Learning Generalizable Feature Fields for Mobile Manipulation
Ri-Zhao Qiu Yafei Hu Ge Yang Yuchen Song Yang Fu Jianglong Ye Jiteng Mu Ruihan Yang Nikolay Atanasov Sebastian Scherer Xiaolong Wang
An open problem in mobile manipulation is how to represent objects and scenes
in a unified manner, so that robots can use it both for navigating in the
environment and manipulating objects. The latter requires capturing intricate
geometry while understanding fine-grained semantics, whereas the former
involves capturing the complexity inherit to an expansive physical scale. In
this work, we present GeFF (Generalizable Feature Fields), a scene-level
generalizable neural feature field that acts as a unified representation for
both navigation and manipulation that performs in real-time. To do so, we treat
generative novel view synthesis as a pre-training task, and then align the
resulting rich scene priors with natural language via CLIP feature
distillation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by deploying
GeFF on a quadrupedal robot equipped with a manipulator. We evaluate GeFF's
ability to generalize to open-set objects as well as running time, when
performing open-vocabulary mobile manipulation in dynamic scenes.