Pixel-UMI: Learning Environment-Aware Whole-Body Manipulation from Sensorized Human Demonstrations
Jason Jingzhou Liu, Tony Tao, Deepak Pathak, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Abstract
Sensorized human demonstrations offer scalable data for mobile manipulation, but embodiment differences complicate policy learning. We present Pixel-UMI, a pipeline for learning environment-aware whole-body policies from human data. We first introduce Environment-Aware Retargeting (EAR), which combines reconstructed scene geometry with demonstrated head and gripper trajectories to determine robot posture and generate collision-aware joint and base targets. Delay-calibrated action assignment converts these trajectories into actions. However, kinematic differences can leave residual pose errors, creating viewpoint mismatches between human demonstrations and robot observations. We therefore introduce Retargeting-Error-Aware Masking (REAM), which uses these errors during training to reduce reliance on mismatched views at deployment. Finally, because estimated actions cannot fully capture contact-rich interactions, we collect on-policy human corrections through DAgger to improve performance. We evaluate Pixel-UMI on five challenging tasks spanning articulated-object manipulation, deformable-object handling, constrained-space reaching, whole-body collision avoidance, and contact-rich bimanual coordination, achieving 87.0% average task progress. Video results are available at https://pixel-robot.com/pixel-umi