RAIL: Robot Affordance Imagination with Large Language Models

This paper introduces an automatic affordance reasoning paradigm tailored to minimal semantic inputs, addressing the critical challenges of classifying and manipulating unseen classes of objects in household settings. Inspired by human cognitive processes, our method integrates generative language models and physics-based simulators to foster analytical thinking and creative imagination of novel affordances. Structured with a tripartite framework consisting of analysis, imagination, and evaluation, our system "analyzes" the requested affordance names into interaction-based definitions, "imagines" the virtual scenarios, and "evaluates" the object affordance. If an object is recognized as possessing the requested affordance, our method also predicts the optimal pose for such functionality, and how a potential user can interact with it. Tuned on only a few synthetic examples across 3 affordance classes, our pipeline achieves a very high success rate on affordance classification and functional pose prediction of 8 classes of novel objects, outperforming learning-based baselines. Validation through real robot manipulating experiments demonstrates the practical applicability of the imagined user interaction, showcasing the system's ability to independently conceptualize unseen affordances and interact with new objects and scenarios in everyday settings.