Building robotic agents capable of operating across diverse environments and
object types remains a significant challenge, often requiring extensive data
collection. This is particularly restrictive in robotics, where each data point
must be physically executed in the real world. Consequently, there is a
critical need for alternative data sources for robotics and frameworks that
enable learning from such data. In this work, we present Point Policy, a new
method for learning robot policies exclusively from offline human demonstration
videos and without any teleoperation data. Point Policy leverages state-of-the-art
vision models and policy architectures to translate human hand poses into robot
poses while capturing object states through semantically meaningful key points.
This approach yields a morphology-agnostic representation that facilitates
effective policy learning. Our experiments on 8 real-world tasks demonstrate an
overall 75% absolute improvement over prior works when evaluated in identical
settings as training. Further, Point Policy exhibits a 74% gain across tasks for
novel object instances and is robust to significant background clutter.
Proposed Framework
Point Policy leverages state-of-the-art vision models and policy architectures to
translate human hand poses into robot poses while capturing object states through
sparse single-frame human annotations. The derived key points are fed into a transformer
policy to predict the 3D future point tracks from which the robot actions are computed
through rigid-body geometry constraints. Finally, the computed action is executed on
the robot using end-effector position control at a 6Hz frequency.
In-domain Performance
We evaluate Point Policy on 8 real world tasks on a
Franka Research 3 robot. Here, we present the results of evaluations conducted in an in-domain setting
with significant spatial variations. Point Policy achieves an average
success rate of 88% across all tasks, outperforming the
strongest baseline by 75%. We provide videos of successful rollouts below (all played at 2X speed).
Task: Trajectory:
Performance on Novel Object Instances
We evaluate Point Policy on novel object instances unseen in the training data on 6 tasks. We observe
that point policy achieves an average success rate of 74%
across all tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 73%.
We provide videos of successful rollouts below (all played at 2X speed).
Extreme Examples
Here we include rollouts of Point Policy operating under heavy scene variations on both in-domain and
novel object instances. We observe that despite the significant visual variations in the scene, Point Policy
succeeds at completing the tasks. This robustness can be attributed to Point Policy’s use of point-based
representations, which are decoupled from raw pixel values. By focusing on semantically meaningful
points rather than image-level features, Point Policy enables policies that are resilient to environmental perturbations.
All videos are played at 2X speed.