground-truth labels, presenting a major advancement in the label-efficiency of OSIL.

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RLJ Journal 2024 Journal Article

Semi-Supervised One Shot Imitation Learning

  • Philipp Wu
  • Kourosh Hakhamaneshi
  • Yuqing Du
  • Igor Mordatch
  • Aravind Rajeswaran
  • Pieter Abbeel

One-shot Imitation Learning (OSIL) aims to imbue AI agents with the ability to learn a new task from a single demonstration. To supervise the learning, OSIL requires a prohibitively large number of paired expert demonstrations: trajectories corresponding to different variations of the same semantic task. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the semi-supervised OSIL problem setting, where the learning agent is presented with a large dataset of tasks with only one demonstration each (unpaired dataset), along with a small dataset of tasks with multiple demonstrations (paired dataset). This presents a more realistic and practical embodiment of few-shot learning and requires the agent to effectively leverage weak supervision. Subsequently, we develop an algorithm applicable to this semi-supervised OSIL setting. Our approach first learns an embedding space where different tasks cluster uniquely. We utilize this embedding space and the clustering it supports to self-generate pairings between trajectories in the large unpaired dataset. Through empirical results, we demonstrate that OSIL models trained on such self-generated pairings (labels) are competitive with OSIL models trained with ground-truth labels, presenting a major advancement in the label-efficiency of OSIL.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Masked Trajectory Models for Prediction, Representation, and Control

  • Philipp Wu
  • Arjun Majumdar
  • Kevin Stone
  • Yixin Lin
  • Igor Mordatch
  • Pieter Abbeel
  • Aravind Rajeswaran

We introduce Masked Trajectory Models (MTM) as a generic abstraction for sequential decision making. MTM takes a trajectory, such as a state-action sequence, and aims to reconstruct the trajectory conditioned on random subsets of the same trajectory. By training with a highly randomized masking pattern, MTM learns versatile networks that can take on different roles or capabilities, by simply choosing appropriate masks at inference time. For example, the same MTM network can be used as a forward dynamics model, inverse dynamics model, or even an offline RL agent. Through extensive experiments in several continuous control tasks, we show that the same MTM network – i. e. same weights – can match or outperform specialized networks trained for the aforementioned capabilities. Additionally, we find that state representations learned by MTM can significantly accelerate the learning speed of traditional RL algorithms. Finally, in offline RL benchmarks, we find that MTM is competitive with specialized offline RL algorithms, despite MTM being a generic self-supervised learning method without any explicit RL components. Code is available at https: //github. com/facebookresearch/mtm.

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ICRA Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Replay Overshooting: Learning Stochastic Latent Dynamics with the Extended Kalman Filter

  • Albert H. Li
  • Philipp Wu
  • Monroe Kennedy III

This paper presents replay overshooting (RO), an algorithm that uses properties of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) to learn nonlinear stochastic latent dynamics models suitable for long-horizon prediction. We build upon overshooting methods used to train other prediction models and recover a novel variational learning objective. Further, we use RO to extend another objective that acts as a surrogate for the true log-likelihood, and show that this objective empirically yields better models than the variational one. We evaluate RO on two tasks: prediction of synthetic video frames of a swinging motorized pendulum and prediction of the planar position of various objects being pushed by a real manipulator (MIT Push Dataset). Our model outperforms several other prediction models on both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

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ICRA Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Quasi-Direct Drive for Low-Cost Compliant Robotic Manipulation

  • David V. Gealy
  • Stephen McKinley
  • Brent Yi
  • Philipp Wu
  • Phillip R. Downey
  • Greg Balke
  • Allan Zhao
  • Menglong Guo

Robots must cost less and be force-controlled to enable widespread, safe deployment in unconstrained human environments. We propose Quasi-Direct Drive actuation as a capable paradigm for robotic force-controlled manipulation in human environments at low-cost. Our prototype - Blue - is a human scale 7 Degree of Freedom arm with 2kg payload. Blue can cost less than $5000. We show that Blue has dynamic properties that meet or exceed the needs of human operators: the robot has a nominal position-control bandwidth of 7. 5Hz and repeatability within 4mm. We demonstrate a Virtual Reality based interface that can be used as a method for telepresence and collecting robot training demonstrations. Manufacturability, scaling, and potential use-cases for the Blue system are also addressed. Videos and additional information can be found online at berkeleyopenarms.github.io.

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