EgoPush: Egocentric Multi-Object Rearrangement for Mobile Robots via Constrained Teacher Observability

Abstract:Humans rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, actively moving to keep task-relevant spatial cues in view. Mobile robots have not matched this: rearrangement is usually built on a global pose estimate or a map, which is exactly what a robot carrying one camera lacks, while pushing keeps changing the scene it would have to be built from. We present EgoPush, which pushes objects into anchor-relative formations from onboard RGB-D alone, with no global localization, external tracking, or map at deployment, and transfers zero-shot to a TurtleBot in controlled and visually cluttered scenes. What makes this learnable turns out to be a property of the teacher rather than of the student: three privileged teachers trained with identical rewards, architecture, and hyperparameters all exceed $98\%$ success, yet their distilled egocentric students reach $0\%$, $54.8\%$, and $87.3\%$, the only variable being the teacher's observation function. EgoPush therefore trains the teacher under egocentric observability constraints, restricting it to visibility-limited cues and revealing target references only when the anchor is centrally visible, so that its supervision is recoverable by a depth-based student distilled online. Making the teacher trainable in the first place needs two further pieces: a role-grouped object-centric interface shared by teacher and student, and stage-wise temporally decayed rewards for long-horizon credit assignment. Videos, the playable task, and code are available at this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2602.18071 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2602.18071v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.18071 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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