PointPilot: Unified Robotic Manipulation via Object-centric 3D Point Flow Prediction

Generalization remains a central challenge in robotics, calling for policies that address domain variations from multiple dimensions such as diverse embodiments, camera poses, and/or scene layouts. In order to approach this problem, we introduce PointPilot, a task-focused and 3D aligned manipulation framework built on a 3D space point-flow prediction. Rather than modeling the global scene, PointPilot only represents task-focused objects (robot grippers treated as objects), avoiding the prediction of potentially redundant scene parts unrelated to the ma- nipulation tasks. Moreover, PointPilot aligns 3D spatial representation in one unified coordinate and supports closed-loop and fully automatic action execution across different manipulation modes from object point flow without a separately trained action expert, while existing works typically need an extra action head or are (semi-)automatic and single-arm mode specific. Given sensor observations and lan- guage instructions, our model jointly learns subtask planning, task-relevant object grounding, and 3D point flow prediction in an end-to-end way. By processing heterogeneous data in a shared 3D point flow space, PointPilot is able to absorb demonstrations from different embodiments. Extensive simulative and real world experiments validate our method. Notably, we demonstrate the zero-shot embodiment generalization in the PointPilot — one trained policy can be deployed onto previously unseen embodiments and successfully complete manipulation tasks, without any additional fine-tuning.