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Robotic foundation models trained on large-scale manipulation datasets have shown promise in learning generalist policies, but they often overfit to specific viewpoints, robot arms, and especially parallel-jaw grippers due to dataset biases. To address this limitation, we propose Cross-Embodiment Interface (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CEI</i>), a framework for cross-embodiment learning that enables the transfer of demonstrations across different robot arm and end-effector morphologies. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CEI</i> introduces the concept of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">functional similarity</i>, which is quantified using Directional Chamfer Distance. Then it aligns robot trajectories through gradient-based optimization, followed by synthesizing observations and actions for unseen robot arms and end-effectors. In experiments, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CEI</i> transfers data and policies from a Franka Panda robot to <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">16</b> different embodiments across <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</b> tasks in simulation, and supports bidirectional transfer between a UR5+AG95 gripper robot and a UR5+Xhand robot across <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</b> real-world tasks, achieving an average transfer ratio of 82.4%. Finally, we demonstrate that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CEI</i> can also be extended with spatial generalization and multimodal motion generation capabilities using our proposed techniques. Project website: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://cross-embodiment-interface.github.io/</uri>.
Published in: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 3486-3493