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This paper introduces Contact Flow, an embodiment-agnostic action representation that encodes manipulation through the trajectory of 3D contact points, facilitating the transfer of action conditioning across different robotic embodiments. By training a large-scale video generative model on both human and robotic interaction videos, the authors create a world model capable of predicting physically plausible manipulation outcomes. Experiments show that Contact Flow significantly enhances the ability to transfer learned actions from human demonstrations to various robotic platforms, improving the effectiveness of robot planning in real-world tasks.
Contact Flow enables seamless transfer of manipulation skills between humans and robots, revolutionizing how we approach action conditioning in robotics.
World models offer a promising route toward robot planning by enabling agents to imagine and verify the consequences of actions before execution. However, current video-based world models often struggle to capture the physical constraints that govern manipulation, particularly contact. Further, their action conditioning is often constrained to specific embodiments such as parallel grippers. We propose \emph{Contact Flow}, an embodiment-agnostic action representation that encodes manipulation through the trajectory of 3D contact points between an actor and a target object. By discarding actor-specific appearance and kinematics, Contact Flow provides a shared conditioning signal for both human demonstrations and robotic execution. Therefore, we can train a large-scale video generative model on both human and robotic object interaction videos conditioned on Contact Flow, yielding a world model that predicts physically plausible manipulation outcomes. We integrate this model into a propose-imagine-verify-act pipeline, where generated rollouts are assessed by a vision-language model before execution. Experiments on the DROID dataset and real-world tabletop manipulation tasks demonstrate that Contact Flow enables transfer between human demonstrations and different robotic embodiments.