Monocular 3D Object Position Estimation with VLMs for Human-Robot Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wahl, Ari, Gawlinski, Dorian, Przewozny, David, Chojecki, Paul, Bießmann, Felix, Bosse, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wahl, Ari
Gawlinski, Dorian
Przewozny, David
Chojecki, Paul
Bießmann, Felix
Bosse, Sebastian
author_facet Wahl, Ari
Gawlinski, Dorian
Przewozny, David
Chojecki, Paul
Bießmann, Felix
Bosse, Sebastian
contents Pre-trained general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLM) hold the potential to enhance intuitive human-machine interactions due to their rich world knowledge and 2D object detection capabilities. However, VLMs for 3D coordinates detection tasks are rare. In this work, we investigate interactive abilities of VLMs by returning 3D object positions given a monocular RGB image from a wrist-mounted camera, natural language input, and robot states. We collected and curated a heterogeneous dataset of more than 100,000 images and finetuned a VLM using QLoRA with a custom regression head. By implementing conditional routing, our model maintains its ability to process general visual queries while adding specialized 3D position estimation capabilities. Our results demonstrate robust predictive performance with a median MAE of 13 mm on the test set and a five-fold improvement over a simpler baseline without finetuning. In about 25% of the cases, predictions are within a range considered acceptable for the robot to interact with objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01224
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Monocular 3D Object Position Estimation with VLMs for Human-Robot Interaction
Wahl, Ari
Gawlinski, Dorian
Przewozny, David
Chojecki, Paul
Bießmann, Felix
Bosse, Sebastian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Robotics
Pre-trained general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLM) hold the potential to enhance intuitive human-machine interactions due to their rich world knowledge and 2D object detection capabilities. However, VLMs for 3D coordinates detection tasks are rare. In this work, we investigate interactive abilities of VLMs by returning 3D object positions given a monocular RGB image from a wrist-mounted camera, natural language input, and robot states. We collected and curated a heterogeneous dataset of more than 100,000 images and finetuned a VLM using QLoRA with a custom regression head. By implementing conditional routing, our model maintains its ability to process general visual queries while adding specialized 3D position estimation capabilities. Our results demonstrate robust predictive performance with a median MAE of 13 mm on the test set and a five-fold improvement over a simpler baseline without finetuning. In about 25% of the cases, predictions are within a range considered acceptable for the robot to interact with objects.
title Monocular 3D Object Position Estimation with VLMs for Human-Robot Interaction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01224