A0: An Affordance-Aware Hierarchical Model for General Robotic Manipulation

Understand

Robotic manipulation faces critical challenges in understanding spatial affordances--the "where" and "how" of object interactions--essential for complex manipulation tasks like wiping a board or stacking objects.

• Existing methods, including modular-based and end-to-end approaches, often lack robust spatial reasoning capabilities.
• Unlike recent point-based and flow-based affordance methods that focus on dense spatial representations or trajectory modeling, we propose A0, a hierarchical affordance-aware diffusion model that decomposes manipulation tasks into high-level spatial affordance understanding and low-level action execution.
• A0 leverages the Embodiment-Agnostic Affordance Representation, which captures object-centric spatial affordances by predicting contact points and post-contact trajectories.