Robot Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models for Agricultural Manipulation

Overview & Synopsis

Robotic manipulation in agricultural environments remains challenging due to variations in plant geometry, occlusion, and camera viewpoints. Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) and generalist robot policies offer a promising approach to addressing these challenges by learning manipulation behaviors from multimodal observations and language instructions. However, adapting these policies to agricultural tasks requires domain-specific demonstrations, which are costly and time-consuming to collect on physical robots. In this work, we develop a simulation-to-real robot-learning framework for agricultural reaching and grasping that integrates task-specific demonstration collection and pretrained policy adaptation. A MuJoCo-based agricultural environment is developed with diverse tomato plant structures to support demonstration collection and controlled evaluation. Expert demonstrations are collected through joystick teleoperation, with a low-level controller used to execute robot actions. Two pretrained generalist robot policies, Octo and $π_{0.5}$, are adapted using simulated demonstrations, followed by further fine-tuning on a physical Franka Research 3 manipulator using real-robot demonstrations. The adapted policies are evaluated under in-distribution, viewpoint/spatial-shift, and out-of-distribution conditions in simulation, followed by physical-robot experiments. The influence of proprioceptive information on policy performance is also investigated. Results show that $π_{0.5}$ achieves higher task-performance scores than Octo and exhibits less degradation under distribution shifts. These findings demonstrate the potential of integrating pretrained generalist policies with task-specific demonstration learning for agricultural manipulation.