Surfer: A World Model-Based Framework for Vision-Language Robot Manipulation

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing

Background:

• Robot manipulation faces challenges in understanding natural language instructions and incorporating world knowledge.
• Existing methods often lack explicit world knowledge modeling and operate in simplified simulation environments.
• Embodied AI agents require robust world modeling for accurate task execution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce Surfer, a novel framework for robot manipulation that explicitly models world knowledge.
• To enhance generalization capabilities for new instructions and scenes in robot manipulation.
• To provide a realistic simulation and benchmark for evaluating vision-language-based robot manipulation.

Main Methods:

• Surfer models robot manipulation as visual scene state transfer, decoupling action and scene prediction.
• The framework utilizes multimodal information for enhanced action and scene prediction.
• A physics-based simulation platform using the MuJoCo engine was developed for data generation and testing.

Main Results:

• Surfer demonstrated superior performance across all manipulation tasks in the SeaWave benchmark.
• The framework achieved an average success rate of 54.74%, outperforming the best baseline by 3.67%.
• Extensive experiments confirmed Surfer's effectiveness in visual-language understanding and physical execution.

Conclusions:

• Surfer offers a significant advancement in robot manipulation by integrating world knowledge modeling.
• The developed benchmark and simulator facilitate standardized evaluation of embodied AI agents.
• The framework shows strong potential for real-world applications requiring nuanced instruction following and physical interaction.