Recent results suggest that very large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations can be used to train transformer-based models that have the potential to generalize to new scenes, robots, and tasks. However, curating, distributing, and loading large datasets of robot trajectories, which typically consist of video, textual, and numerical modalities - including streams from multiple cameras - remains challenging. We propose Robo-DM, an efficient open-source cloud-based data management toolkit for collecting, sharing, and learning with robot data. With Robo-DM, robot datasets are stored in a self-contained format with Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML). Robo-DM can significantly reduce the size of robot trajectory data, transfer costs, and data load time during training. Compared to the RLDS format used in OXE datasets, Robo-DM's compression saves space by up to 70x (lossy) and 3.5x (lossless). Robo-DM also accelerates data retrieval by load-balancing video decoding with memory-mapped decoding caches. Compared to LeRobot, a framework that also uses lossy video compression, Robo-DM is up to 50x faster when decoding sequentially. We physically evaluate a model trained by Robo-DM with lossy compression, a pick-and-place task, and In-Context Robot Transformer. Robo-DM uses 75x compression of the original dataset and does not suffer reduction in downstream task accuracy. Code and evaluation scripts can be found on website https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/fog_x.

Behavior cloning facilitates the learning of dexterous manipulation skills, yet the complexity of surgical environments, the difficulty and expense of obtaining patient data, and robot calibration errors present unique challenges for surgical robot learning. We provide an enhanced surgical digital twin with photorealistic human anatomical organs, integrated into a comprehensive simulator designed to generate high-quality synthetic data to solve fundamental tasks in surgical autonomy. We present SuFIA-BC: visual Behavior Cloning policies for Surgical First Interactive Autonomy Assistants. We investigate visual observation spaces including multi-view cameras and 3D visual representations extracted from a single endoscopic camera view. Through systematic evaluation, we find that the diverse set of photorealistic surgical tasks introduced in this work enables a comprehensive evaluation of prospective behavior cloning models for the unique challenges posed by surgical environments. We observe that current state-of-the-art behavior cloning techniques struggle to solve the contact-rich and complex tasks evaluated in this work, regardless of their underlying perception or control architectures. These findings highlight the importance of customizing perception pipelines and control architectures, as well as curating larger-scale synthetic datasets that meet the specific demands of surgical tasks. Project website: orbit-surgical.github.io/sufia-bc/

Tracking and manipulating irregularly-shaped, previously unseen objects in dynamic environments is important for robotic applications in manufacturing, assembly, and logistics. Recently introduced Gaussian Splats [1] efficiently model object geometry, but lack persistent state estimation for taskoriented manipulation. We present Persistent Object Gaussian Splat (POGS), a system that embeds semantics, self-supervised visual features, and object grouping features into a compact representation that can be continuously updated to estimate the pose of scanned objects. POGS updates object states without requiring expensive rescanning or prior CAD models of objects. After an initial multi-view scene capture and training phase, POGS uses a single stereo camera to integrate depth estimates along with self-supervised vision encoder features for object pose estimation. POGS supports grasping, reorientation, and natural language-driven manipulation by refining object pose estimates, facilitating sequential object reset operations with human-induced object perturbations and tool servoing, where robots recover tool pose despite tool perturbations of up to 30°. POGS achieves up to 12 consecutive successful object resets and recovers from 80% of in-grasp tool perturbations.

Knot tying is a fundamental dexterous surgical subtask that is a key step in suturing. One challenge to robot augmentation is limited depth perception due to the small baseline of surgical endoscopic cameras. In this work, we present Surgical D-Knot: an augmented dexterity pipeline combining learned perception with model-based methods to perform surgical double knots using only one monocular RGB camera. This pipeline includes 2D grasp point identification, 3D suture thread grasping using local feature servoing, suture thread wrapping using relative motion and 2D re-grasp point identification. Human dexterity is required for initial thread setup and thread cutting after each double knot. Physical experiments with 120 double knot trials result in a success rate of 80.83% for the initial knot and 55.83% for the second knot. Translation of surgical knot tying to chicken skin results in success rates of 73.75% for the initial knot and 40% for the second knot. Each double knot requires on average 70 seconds. This is the first work to our knowledge that augments human dexterity for double knot tying. https://sites.google.com/view/surgicaldknot/

Cloud service providers provide over 50,000 distinct and dynamically changing set of cloud server options. To help roboticists make cost-effective decisions, we present FogROS2-Config, an open toolkit that takes ROS2 nodes as input and automatically runs relevant benchmarks to quickly return a menu of cloud compute services that tradeoff latency and cost. Because it is infeasible to try every hardware configuration, FogROS2-Config quickly samples tests a small set of edge-case servers. We evaluate FogROS2-Config on three robotics application tasks: visual SLAM, grasp planning. and motion planning. FogROS2-Config can reduce the cost by up to 20x. By comparing with a Pareto frontier for cost and latency by running the application task on feasible server configurations, we evaluate cost and latency models and confirm that FogROS2-Config selects efficient hardware configurations to balance cost and latency. Videos and code are available on the website https://sites.google.com/view/fogros2-config

Inventory monitoring in homes, factories, and retail stores relies on maintaining data despite objects being swapped, added, removed, or moved. We introduce Lifelong LERF, a method that allows a mobile robot with minimal compute to jointly optimize a dense language and geometric representation of its surroundings. Lifelong LERF maintains this representation over time by detecting semantic changes and selectively updating these regions of the environment, avoiding the need to exhaustively remap. Human users can query inventory by providing natural language queries and receiving a 3D heatmap of potential object locations. To manage the computational load, we use Fog-ROS2, a cloud robotics platform, to offload resource-intensive tasks. Lifelong LERF obtains poses from a monocular RGBD SLAM backend, and uses these poses to progressively optimize a Language Embedded Radiance Field (LERF) for semantic monitoring. Experiments with 3-5 objects arranged on a tabletop and a Turtlebot with a RealSense camera suggest that Lifelong LERF can persistently adapt to changes in objects with up to 91% accuracy.

Physics-based simulations have accelerated progress in robot learning for driving, manipulation, and locomotion. Yet, a fast, accurate, and robust surgical simulation environment remains a challenge. In this paper, we present Orbit-Surgical, a physics-based surgical robot simulation framework with photorealistic rendering in NVIDIA Omniverse. We provide 14 benchmark surgical tasks for the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) which represent common subtasks in surgical training. Orbit-Surgical leverages GPU parallelization to train reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms to facilitate study of robot learning to augment human surgical skills. Orbit-Surgical also facilitates realistic synthetic data generation for active perception tasks. We demonstrate Orbit-Surgical sim-to-real transfer of learned policies onto a physical dVRK robot.Project website: orbit-surgical.github.io

Cloud robotics enables robots to offload complex computational tasks to cloud servers for performance and ease of management. However, cloud compute can be costly, cloud services can suffer occasional downtime, and connectivity between the robot and cloud can be prone to variations in network Quality-of-Service (QoS). We present FogROS2-FT (Fault Tolerant) to mitigate these issues by introducing a multi-cloud extension that automatically replicates independent stateless robotic services, routes requests to these replicas, and directs the first response back. With replication, robots can still benefit from cloud computations even when a cloud service provider is down or there is low QoS. Additionally, many cloud computing providers offer low-cost "spot" computing instances that may shutdown unpredictably. Normally, these low-cost instances would be inappropriate for cloud robotics, but the fault tolerance nature of FogROS2-FT allows them to be used reliably. We demonstrate FogROS2-FT fault tolerance capabilities in 3 cloud-robotics scenarios in simulation (visual object detection, semantic segmentation, motion planning) and 1 physical robot experiment (scan-pick-and-place). Running on the same hardware specification, FogROS2-FT achieves motion planning with up to 2.2x cost reduction and up to a 5.53x reduction on 99 Percentile (P99) long-tail latency. FogROS2-FT reduces the P99 long-tail latency of object detection and semantic segmentation by 2.0x and 2.1x, respectively, under network slowdown and resource contention. Videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/fogros2-ft.

Building semantic 3D maps is valuable for searching for objects of interest in offices, warehouses, stores, and homes. We present a mapping system that incrementally builds a Language-Embedded Gaussian Splat (LEGS): a detailed 3D scene representation that encodes both appearance and semantics in a unified representation. LEGS is trained online as a robot traverses its environment to enable localization of open-vocabulary object queries. We evaluate LEGS on 4 room-scale scenes where we query for objects in the scene to assess how LEGS can capture semantic meaning. We compare LEGS to LERF [1] and find that while both systems have comparable object query success rates, LEGS trains over 3.5x faster than LERF. Results suggest that a multi-camera setup and incremental bundle adjustment can boost visual reconstruction quality in constrained robot trajectories, and suggest LEGS can localize open-vocabulary and long-tail object queries with up to 66% accuracy. See project website at: berkeleyautomation.github.io/LEGS