This paper introduces a novel method for translating natural-language instructions into executable robot actions using OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a few-shot setting. We propose customizable input prompts for ChatGPT that can easily integrate with robot execution systems or visual recognition programs, adapt to various environments, and create multi-step task plans while mitigating the impact of token limit imposed on ChatGPT. In our approach, ChatGPT receives both instructions and textual environmental data, and outputs a task plan and an updated environment. These environmental data are reused in subsequent task planning, thus eliminating the extensive record-keeping of prior task plans within the prompts of ChatGPT. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of these prompts across various domestic environments, such as manipulations in front of a shelf, a fridge, and a drawer. The conversational capability of ChatGPT allows users to adjust the output via natural-language feedback. Additionally, a quantitative evaluation using VirtualHome showed that our results are comparable to previous studies. Specifically, 36% of task planning met both executability and correctness, and the rate approached 100% after several rounds of feedback. Our experiments revealed that ChatGPT can reasonably plan tasks and estimate post-operation environments without actual experience in object manipulation. Despite the allure of ChatGPT-based task planning in robotics, a standardized methodology remains elusive, making our work a substantial contribution. These prompts can serve as customizable templates, offering practical resources for the robotics research community. Our prompts and source code are open source and publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/ChatGPT-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts.

We introduce a pipeline that enhances a general-purpose Vision Language Model, GPT-4V(ision), to facilitate one-shot visual teaching for robotic manipulation. This system analyzes videos of humans performing tasks and outputs executable robot programs that incorporate insights into affordances. The process begins with GPT-4 V analyzing the videos to obtain textual explanations of environmental and action details. A GPT-4-based task planner then encodes these details into a symbolic task plan. Subsequently, vision systems spatially and temporally ground the task plan in the videos—objects are identified using an open-vocabulary object detector, and hand-object interactions are analyzed to pinpoint moments of grasping and releasing. This spatiotemporal grounding allows for the gathering of affordance information (e.g., grasp types, waypoints, and body postures) critical for robot execution. Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate the method's efficacy in enabling real robots to operate from one-shot human demonstrations. Meanwhile, quantitative tests have revealed instances of hallucination in GPT-4 V, highlighting the importance of incorporating human supervision within the pipeline. The prompts of GPT-4 V/GPT-4 are available at this project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GPT4Vision-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts/

To achieve recycling of mixed industrial waste toward an advanced sustainable society, waste sorting automation through robots is crucial and urgent. For this purpose, a robot is required to recognize the category, shape, pose, and condition of different waste items and manipulate them according to the category to be sorted. This survey considers three potential difficulties in the sorting automation: 1) End-effector: to robustly grasp and manipulate different waste items with dirt and deformations; 2) Sensor: to recognize the category, shape, and pose of existing objects to be manipulated and the wet and dirty conditions of their surfaces; and 3) Planner: to generate feasible and efficient sequences and trajectories. This survey includes 76 references to studies related to automatic waste sorting and 159 references to worldwide waste recycling attempts. This pioneering investigation reveals the possibility and limitations of conventional systems; thus, providing insights on open issues and potential technologies to achieve a robot-incorporated sorter for the chaotic mixed waste is one of its contributions. This paper further presents a system design policy for readers and discusses future advanced sorters, thereby contributing to the field of robotics and automation. Note to Practitioners —Most automated sorting systems operate for limited target waste items. This study is motivated by the automation of mixed industrial waste treatment facilities using advanced robotic sorters. Emerging advances and increasing functionalities of robot system components will widen system applicability and increase use cases in the chaotic mixed industrial waste domain. This paper surveys the research conducted to date, discusses open issues and potential approaches, and presents user guides that provide practitioners with a system design policy. The user guides created according to the strengths and weaknesses of each system configuration provide future researchers and developers with a useful a priori design policy that has been thus far validated on efficiency, quality, productivity, and reliability. A question-and-answer style guide and a sorting-target-aware previous study reference list allows users to find the desired system configuration, including the investigated components according to their purpose.

Owing to human labor shortages, the automation of labor-intensive manual waste-sorting is needed. The goal of automating waste-sorting is to replace the human role of robust detection and agile manipulation of waste items with robots. To achieve this, we propose three methods. First, we provide a combined manipulation method using graspless push-and-drop and pick-and-release manipulation. Second, we provide a robotic system that can automatically collect object images to quickly train a deep neural-network model. Third, we provide a method to mitigate the differences in the appearance of target objects from two scenes: one for dataset collection and the other for waste sorting in a recycling factory. If differences exist, the performance of a trained waste detector may decrease. We address differences in illumination and background by applying object scaling, histogram matching with histogram equalization, and background synthesis to the source target-object images. Via experiments in an indoor experimental workplace for waste-sorting, we confirm that the proposed methods enable quick collection of the training image sets for three classes of waste items (i.e., aluminum can, glass bottle, and plastic bottle) and detection with higher performance than the methods that do not consider the differences. We also confirm that the proposed method enables the robot quickly manipulate the objects.

The universal gripper has attracted attention due to its simple structure and advanced grasping ability for irregularly shaped objects. In this research, we propose a novel design for a granular-jamming-based gripper which uses a transparent filling and a semi-transparent membrane to allow optical sensing to detect both deformation of the membrane and the object being grasped. By adjusting the refractive index of an oil mixture to the refractive index of the granular bodies, we produced a fully transparent filling that allows the use of a camera inside the universal gripper. In this paper, we present the materials and development of our prototype, and describe the experimental confirmation of the prototype's performance. We showed that our prototype was able to grasp cylindrical and rectangular objects between 10 to 70 mm length while also tracking the deformation of the gripper.