Shaping the future of advanced robotics (2024)

Introducing AutoRT, SARA-RT and RT-Trajectory to improve real-world robot data collection, speed, and generalization

Picture a future in which a simple request to your personal helper robot - “tidy the house” or “cook us a delicious, healthy meal” - is all it takes to get those jobs done. These tasks, straightforward for humans, require a high-level understanding of the world for robots.

Today we’re announcing a suite of advances in robotics research that bring us a step closer to this future. AutoRT, SARA-RT, and RT-Trajectory build on our historic Robotics Transformers work to help robots make decisions faster, and better understand and navigate their environments.

AutoRT: Harnessing large models to better train robots

We introduce AutoRT, a system that harnesses the potential of large foundation models which is critical to creating robots that can understand practical human goals. By collecting more experiential training data – and more diverse data – AutoRT can help scale robotic learning to better train robots for the real world.

AutoRT combines large foundation models such as a Large Language Model (LLM) or Visual Language Model (VLM), and a robot control model (RT-1 or RT-2) to create a system that can deploy robots to gather training data in novel environments. AutoRT can simultaneously direct multiple robots, each equipped with a video camera and an end effector, to carry out diverse tasks in a range of settings. For each robot, the system uses a VLM to understand its environment and the objects within sight. Next, an LLM suggests a list of creative tasks that the robot could carry out, such as “Place the snack onto the countertop” and plays the role of decision-maker to select an appropriate task for the robot to carry out.

In extensive real-world evaluations over seven months, the system safely orchestrated as many as 20 robots simultaneously, and up to 52 unique robots in total, in a variety of office buildings, gathering a diverse dataset comprising 77,000 robotic trials across 6,650 unique tasks.

Layered safety protocols are critical

Before robots can be integrated into our everyday lives, they need to be developed responsibly with robust research demonstrating their real-world safety.

While AutoRT is a data-gathering system, it is also an early demonstration of autonomous robots for real-world use. It features safety guardrails, one of which is providing its LLM-based decision-maker with a Robot Constitution - a set of safety-focused prompts to abide by when selecting tasks for the robots. These rules are in part inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – first and foremost that a robot “may not injure a human being”. Further safety rules require that no robot attempts tasks involving humans, animals, sharp objects or electrical appliances.

But even if large models are prompted correctly with self-critiquing, this alone cannot guarantee safety. So the AutoRT system comprises layers of practical safety measures from classical robotics. For example, the collaborative robots are programmed to stop automatically if the force on its joints exceed a given threshold, and all active robots were kept in line-of-sight of a human supervisor with a physical deactivation switch.

SARA-RT: Making Robotics Transformers leaner and faster

Our new system, Self-Adaptive Robust Attention for Robotics Transformers (SARA-RT), converts Robotics Transformer (RT) models into more efficient versions.

SARA-RT makes models more efficient using a novel method of model fine-tuning that we call “up-training”. Up-training converts the quadratic complexity to mere linear complexity, sharply reducing the computational requirements. This conversion not only increases the original model’s speed, but also preserves its quality.

We designed our system for usability and hope many researchers and practitioners will apply it, in robotics and beyond. Because SARA provides a universal recipe for speeding up Transformers, without need for computationally expensive pre-training, this approach has the potential to massively scale up use of Transformers technology. SARA-RT does not require any additional code as various open-sourced linear variants can be used.

When we applied SARA-RT to a state-of-the-art RT-2 model with billions of parameters, it resulted in faster decision-making and better performance on a wide range of robotic tasks.

And with its robust theoretical grounding, SARA-RT can be applied to a wide variety of Transformer models. For example, applying SARA-RT to Point Cloud Transformers - used to process spatial data from robot depth cameras - more than doubled their speed.

RT-Trajectory: Helping robots generalize

It may be intuitive for humans to understand how to wipe a table, but there are many possible ways a robot could translate an instruction into actual physical motions.

We developed a model called RT-Trajectory, which automatically adds visual outlines that describe robot motions in training videos. RT-Trajectory takes each video in a training dataset and overlays it with a 2D trajectory sketch of the robot arm’s gripper as it performs the task. These trajectories, in the form of RGB images, provide low-level, practical visual hints to the model as it learns its robot-control policies.

When tested on 41 tasks unseen in the training data, an arm controlled by RT-Trajectory more than doubled the performance of existing state-of-the-art RT models: it achieved a task success rate of 63%, compared with 29% for RT-2.

Traditionally, training a robotic arm relies on mapping abstract natural language (“wipe the table”) to specific movements (close gripper, move left, move right), making it hard for models to generalize to novel tasks. In contrast, an RT-Trajectory model enables RT models to understand "how to do" tasks by interpreting specific robot motions like those contained in videos or sketches.

The system is versatile: RT-Trajectory can also create trajectories by watching human demonstrations of desired tasks, and even accept hand-drawn sketches. And it can be readily adapted to different robot platforms.

RT-Trajectory makes use of the rich robotic-motion information that is present in all robot datasets, but currently under-utilized. RT-Trajectory not only represents another step along the road to building robots able to move with efficient accuracy in novel situations, but also unlocking knowledge from existing datasets.

Building the foundations for next-generation robots

By building on the foundation of our state-of-the-art RT-1 and RT-2 models, each of these pieces help create ever more capable and helpful robots. We envision a future in which these models and systems can be integrated to create robots – with the motion generalization of RT-Trajectory, the efficiency of SARA-RT, and the large-scale data collection from models like AutoRT. We will continue to tackle challenges in robotics today and to adapt to the new capabilities and technologies of more advanced robotics.