A Training-Free Framework for Precise
Mobile Manipulation of Small Everyday Objects

Arjun Gupta
Rishik Sathua
Saurabh Gupta
UIUC
UIUC
UIUC
Paper


Many everyday mobile manipulation tasks require precise interaction with small objects, such as grasping a knob to open a cabinet or pressing a light switch. In this paper, we develop Servoing with Vision Models (SVM), a closed-loop training-free framework that enables a mobile manipulator to tackle such precise tasks involving the manipulation of small objects. SVM employs an RGB-D wrist camera and uses visual servoing for control. Our novelty lies in the use of state-of- the-art vision models to reliably compute 3D targets from the wrist image for diverse tasks and under occlusion due to the end-effector. To mitigate occlusion artifacts, we employ vision models to out-paint the end-effector thereby significantly en- hancing target localization. We demonstrate that aided by out- painting methods, open-vocabulary object detectors can serve as a drop-in module to identify semantic targets (e.g. knobs) and point tracking methods can reliably track interaction sites indicated by user clicks. This training-free method obtains an 85% zero-shot success rate on manipulating unseen objects in novel environments in the real world, outperforming an open- loop control method and an imitation learning baseline trained on 1000+ demonstrations by an absolute success rate of 50%.