Deep learning methods for perception are the cornerstone of many robotic systems. Despite their potential for impressive performance, obtaining real-world training data is expensive, and can be impractically difficult for some tasks. Sim-to-real transfer with domain randomization offers a potential workaround, but often requires extensive manual tuning and results in models that are brittle to distribution shift between sim and real. In this work, we introduce Composable Object Volume NeRF (COV-NeRF), an object-composable NeRF model that is the centerpiece of a real-to-sim pipeline for synthesizing training data targeted to scenes and objects from the real world. COV-NeRF extracts objects from real images and composes them into new scenes, generating photorealistic renderings and many types of 2D and 3D supervision, including depth maps, segmentation masks, and meshes. We show that COV-NeRF matches the rendering quality of modern NeRF methods, and can be used to rapidly close the sim-to-real gap across a variety of perceptual modalities.

Dense packing in pick-and-place systems is an important feature in many warehouse and logistics applications. Prior work in this space has largely focused on planning algorithms in simulation, but real-world packing performance is often bottlenecked by the difficulty of perceiving 3D object geometry in highly occluded, partially observed scenes. In this work, we present a fully-convolutional shape completion model, F-CON, which can be easily combined with off-the-shelf planning methods for dense packing in the real world. We also release a simulated dataset, COB-3D-v2, that can be used to train shape completion models for real-word robotics applications, and use it to demonstrate that F-CON outperforms other state-of-the-art shape completion methods. Finally, we equip a real-world pick-and-place system with F-CON, and demonstrate dense packing of complex, unseen objects in cluttered scenes. Across multiple planning methods, F-CON enables substantially better dense packing than other shape completion methods.

We propose associating language utterances to 3D visual abstractions of the scene they describe. The 3D visual abstractions are encoded as 3-dimensional visual feature maps. We infer these 3D visual scene feature maps from RGB images of the scene via view prediction: when the generated 3D scene feature map is neurally projected from a camera viewpoint, it should match the corresponding RGB image. We present generative models that condition on the dependency tree of an utterance and generate a corresponding visual 3D feature map as well as reason about its plausibility, and detector models that condition on both the dependency tree of an utterance and a related image and localize the object referents in the 3D feature map inferred from the image. Our model outperforms models of language and vision that associate language with 2D CNN activations or 2D images by a large margin in a variety of tasks, such as, classifying plausibility of utterances, detecting referential expressions, and supplying rewards for trajectory optimization of object placement policies from language instructions. We perform numerous ablations and show the improved performance of our detectors is due to its better generalization across camera viewpoints and lack of object interferences in the inferred 3D feature space, and the improved performance of our generators is due to their ability to spatially reason about objects and their configurations in 3D when mapping from language to scenes.