Unfettered Forceful Skill Acquisition with Physical Reasoning and Coordinate Frame Labeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, William, Conway, Max, Zhang, Yutong, Correll, Nikolaus
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xie, William
Conway, Max
Zhang, Yutong
Correll, Nikolaus
author_facet Xie, William
Conway, Max
Zhang, Yutong
Correll, Nikolaus
contents Vision language models (VLMs) exhibit vast knowledge of the physical world, including intuition of physical and spatial properties, affordances, and motion. With fine-tuning, VLMs can also natively produce robot trajectories. We demonstrate that eliciting wrenches, not trajectories, allows VLMs to explicitly reason about forces and leads to zero-shot generalization in a series of manipulation tasks without pretraining. We achieve this by overlaying a consistent visual representation of relevant coordinate frames on robot-attached camera images to augment our query. First, we show how this addition enables a versatile motion control framework evaluated across four tasks (opening and closing a lid, pushing a cup or chair) spanning prismatic and rotational motion, an order of force and position magnitude, different camera perspectives, annotation schemes, and two robot platforms over 220 experiments, resulting in 51% success across the four tasks. Then, we demonstrate that the proposed framework enables VLMs to continually reason about interaction feedback to recover from task failure or incompletion, with and without human supervision. Finally, we observe that prompting schemes with visual annotation and embodied reasoning can bypass VLM safeguards. We characterize prompt component contribution to harmful behavior elicitation and discuss its implications for developing embodied reasoning. Our code, videos, and data are available at: https://scalingforce.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_09731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unfettered Forceful Skill Acquisition with Physical Reasoning and Coordinate Frame Labeling
Xie, William
Conway, Max
Zhang, Yutong
Correll, Nikolaus
Robotics
Vision language models (VLMs) exhibit vast knowledge of the physical world, including intuition of physical and spatial properties, affordances, and motion. With fine-tuning, VLMs can also natively produce robot trajectories. We demonstrate that eliciting wrenches, not trajectories, allows VLMs to explicitly reason about forces and leads to zero-shot generalization in a series of manipulation tasks without pretraining. We achieve this by overlaying a consistent visual representation of relevant coordinate frames on robot-attached camera images to augment our query. First, we show how this addition enables a versatile motion control framework evaluated across four tasks (opening and closing a lid, pushing a cup or chair) spanning prismatic and rotational motion, an order of force and position magnitude, different camera perspectives, annotation schemes, and two robot platforms over 220 experiments, resulting in 51% success across the four tasks. Then, we demonstrate that the proposed framework enables VLMs to continually reason about interaction feedback to recover from task failure or incompletion, with and without human supervision. Finally, we observe that prompting schemes with visual annotation and embodied reasoning can bypass VLM safeguards. We characterize prompt component contribution to harmful behavior elicitation and discuss its implications for developing embodied reasoning. Our code, videos, and data are available at: https://scalingforce.github.io/.
title Unfettered Forceful Skill Acquisition with Physical Reasoning and Coordinate Frame Labeling
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09731