Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-horizon Manipulation

January 2025

Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-horizon Manipulation

Authors:

Murtaza Dalal, Min Liu, Walter Talbott, Chen Chen, Deepak Pathak, Jian Zhang, and Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Conference Paper
Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Abstract:

Sim2real for robotic manipulation is difficult due to the challenges of simulating complex contacts and generating realistic task distributions. To tackle the latter problem, we introduce ManipGen, which leverages a new class of policies for sim2real transfer: local policies. Locality enables a variety of appealing properties including invariances to absolute robot and object pose, skill ordering, and global scene configuration. We combine these policies with foundation models for vision, language and motion planning and demonstrate SOTA zero-shot performance of our method to Robosuite benchmark tasks in simulation (97%). We transfer our local policies from simulation to reality and observe they can solve unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages with significant pose, object and scene configuration variation. ManipGen outperforms SOTA approaches such as SayCan, OpenVLA, LLMTrajGen and VoxPoser across 50 real-world manipulation tasks by 36%, 76%, 62% and 60% respectively.
@conference{Dalal and Liu-2025-145324,
author = {Murtaza Dalal And Min Liu And Walter Talbott And Chen Chen And Deepak Pathak And Jian Zhang And Ruslan Salakhutdinov},
title = {Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-horizon Manipulation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2025},
month = {January},
publisher = {IEEE},
keywords = {sim2real, long-horizon manipulation, hierarchy},
}
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