RoboCat: A Self-Improving Generalist Agent for Robotic Manipulation

20 Jun 2023 · Konstantinos Bousmalis, Giulia Vezzani, Dushyant Rao, Coline Devin, Alex X. Lee, Maria Bauza, Todor Davchev, Yuxiang Zhou, Agrim Gupta, Akhil Raju, Antoine Laurens, Claudio Fantacci, Valentin Dalibard, Martina Zambelli, Murilo Martins, Rugile Pevceviciute, Michiel Blokzijl, Misha Denil, Nathan Batchelor, Thomas Lampe, Emilio Parisotto, Konrad Żołna, Scott Reed, Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo, Jon Scholz, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Oliver Groth, Jean-Baptiste Regli, Oleg Sushkov, Tom Rothörl, José Enrique Chen, Yusuf Aytar, Dave Barker, Joy Ortiz, Martin Riedmiller, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Raia Hadsell, Francesco Nori, Nicolas Heess ·

The ability to leverage heterogeneous robotic experience from different robots and tasks to quickly master novel skills and embodiments has the potential to transform robot learning. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models for vision and language, we propose a multi-embodiment, multi-task generalist agent for robotic manipulation. This agent, named RoboCat, is a visual goal-conditioned decision transformer capable of consuming action-labelled visual experience. This data spans a large repertoire of motor control skills from simulated and real robotic arms with varying sets of observations and actions. With RoboCat, we demonstrate the ability to generalise to new tasks and robots, both zero-shot as well as through adaptation using only 100-1000 examples for the target task. We also show how a trained model itself can be used to generate data for subsequent training iterations, thus providing a basic building block for an autonomous improvement loop. We investigate the agent's capabilities, with large-scale evaluations both in simulation and on three different real robot embodiments. We find that as we grow and diversify its training data, RoboCat not only shows signs of cross-task transfer, but also becomes more efficient at adapting to new tasks.

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