Icon AimBot: A Simple Auxiliary Visual Cue to Enhance Spatial Awareness of Visuomotor Policies

CoRL 2025

Yinpei Dai† *, Jayjun Lee‡ *,
Nima Fazeli† ‡ , Joyce Chai
*Equal Contribution
Equal Advising
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Robotics Department, University of Michigan,
Lambda Labs

TL;DR AimBot is a lightweight visual augmentation technique that provides explicit spatial cues (e.g., shooting lines and scope reticles) to improve any Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.




Abstract

In this paper, we propose AimBot, a lightweight visual augmentation technique that provides explicit spatial cues to improve visuomotor policy learning in robotic manipulation. AimBot overlays shooting lines and scope reticles onto multi-view RGB images, offering auxiliary visual guidance that encodes the end-effector's state. The overlays are computed from depth images, camera extrinsics, and the current end-effector pose, explicitly conveying spatial relationships between the gripper and objects in the scene. AimBot incurs minimal computational overhead (less than 1 ms) and requires no changes to model architectures, as it simply replaces original RGB images with augmented counterparts. Despite its simplicity, our results show that AimBot consistently improves the performance of various visuomotor policies in both simulation and real-world settings, highlighting the benefits of spatially grounded visual feedback.

Model Architecture

AimBot is a simple visual augmentation technique that provides spatial cues in the image space to improve visuomotor policy learning in robotic manipulation.


AimBot Framework Overview

Experimental Results


Real World Videos Click to view all rollouts

We finetune various base VLA models (OpenVLA+OFT, π0-FAST, π0) to evaluate our method.
We compare AimBot against other visual augmentations, including Traces, RoboPoint, and raw depth images.
We visualize sample rollouts below and all rollouts from the paper for all models including OOD scenes are available here.


Model Fruits
in Box
Tennis Ball
in Drawer
Bread in
Toaster
Place
Coffee Cup
Egg in
Carton
Total
Success
OpenVLA-OFT 7/10 6/10 4/10 2/10 2/10 21/50
OpenVLA-OFT + AimBot 9/10 7/10 9/10 8/10 3/10 36/50
π0-FAST 10/10 10/10 9/10 7/10 6/10 42/50
π0-FAST + AimBot 10/10 10/10 10/10 9/10 8/10 47/50
π0 7/10 7/10 4/10 5/10 4/10 27/50
π0 + AimBot 10/10 10/10 7/10 8/10 8/10 43/50
π0 + Traces 8/10 8/10 5/10 2/10 2/10 25/50
π0 + RoboPoint 8/10 9/10 4/10 6/10 0/10 27/50
π0 + Depth Images 7/10 9/10 5/10 7/10 4/10 32/50
Performance comparison on five real-world tasks. Each task is evaluated over ten trials.

Task Goal: Put the bread inside the toaster.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the cup on the coffee machine.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the tennis ball inside the drawer.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the eggs inside the egg carton.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put all the fruits into the box.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Simulation Videos on LIBERO

Model LIBERO
Spatial
LIBERO
Object
LIBERO
Goal
LIBERO
Long
Average
Success Rate
OpenVLA-OFT 96.2 97.3 93.9 87.5 93.8
OpenVLA-OFT + AimBot 95.2 (–1.0) 99.1 (+1.8) 94.2 (+0.3) 91.2 (+3.7) 95.0 (+1.2)
π0-FAST 96.5 96.8 93.6 81.6 92.1
π0-FAST + AimBot 96.9 (+0.4) 96.8 (+0.0) 94.0 (+0.4) 87.1 (+5.5) 93.7 (+1.6)
π0 96.8 98.8 95.8 85.2 94.2
π0 + AimBot 96.9 (+0.1) 98.4 (–0.4) 97.2 (+1.4) 91.0 (+5.8) 95.9 (+1.7)
Performance comparison on the LIBERO simulation benchmark. Green and Red numbers indicate performance gains and losses, respectively. Each task suite averages over four runs.

Task: Pick up the orange juice and place it in the basket.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the moka pot in the microwave and close it.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the white mug on the plate and put the chocolate pudding to the right of the plate.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the wine bottle on the rack.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Put the yellow and white mug in the microwave and close it.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Task: Turn on the stove and put the moka pot on it.

Failure: π0

Success: π0 + AimBot

Failure Cases

Task Goal: Put the bread in the toaster.

Failure: π0 + AimBot

Task Goal: Put the eggs into the egg carton.

Failure: π0 + AimBot

Task Goal: Put the cup on the coffee machine.

Failure: π0 + AimBot