Nur Muhammad “Mahi” Shafiullah

MolmoSpaces: A Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Navigation and Manipulation

2026-02-11T20:00:01+00:00

Deploying robots at scale demands robustness to the long tail of everyday situations. We introduce MolmoSpaces, a fully open ecosystem to support large-scale benchmarking of robot policies. MolmoSpaces consists of over 230,000 diverse indoor environments populated with 130,000 richly annotated object assets, including 48,000 manipulable objects with 42 million stable grasps. The ecosystem supports the full spectrum of embodied tasks: static and mobile manipulation, navigation, and multiroom long-horizon tasks. Our experiments show MolmoSpaces-Bench exhibits strong sim-to-real correlation (R = 0.96, rho = 0.98), providing a foundation for scalable data generation, policy training, and benchmark creation for robot learning research.

YOR: Your Own Mobile Manipulator for Generalizable Robotics

2026-02-11T20:00:00+00:00

Recent advances in robot learning have generated significant interest in capable platforms that may eventually approach human-level competence. This interest, combined with the commoditization of actuators, has propelled growth in low-cost robotic platforms. However, the optimal form factor for mobile manipulation, especially on a budget, remains an open question. We introduce YOR, an open-source, low-cost mobile manipulator that integrates an omnidirectional base, a telescopic vertical lift, and two arms with grippers to achieve whole-body mobility and manipulation. Our design emphasizes modularity, ease of assembly using off-the-shelf components, and affordability, with a bill-of-materials cost under 10,000 USD. We demonstrate YOR’s capability by completing tasks that require coordinated whole-body control, bimanual manipulation, and autonomous navigation. Overall, YOR offers competitive functionality for mobile manipulation research at a fraction of the cost of existing platforms.

Contact-Anchored Policies: Contact Conditioning Creates Strong Robot Utility Models

2026-02-09T20:00:00+00:00

Language-conditioned robot learning has emerged as the dominant paradigm for creating general-purpose robot policies. However, language as an interface for robot control has inherent limitations: it is abstract, ambiguous, and lacks the spatial precision needed for manipulation tasks. We propose Contact-Anchored Policies (CAPs), which replace language conditioning with physical contact points in space. Rather than training a single generalist policy, CAPs organize capabilities as modular utility models, each specialized for a specific task. We also introduce EgoGym, a lightweight simulation environment for identifying and addressing failure modes before real-world deployment. Using only 23 hours of demonstration data, our method generalizes to novel environments and embodiments, outperforming large, state-of-the-art VLAs in zero-shot evaluations by 56%. All resources, including models, code, hardware specifications, simulation environments, and datasets, are publicly available.

DynaMem: Online Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Memory for Open World Mobile Manipulation

2024-11-07T20:00:00+00:00

Significant progress has been made in open-vocabulary mobile manipulation, where the goal is for a robot to perform tasks in any environment given a natural language description. However, most current systems assume a static environment, which limits the system’s applicability in real-world scenarios where environments frequently change due to human intervention or the robot’s own actions. In this work, we present DynaMem, a new approach to open-world mobile manipulation that uses a dynamic spatio-semantic memory to represent a robot’s environment. DynaMem constructs a 3D data structure to maintain a dynamic memory of point clouds, and answers open-vocabulary object localization queries using multimodal LLMs or open-vocabulary features generated by state-of-the-art vision-language models. Powered by DynaMem, our robots can explore novel environments, search for objects not found in memory, and continuously update the memory as objects move, appear, or disappear in the scene. We run extensive experiments on the Stretch SE3 robots in three real and nine offline scenes, and achieve an average pick-and-drop success rate of 70% on non-stationary objects, which is more than a 2x improvement over state-of-the-art static systems.

Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments

2024-09-09T20:00:00+00:00

Robot models, particularly those trained with large amounts of data, have recently shown a plethora of real-world manipulation and navigation capabilities. Several independent efforts have shown that given sufficient training data in an environment, robot policies can generalize to demonstrated variations in that environment. However, needing to finetune robot models to every new environment stands in stark contrast to models in language or vision that can be deployed zero-shot for open-world problems. In this work, we present Robot Utility Models (RUMs), a framework for training and deploying zero-shot robot policies that can directly generalize to new environments without any finetuning. To create RUMs efficiently, we develop new tools to quickly collect data for mobile manipulation tasks, integrate such data into a policy with multi-modal imitation learning, and deploy policies on-device on Hello Robot Stretch, a cheap commodity robot, with an external mLLM verifier for retrying. We train five such utility models for opening cabinet doors, opening drawers, picking up napkins, picking up paper bags, and reorienting fallen objects. Our system, on average, achieves 90% success rate in unseen, novel environments interacting with unseen objects. Moreover, the utility models can also succeed in different robot and camera set-ups with no further data, training, or fine-tuning. Primary among our lessons are the importance of training data over training algorithm and policy class, guidance about data scaling, necessity for diverse yet high-quality demonstrations, and a recipe for robot introspection and retrying to improve performance on individual environments.

Behavior Generation with Latent Actions

2024-03-05T20:00:00+00:00

Generative modeling of complex behaviors from labeled datasets has been a longstanding problem in decision making. Unlike language or image generation, decision making requires modeling actions - continuous-valued vectors that are multimodal in their distribution, potentially drawn from uncurated sources, where generation errors can compound in sequential prediction. A recent class of models called Behavior Transformers (BeT) addresses this by discretizing actions using k-means clustering to capture different modes. However, k-means struggles to scale for high-dimensional action spaces or long sequences, and lacks gradient information, and thus BeT suffers in modeling long-range actions. In this work, we present Vector-Quantized Behavior Transformer (VQ-BeT), a versatile model for behavior generation that handles multimodal action prediction, conditional generation, and partial observations. VQ-BeT augments BeT by tokenizing continuous actions with a hierarchical vector quantization module. Across seven environments including simulated manipulation, autonomous driving, and robotics, VQ-BeT improves on state-of-the-art models such as BeT and Diffusion Policies. Importantly, we demonstrate VQ-BeT’s improved ability to capture behavior modes while accelerating inference speed 5x over Diffusion Policies. Videos and code can be found in https://sjlee.cc/vq-bet/.

OK-Robot: What Really Matters in Integrating Open-Knowledge Models for Robotics

2024-01-22T20:00:00+00:00

Remarkable progress has been made in recent years in the fields of vision, language, and robotics. We now have vision models capable of recognizing objects based on language queries, navigation systems that can effectively control mobile systems, and grasping models that can handle a wide range of objects. Despite these advancements, general-purpose applications of robotics still lag behind, even though they rely on these fundamental capabilities of recognition, navigation, and grasping. In this paper, we adopt a systems-first approach to develop a new Open Knowledge-based robotics framework called OK-Robot. By combining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for object detection, navigation primitives for movement, and grasping primitives for object manipulation, OK-Robot offers a integrated solution for pick-and-drop operations without requiring any training. To evaluate its performance, we run OK-Robot in 10 real-world home environments. The results demonstrate that OK-Robot achieves a 58.5% success rate in open-ended pick-and-drop tasks, representing a new state-of-the-art in Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) with nearly 1.8x the performance of prior work. On cleaner, uncluttered environments, OK-Robot’s performance increases to 82%. However, the most important insight gained from OK-Robot is the critical role of nuanced details when combining Open Knowledge systems like VLMs with robotic modules. Videos of our experiments are available on our website: https://ok-robot.github.io.

From Play to Policy: Conditional Behavior Generation from Uncurated Robot Data

2022-10-19T20:00:00+00:00

While large-scale sequence modeling from offline data has led to impressive performance gains in natural language and image generation, directly translating such ideas to robotics has been challenging. One critical reason for this is that uncurated robot demonstration data, i.e. play data, collected from non-expert human demonstrators are often noisy, diverse, and distributionally multi-modal. This makes extracting useful, task-centric behaviors from such data a difficult generative modeling problem. In this work, we present Conditional Behavior Transformers (C-BeT), a method that combines the multi-modal generation ability of Behavior Transformer with future-conditioned goal specification. On a suite of simulated benchmark tasks, we find that C-BeT improves upon prior state-of-the-art work in learning from play data by an average of 45.7%. Further, we demonstrate for the first time that useful task-centric behaviors can be learned on a real-world robot purely from play data without any task labels or reward information. Robot videos are best viewed on our project website: https://play-to-policy.github.io.

On Bringing Robots Home

2022-10-19T20:00:00+00:00

Throughout history, we have successfully integrated various machines into our homes. Dishwashers, laundry machines, stand mixers, and robot vacuums are a few recent examples. However, these machines excel at performing only a single task effectively. The concept of a “generalist machine” in homes - a domestic assistant that can adapt and learn from our needs, all while remaining cost-effective - has long been a goal in robotics that has been steadily pursued for decades. In this work, we initiate a large-scale effort towards this goal by introducing Dobb-E, an affordable yet versatile general-purpose system for learning robotic manipulation within household settings. Dobb-E can learn a new task with only five minutes of a user showing it how to do it, thanks to a demonstration collection tool (“The Stick”) we built out of cheap parts and iPhones. We use the Stick to collect 13 hours of data in 22 homes of New York City, and train Home Pretrained Representations (HPR). Then, in a novel home environment, with five minutes of demonstrations and fifteen minutes of adapting the HPR model, we show that Dobb-E can reliably solve the task on the Stretch, a mobile robot readily available on the market. Across roughly 30 days of experimentation in homes of New York City and surrounding areas, we test our system in 10 homes, with a total of 109 tasks in different environments, and finally achieve a success rate of 81%. Beyond success percentages, our experiments reveal a plethora of unique challenges absent or ignored in lab robotics. These range from effects of strong shadows, to variable demonstration quality by non-expert users. With the hope of accelerating research on home robots, and eventually seeing robot butlers in every home, we open-source Dobb-E software stack and models, our data, and our hardware designs on our website: https://dobb-e.com.

CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory

2022-10-11T20:00:00+00:00

We propose CLIP-Fields, an implicit scene model that can be trained with no direct human supervision. This model learns a mapping from spatial locations to semantic embedding vectors. The mapping can then be used for a variety of tasks, such as segmentation, instance identification, semantic search over space, and view localization. Most importantly, the mapping can be trained with supervision coming only from web-image and web-text trained models such as CLIP, Detic, and Sentence-BERT. When compared to baselines like Mask-RCNN, our method outperforms on few-shot instance identification or semantic segmentation on the HM3D dataset with only a fraction of the examples. Finally, we show that using CLIP-Fields as a scene memory, robots can perform semantic navigation in real-world environments.