RoboFlamingo-Plus: Fusion of Depth and RGB Perception with Vision-Language Models for Enhanced Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

As robotic technologies advancing towards more complex multimodal interactions and manipulation tasks, the integration of advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has become a key driver in the field. Despite progress with current methods, challenges persist in fusing depth and RGB information within 3D environments and executing tasks guided by linguistic instructions. In response to these challenges, we have enhanced the existing RoboFlamingo framework by introducing RoboFlamingo-Plus, which incorporates depth data into VLMs to significantly improve robotic manipulation performance. Our research achieves a nuanced fusion of RGB and depth information by integrating a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) with a resampling technique, closely aligning this combined data with linguistic cues for superior multimodal understanding. The novelty of RoboFlamingo-Plus lies in its adaptation of inputs for depth data processing, leveraging a pre-trained resampler for depth feature extraction, and employing cross-attention mechanisms for optimal feature integration. These improvements allow RoboFlamingo-Plus to not only deeply understand 3D environments but also easily perform complex, language-guided tasks in challenging settings. Experimental results show that RoboFlamingo-Plus boosts robotic manipulation by 10-20% over current methods, marking a significant advancement. Codes and model weights are public at RoboFlamingo-Plus.