  Language-conditioned policies allow robots to interpret and execute human
instructions. Learning such policies requires a substantial investment with
regards to time and compute resources. Still, the resulting controllers are
highly device-specific and cannot easily be transferred to a robot with
different morphology, capability, appearance or dynamics. In this paper, we
propose a sample-efficient approach for training language-conditioned
manipulation policies that allows for rapid transfer across different types of
robots. By introducing a novel method, namely Hierarchical Modularity, and
adopting supervised attention across multiple sub-modules, we bridge the divide
between modular and end-to-end learning and enable the reuse of functional
building blocks. In both simulated and real world robot manipulation
experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the current
state-of-the-art methods and can transfer policies across 4 different robots in
a sample-efficient manner. Finally, we show that the functionality of learned
sub-modules is maintained beyond the training process and can be used to
introspect the robot decision-making process. Code is available at
https://github.com/ir-lab/ModAttn.

Robotics