No Need for Real 3D: Fusing 2D Vision with Pseudo 3D Representations for Robotic Manipulation Learning

Recently,vision-based robotic manipulation has garnered significant attention and witnessed substantial advancements. 2D image-based and 3D point cloud-based policy learning represent two predominant paradigms in the field, with recent studies showing that the latter consistently outperforms the former in terms of both policy performance and generalization, thereby underscoring the value and significance of 3D information. However, 3D point cloud-based approaches face the significant challenge of high data acquisition costs, limiting their scalability and real-world deployment. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework NoReal3D: which introduces the 3DStructureFormer, a learnable 3D perception module capable of transforming monocular images into geometrically meaningful pseudo-point cloud features, effectively fused with the 2D encoder output features. Specially, the generated pseudo-point clouds retain geometric and topological structures so we design a pseudo-point cloud encoder to preserve these properties, making it well-suited for our framework. We also investigate the effectiveness of different feature fusion strategies.Our framework enhances the robot's understanding of 3D spatial structures while completely eliminating the substantial costs associated with 3D point cloud acquisition.Extensive experiments across various tasks validate that our framework can achieve performance comparable to 3D point cloud-based methods, without the actual point cloud data.