FlowControl: Optical Flow Based Visual Servoing

Abstract

One-shot imitation is the vision of robot programming from a single demonstration, rather than by tedious construction of computer code. We present a practical method for realizing one-shot imitation for manipulation tasks, exploiting modern learning-based optical flow to perform real-time visual servoing. Our approach, which we call FlowControl, continuously tracks a demonstration video, using a specified foreground mask to attend to an object of interest. Using RGBD observations, FlowControl requires no 3D object models, and is easy to set up. FlowControl inherits great robustness to visual appearance from decades of work in optical flow. We exhibit FlowControl on a range of problems, including ones requiring very precise motions, and ones requiring the ability to generalize.