Stretch Community News - March 2024
Welcome to the Hello Robot monthly community update!
Last month we got the chance to meet dozens of Stretch users in Boulder at the Human-Robot Interaction conference - thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi! Tons of work with Stretch was presented and included a Best Paper and Best Video award; read on to see more.
This month, we have Stretch learning to open cabinets and drawers, Robots for Aging supporting Alzheimer’s dementia, VR teleoperation, whole-body trajectory optimization, and more! Read on for details. If you’d like to see your work featured in a future newsletter, please let us know!
In new work from UIUC, researchers present an end-to-end system for opening articulated objects like cabinets and drawers in the real-world. With this system, Stretch 2 achieved a 61% zero-shot success rate opening previously unseen drawers and cabinets in 13 different real environments.
The University of New Hampshire shared a new video as part of their Robots for Aging project, demonstrating the first testing of their ROS2 framework for long-term human-robot interaction on Stretch. This project is designing a robot-based intervention for older adults with Alzheimer’s dementia to facilitate aging-in-place by reducing caregiver burden.
Vector-Quantized Behavior Transformer (VQ-BeT), from NYU and Seoul National University, is a versatile model for learning behavior from open-ended, multi-modal data by tokenizing the action space. Researchers tested VQ-BeT with Stretch learning from demonstrations, outperforming baselines on longer horizon tasks by a relative margin of 73%.
Work with Stretch won several awards at the Human-Robot Interaction conference last month! Prof. Zackory Erickson’s lab at CMU won Best Paper - Systems for the Head-Worn Assistive Teleoperation interface, and Prof. Maya Cakmak’s UW lab won Best Video for work designing and testing a web-based teleop system.
A Hello Robot Forum post from Michal Ciebelski details a new method of performing whole body trajectory optimization with Stretch, including examples and an open-source repo!
Avanade’s Fergus Kidd sat down for an interview with “Rory”, a Stretch RE1 - powered by GPT-4 on Azure, with vision processing using GPT-V and OpenAI text-to-speech models.
University of Wisconsin and Idiap Research Institute presented a taxonomy of important factors to consider when designing interactions with an assistive robot in a senior living facility, derived in part from a participatory design study using Stretch.
OPEN TEACH is a new open-sourced teleoperation system using the Meta Quest 3 to immerse users in mixed reality for intuitive real-time control of robots including Stretch.
