Prompting with the Future: Open-World Model Predictive Control with Interactive Digital Twins

Abstract: Recent advancements in open-world robot manipulation have been largely driven by vision-LLMs (VLMs). While these models exhibit strong generalization ability in high-level planning, they struggle to predict low-level robot controls due to limited physical-world understanding. To address this issue, we propose a model predictive control framework for open-world manipulation that combines the semantic reasoning capabilities of VLMs with physically-grounded, interactive digital twins of the real-world environments. By constructing and simulating the digital twins, our approach generates feasible motion trajectories, simulates corresponding outcomes, and prompts the VLM with future observations to evaluate and select the most suitable outcome based on language instructions of the task. To further enhance the capability of pre-trained VLMs in understanding complex scenes for robotic control, we leverage the flexible rendering capabilities of the digital twin to synthesize the scene at various novel, unoccluded viewpoints. We validate our approach on a diverse set of complex manipulation tasks, demonstrating superior performance compared to baseline methods for language-conditioned robotic control using VLMs.