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Improving Competence via Iterative State Space Refinement | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636239/ | [
"Connor Basich",
"Justin Svegliato",
"Allyson Beach",
"Kyle H. Wray",
"Stefan Witwicki",
"Shlomo Zilberstein",
"Connor Basich",
"Justin Svegliato",
"Allyson Beach",
"Kyle H. Wray",
"Stefan Witwicki",
"Shlomo Zilberstein"
] | Despite considerable efforts by human designers, accounting for every unique situation that an autonomous robotic system deployed in the real world could face is often an infeasible task. As a result, many such deployed systems still rely on human assistance in various capacities to complete certain tasks while staying safe. Competence-aware systems (CAS) is a recently proposed model for reducing ... |
An Analysis of Human-Robot Information Streams to Inform Dynamic Autonomy Allocation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636637/ | [
"Christopher X. Miller",
"Temesgen Gebrekristos",
"Michael Young",
"Enid Montague",
"Brenna Argall",
"Christopher X. Miller",
"Temesgen Gebrekristos",
"Michael Young",
"Enid Montague",
"Brenna Argall"
] | A dynamic autonomy allocation framework automatically shifts how much control lies with the human versus the robotics autonomy, for example based on factors such as environmental safety or user preference. To investigate the question of which factors should drive dynamic autonomy allocation, we perform a human subject study to collect ground truth data that shifts between levels of autonomy during... |
Extending Referring Expression Generation through shared knowledge about past Human-Robot collaborative activity | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636796/ | [
"Guillaume Sarthou",
"Guilhem Buisan",
"Aurélie Clodic",
"Rachid Alami",
"Guillaume Sarthou",
"Guilhem Buisan",
"Aurélie Clodic",
"Rachid Alami"
] | Being able to refer to an object, a person, or a place in a non-ambiguous manner is a need when one has to achieve collaborative activities with a partner. This is the so-called Referring Expression Generation (REG) problem. While widely used for Human-Robot Interaction, state of the art approaches restrict its use to the current environment. We propose a novel extension to the REG which takes ful... |
Learning and Interactive Design of Shared Control Templates | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636047/ | [
"Gabriel Quere",
"Samuel Bustamante",
"Annette Hagengruber",
"Jörn Vogel",
"Franz Steinmetz",
"Freek Stulp",
"Gabriel Quere",
"Samuel Bustamante",
"Annette Hagengruber",
"Jörn Vogel",
"Franz Steinmetz",
"Freek Stulp"
] | Controlling a robotic arm to achieve manipulation tasks is challenging for humans. Especially if only low-dimensional input signals can be provided, as is often the case for users with motor impairments. Using shared control to provide task-specific guidance and constraints facilitates control – for instance with the Shared Control Templates (SCT) framework – and enables even complex activities of... |
A Safety-Aware Architecture for Task Scheduling and Execution for Human-Robot Collaboration | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636855/ | [
"Andrea Pupa",
"Cristian Secchi",
"Andrea Pupa",
"Cristian Secchi"
] | In collaborative robotic applications, human and robot have to work together to accomplish a common job, composed by a set of tasks. In order to achieve an efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC), it is important to have an integration between a proper task scheduling strategy and a task execution strategy. The first must deal with the variability of the two agents, while the second must deal wi... |
Collaborative Storytelling with Social Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636409/ | [
"Eric Nichols",
"Leo Gao",
"Yurii Vasylkiv",
"Randy Gomez",
"Eric Nichols",
"Leo Gao",
"Yurii Vasylkiv",
"Randy Gomez"
] | Storytelling plays a central role in human socializing and entertainment, and research on conducting storytelling with robots is gaining interest. However, much of this research assumes that story content is curated. In this paper, we expand the recently-proposed task of collaborative storytelling, where an intelligent agent and a person collaborate to create a unique story by taking turns adding ... |
An Integrated Approach to Context-Sensitive Moral Cognition in Robot Cognitive Architectures | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636434/ | [
"Ryan Blake Jackson",
"Sihui Li",
"Santosh Balajee Banisetty",
"Sriram Siva",
"Hao Zhang",
"Neil Dantam",
"Tom Williams",
"Ryan Blake Jackson",
"Sihui Li",
"Santosh Balajee Banisetty",
"Sriram Siva",
"Hao Zhang",
"Neil Dantam",
"Tom Williams"
] | Acceptance of social robots in human-robot collaborative environments depends on the robots’ sensitivity to human moral and social norms. Robot behavior that violates norms may decrease trust and lead human interactants to blame the robot and view it negatively. Hence, for long-term acceptance, social robots need to detect possible norm violations in their action plans and refuse to perform such p... |
Translating Natural Language Instructions to Computer Programs for Robot Manipulation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636342/ | [
"Sagar Gubbi Venkatesh",
"Raviteja Upadrashta",
"Bharadwaj Amrutur",
"Sagar Gubbi Venkatesh",
"Raviteja Upadrashta",
"Bharadwaj Amrutur"
] | It is highly desirable for robots that work alongside humans to be able to understand instructions in natural language. Existing language conditioned imitation learning models directly predict the actuator commands from the image observation and the instruction text. Rather than directly predicting actuator commands, we propose translating the natural language instruction to a Python function whic... |
Design of Taking a Walk with a Robot that Receives Care from a Person and Indirectly Mediates Communication with Strangers | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636533/ | [
"Kanae Kochigami",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba",
"Kanae Kochigami",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba"
] | We report the results of our study on whether taking a walk with a child-like robot that a person takes care of can generate interaction with the surrounding people whom the person has never met before. As the number of single-person households increases, it is expected that more people will live with not only robots that can be useful for people but also robots that people can take care of. Our s... |
Human-Robot greeting: tracking human greeting mental states and acting accordingly | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635894/ | [
"Manuel Carvalho",
"João Avelino",
"Alexandre Bernardino",
"Rodrigo Ventura",
"Plinio Moreno",
"Manuel Carvalho",
"João Avelino",
"Alexandre Bernardino",
"Rodrigo Ventura",
"Plinio Moreno"
] | Mobile social robots should be able to engage in interaction with people effectively. However, greeting someone is a complex task since it implies an exchange of social signals. Adam Kendon modeled human greetings as a set of six phases: initiation of approach, distance salutation, head dip, approach, final approach, and close salutation. Based on Kendon’s model, we propose a system for mobile soc... |
Persuasion Strategies for Social Robot to Keep Humans Accepting Daily Different Recommendations | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636772/ | [
"Yuki Okafuji",
"Jun Baba",
"Junya Nakanishi",
"Joichiro Amada",
"Yuichiro Yoshikawa",
"Hiroshi Ishiguro",
"Yuki Okafuji",
"Jun Baba",
"Junya Nakanishi",
"Joichiro Amada",
"Yuichiro Yoshikawa",
"Hiroshi Ishiguro"
] | Social robots are used in daily life. One of the applications of social robots is as recommendation systems. Previous research has mainly investigated how persuasive recommendations can be improved by focusing on the non-verbal/verbal behavior of robots. However, to use robots as recommendation systems every day, it is extremely important to examine the persistence of repeated persuasion over a lo... |
Why fly blind? Event-based visual guidance for ornithopter robot flight | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636315/ | [
"A. Gómez Eguíluz",
"J.P. Rodríguez-Gómez",
"R. Tapia",
"F.J. Maldonado",
"J.Á. Acosta",
"J.R. Martínez-de Dios",
"A. Ollero",
"A. Gómez Eguíluz",
"J.P. Rodríguez-Gómez",
"R. Tapia",
"F.J. Maldonado",
"J.Á. Acosta",
"J.R. Martínez-de Dios",
"A. Ollero"
] | The development of perception and control methods that allow bird-scale flapping-wing robots (a.k.a. ornithopters) to perform autonomously is an under-researched area. This paper presents a fully onboard event-based method for ornithopter robot visual guidance. The method uses event cameras to exploit their fast response and robustness against motion blur in order to feed the ornithopter control l... |
Autonomous Flights in Dynamic Environments with Onboard Vision | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636117/ | [
"Yingjian Wang",
"Jialin Ji",
"Qianhao Wang",
"Chao Xu",
"Fei Gao",
"Yingjian Wang",
"Jialin Ji",
"Qianhao Wang",
"Chao Xu",
"Fei Gao"
] | In this paper, we introduce a complete system for autonomous flight of quadrotors in dynamic environments with onboard sensing. Extended from existing work, we develop an occlusion-aware dynamic perception method based on depth images, which classifies obstacles as dynamic and static. For representing generic dynamic environment, we model dynamic objects with moving ellipsoids and fuse static ones... |
Target-visible Polynomial Trajectory Generation within an MAV Team | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636446/ | [
"Yunwoo Lee",
"Jungwon Park",
"Boseong Jeon",
"H. Jin Kim",
"Yunwoo Lee",
"Jungwon Park",
"Boseong Jeon",
"H. Jin Kim"
] | Autonomous aerial videography is a challenging task, which involves collision avoidance against obstacles and visibility guaranteed target tracking in unstructured environments. In this paper, we organize a two micro aerial vehicle (MAV) team, which consists of a target agent responsible for a specific mission and a camera agent for filming the target agent. Especially, this paper focuses on traje... |
Multi-Resolution Elevation Mapping and Safe Landing Site Detection with Applications to Planetary Rotorcraft | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636507/ | [
"Pascal Schoppmann",
"Pedro F. Proença",
"Jeff Delaune",
"Michael Pantic",
"Timo Hinzmann",
"Larry Matthies",
"Roland Siegwart",
"Roland Brockers",
"Pascal Schoppmann",
"Pedro F. Proença",
"Jeff Delaune",
"Michael Pantic",
"Timo Hinzmann",
"Larry Matthies",
"Roland Siegwart",
"Roland Brockers"
] | In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient approach to provide an autonomous UAV with an on-board perception method to detect safe, hazard-free landing sites during flights over complex 3D terrain. We aggregate 3D measurements acquired from a sequence of monocular images by a Structure-from-Motion approach into a local, robot-centric, multi-resolution elevation map of the overflown terrain, wh... |
Multi-Resolution POMDP Planning for Multi-Object Search in 3D | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636737/ | [
"Kaiyu Zheng",
"Yoonchang Sung",
"George Konidaris",
"Stefanie Tellex",
"Kaiyu Zheng",
"Yoonchang Sung",
"George Konidaris",
"Stefanie Tellex"
] | Robots operating in households must find objects on shelves, under tables, and in cupboards. In such environments, it is crucial to search efficiently at 3D scale while coping with limited field of view and the complexity of searching for multiple objects. Principled approaches to object search frequently use Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) as the underlying framework for comp... |
Deformation Recovery Control and Post-Impact Trajectory Replanning for Collision-Resilient Mobile Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636276/ | [
"Zhouyu Lu",
"Zhichao Liu",
"Konstantinos Karydis",
"Zhouyu Lu",
"Zhichao Liu",
"Konstantinos Karydis"
] | The paper focuses on collision-inclusive motion planning for impact-resilient mobile robots. We propose a new deformation recovery and replanning strategy to handle collisions that may occur at run-time. Contrary to collision avoidance methods that generate trajectories only in conservative local space or require collision checking that has high computational cost, our method directly generates (l... |
Towards Autonomous Parking using Vision-only Sensors | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636106/ | [
"Yi Yang",
"Miaoxin Pan",
"Sitan Jiang",
"Jianhang Wang",
"Wei Wang",
"Junbo Wang",
"Meiling Wang",
"Yi Yang",
"Miaoxin Pan",
"Sitan Jiang",
"Jianhang Wang",
"Wei Wang",
"Junbo Wang",
"Meiling Wang"
] | Existing autonomous parking solutions usually require special signs, pre-built maps or accurate ranging sensors to achieve reliable perception of the parking environment, but these methods are difficult to popularize because they either require preconditions or are expensive for production cars. In this paper, we propose a vision-only autonomous parking solution based on only six cameras. Through ... |
Mechanical Search on Shelves using Lateral Access X-RAY | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636629/ | [
"Huang Huang",
"Marcus Dominguez-Kuhne",
"Vishal Satish",
"Michael Danielczuk",
"Kate Sanders",
"Jeffrey Ichnowski",
"Andrew Lee",
"Anelia Angelova",
"Vincent Vanhoucke",
"Ken Goldberg",
"Huang Huang",
"Marcus Dominguez-Kuhne",
"Vishal Satish",
"Michael Danielczuk",
"Kate Sanders",
"Jeffrey Ichnowski",
"Andrew Lee",
"Anelia Angelova",
"Vincent Vanhoucke",
"Ken Goldberg"
] | Finding an occluded object in a lateral access environment such as a shelf or cabinet is a problem that arises in many contexts such as warehouses, retail, healthcare, shipping, and homes. While this problem, known as mechanical search, is well-studied in overhead access environments, lateral access environments introduce constraints on the poses of objects and on available grasp actions, and push... |
XAI-N: Sensor-based Robot Navigation using Expert Policies and Decision Trees | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636759/ | [
"Aaron M. Roth",
"Jing Liang",
"Dinesh Manocha",
"Aaron M. Roth",
"Jing Liang",
"Dinesh Manocha"
] | We present a novel sensor-based learning navigation algorithm to compute a collision-free trajectory for a robot in dense and dynamic environments with moving obstacles or targets. Our approach uses deep reinforcement learning-based expert policy that is trained using a sim2real paradigm. In order to increase the reliability and handle the failure cases of the expert policy, we combine with a poli... |
Reactive Control for Bipedal Running Over Random Discrete Terrain Under Uncertainty | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636809/ | [
"Omer Nir",
"Amir Degani",
"Omer Nir",
"Amir Degani"
] | This paper presents a reactive control framework for robotic bipedal running over random discrete terrain using a shift-invariant funnel library that can be composed into motion plans. The main contribution of the paper is the formalization of the funnel library and the introduction of a receding-horizon reactive planner that utilizes this funnel library. The proposed controller generates a robust... |
Object-to-Scene: Learning to Transfer Object Knowledge to Indoor Scene Recognition | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636700/ | [
"Bo Miao",
"Liguang Zhou",
"Ajmal Saeed Mian",
"Tin Lun Lam",
"Yangsheng Xu",
"Bo Miao",
"Liguang Zhou",
"Ajmal Saeed Mian",
"Tin Lun Lam",
"Yangsheng Xu"
] | Accurate perception of the surrounding scene is helpful for robots to make reasonable judgments and behaviours. Therefore, developing effective scene representation and recognition methods are of significant importance in robotics. Currently, a large body of research focuses on developing novel auxiliary features and networks to improve indoor scene recognition ability. However, few of them focus ... |
MV-FractalDB: Formula-driven Supervised Learning for Multi-view Image Recognition | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635946/ | [
"Ryosuke Yamada",
"Ryo Takahashi",
"Ryota Suzuki",
"Akio Nakamura",
"Yusuke Yoshiyasu",
"Ryusuke Sagawa",
"Hirokatsu Kataoka",
"Ryosuke Yamada",
"Ryo Takahashi",
"Ryota Suzuki",
"Akio Nakamura",
"Yusuke Yoshiyasu",
"Ryusuke Sagawa",
"Hirokatsu Kataoka"
] | The paper proposes a method for automatic multi-view dataset construction based on formula-driven supervised learning (FDSL). Although data collection and human annotation of 3D objects are labor-intensive, we automatically generate their training data and labels in the proposed multi-view dataset. To create a large-scale multi-view dataset, we employ fractal geometry, which is considered the back... |
CORAL: Colored structural representation for bi-modal place recognition | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635839/ | [
"Yiyuan Pan",
"Xuecheng Xu",
"Weijie Li",
"Yunxiang Cui",
"Yue Wang",
"Rong Xiong",
"Yiyuan Pan",
"Xuecheng Xu",
"Weijie Li",
"Yunxiang Cui",
"Yue Wang",
"Rong Xiong"
] | Place recognition is indispensable for a drift-free localization system. Due to the variations of the environment, place recognition using single-modality has limitations. In this paper, we propose a bi-modal place recognition method, which can extract a compound global descriptor from the two modalities, vision and LiDAR. Specifically, we first build the elevation image generated from 3D points a... |
SSC: Semantic Scan Context for Large-Scale Place Recognition | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635904/ | [
"Lin Li",
"Xin Kong",
"Xiangrui Zhao",
"Tianxin Huang",
"Wanlong Li",
"Feng Wen",
"Hongbo Zhang",
"Yong Liu",
"Lin Li",
"Xin Kong",
"Xiangrui Zhao",
"Tianxin Huang",
"Wanlong Li",
"Feng Wen",
"Hongbo Zhang",
"Yong Liu"
] | Place recognition gives a SLAM system the ability to correct cumulative errors. Unlike images that contain rich texture features, point clouds are almost pure geometric information which makes place recognition based on point clouds challenging. Existing works usually encode low-level features such as coordinate, normal, reflection intensity, etc., as local or global descriptors to represent scene... |
Fully-Online Always-Adaptation of Transfer Functions and Its Application to Sound Source Localization and Separation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636631/ | [
"Kazuhiro Nakadai",
"Masayuki Takigahira",
"Yusuke Kawai",
"Hirofumi Nakajima",
"Kazuhiro Nakadai",
"Masayuki Takigahira",
"Yusuke Kawai",
"Hirofumi Nakajima"
] | This paper addresses fully-online always-adaptation of a transfer function for robot audition systems based on microphone array processing. The transfer function represents signal propagation characteristics between a microphone and a sound source, which provides essential information for real-world scene analysis, such as sound source localization and separation for robots. Although it is commonl... |
Alternating Drive-and-Glide Flight Navigation of a Kiteplane for Sound Source Position Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636136/ | [
"Makoto Kumon",
"Hiroshi G. Okuno",
"Shuichi Tajima",
"Makoto Kumon",
"Hiroshi G. Okuno",
"Shuichi Tajima"
] | Drone audition, namely the hearing capability of a drone, is expected to compensate for the drawbacks of visual sensors in search-and-rescue missions. Current multi-rotor drones have limitations of flight duration and sound processing due to ego-noise generated by rotors and air-flow. Drone audition for a kiteplane, i.e., a fixed-wing drone that can fly slowly and stably, has not been investigated... |
Reinforcement Learning Control of a Forestry Crane Manipulator | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636219/ | [
"Jennifer Andersson",
"Kenneth Bodin",
"Daniel Lindmark",
"Martin Servin",
"Erik Wallin",
"Jennifer Andersson",
"Kenneth Bodin",
"Daniel Lindmark",
"Martin Servin",
"Erik Wallin"
] | Forestry machines are heavy vehicles performing complex manipulation tasks in unstructured production forest environments. Together with the complex dynamics of the onboard hydraulically actuated cranes, the rough forest terrains have posed a particular challenge in forestry automation. In this study, the feasibility of applying reinforcement learning control to forestry crane manipulators is inve... |
Hybrid Data-Driven Modelling for Inverse Control of Hydraulic Excavators | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636269/ | [
"Jonas Weigand",
"Julian Raible",
"Nico Zantopp",
"Ozan Demir",
"Adrian Trachte",
"Achim Wagner",
"Martin Ruskowski",
"Jonas Weigand",
"Julian Raible",
"Nico Zantopp",
"Ozan Demir",
"Adrian Trachte",
"Achim Wagner",
"Martin Ruskowski"
] | We present a comprehensive comparison of hybrid Data-Driven Control (DDC) applied on a hydraulic excavator. DDC offers a state-of-the-art, high performance control based on data and expert knowledge. On the one hand, expert knowledge is complex to adapt to each unique excavator requiring substantial engineering efforts. On the other hand, purely data based control overcomes this drawback by adapti... |
Real-Time Motion Planning of a Hydraulic Excavator using Trajectory Optimization and Model Predictive Control | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635965/ | [
"Dongjae Lee",
"Inkyu Jang",
"Jeonghyun Byun",
"Hoseong Seo",
"H. Jin Kim",
"Dongjae Lee",
"Inkyu Jang",
"Jeonghyun Byun",
"Hoseong Seo",
"H. Jin Kim"
] | Automation of excavation tasks requires real-time trajectory planning satisfying various constraints. To guarantee both constraint feasibility and real-time trajectory re-plannability, we present an integrated framework for real-time optimization-based trajectory planning of a hydraulic excavator. The proposed framework is composed of two main modules: a global planner and a real-time local planne... |
Task-Consistent Path Planning for Mobile 3D Printing | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635916/ | [
"Julius Sustarevas",
"Dimitrios Kanoulas",
"Simon Julier",
"Julius Sustarevas",
"Dimitrios Kanoulas",
"Simon Julier"
] | In this paper, we explore the problem of task-consistent path planning for printing-in-motion via Mobile Manipulators (MM). MM offer a potentially unlimited planar workspace and flexibility for print operations. However, most existing methods have only mobility to relocate an arm which then prints while stationary. In this paper we present a new fully autonomous path planning approach for mobile m... |
A Learning Approach to Robot-Agnostic Force-Guided High Precision Assembly | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636328/ | [
"Jieliang Luo",
"Hui Li",
"Jieliang Luo",
"Hui Li"
] | In this work we propose a learning approach to high-precision robotic assembly problems. We focus on the contact-rich phase, where the assembly pieces are in close contact with each other. Unlike many learning-based approaches that heavily rely on vision or spatial tracking, our approach takes force/torque in task space as the only observation. Our training environment is robotless, as the end-eff... |
Image-Based Joint State Estimation Pipeline for Sensorless Manipulators | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636439/ | [
"Mingjie Han",
"Bowen Xie",
"Martin Barczyk",
"Alireza Bayat",
"Mingjie Han",
"Bowen Xie",
"Martin Barczyk",
"Alireza Bayat"
] | Motion planning is a largely solved problem for robot arms with joint state feedback, but remains an area of research for sensorless manipulators such as toy robot arms and heavy equipment such as excavators and cranes. A promising approach to this problem is deep learning, which employs a pre-trained convolutional neural network to identify manipulator links and estimate joint states from a monoc... |
Spatial Imagination With Semantic Cognition for Mobile Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636550/ | [
"Zhengcheng Shen",
"Linh Kästner",
"Jens Lambrecht",
"Zhengcheng Shen",
"Linh Kästner",
"Jens Lambrecht"
] | The imagination of the surrounding environment based on the experience and semantic cognition has great potential to extend the limited observations to leverage the ability for mapping, collision avoidance and path planning. This paper provides a training-based algorithm for mobile robots to perform spatial imagination based on semantic cognition and evaluates the proposed method for the mapping t... |
Decoder Modulation for Indoor Depth Completion | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636870/ | [
"Dmitry Senushkin",
"Mikhail Romanov",
"Ilia Belikov",
"Nikolay Patakin",
"Anton Konushin",
"Dmitry Senushkin",
"Mikhail Romanov",
"Ilia Belikov",
"Nikolay Patakin",
"Anton Konushin"
] | Depth completion recovers a dense depth map from sensor measurements. Current methods are mostly tailored for very sparse depth measurements from LiDARs in outdoor settings, while for indoor scenes Time-of-Flight (ToF) or structured light sensors are mostly used. These sensors provide semi-dense maps, with dense measurements in some regions and almost empty in others. We propose a new model that t... |
Adversarial Attacks on Camera-LiDAR Models for 3D Car Detection | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636638/ | [
"Mazen Abdelfattah",
"Kaiwen Yuan",
"Z. Jane Wang",
"Rabab Ward",
"Mazen Abdelfattah",
"Kaiwen Yuan",
"Z. Jane Wang",
"Rabab Ward"
] | Most autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on LiDAR and RGB camera sensors for perception. Using these point cloud and image data, perception models based on deep neural nets (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in 3D detection. The vulnerability of DNNs to adversarial attacks have been heavily investigated in the RGB image domain and more recently in the point cloud domain, but rarely in bo... |
Object-Augmented RGB-D SLAM for Wide-Disparity Relocalisation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636034/ | [
"Yuhang Ming",
"Xingrui Yang",
"Andrew Calway",
"Yuhang Ming",
"Xingrui Yang",
"Andrew Calway"
] | We propose a novel object-augmented RGB-D SLAM system that is capable of constructing a consistent object map and performing relocalisation based on centroids of objects in the map. The approach aims to overcome the view dependence of appearance-based relocalisation methods using point features or images. During the map construction, we use a pre-trained neural network to detect objects and estima... |
Plane Segmentation Using Depth-Dependent Flood Fill | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635930/ | [
"Arindam Roychoudhury",
"Marceli Missura",
"Maren Bennewitz",
"Arindam Roychoudhury",
"Marceli Missura",
"Maren Bennewitz"
] | The detection of planar surfaces in a point cloud is a popular technique for the extraction of drivable or walkable surfaces and for tabletop segmentation. Unfortunately, RGB-D sensors are quite noisy and provide incomplete data, which makes the extraction of surfaces more challenging. Also, it is desirable to process the point cloud data in real time, which at a rate of approximately 30 Hz, leave... |
Robust Pose Estimation Based on Normalized Information Distance | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636532/ | [
"Zhaozhong Chen",
"Christoffer Heckman",
"Zhaozhong Chen",
"Christoffer Heckman"
] | Dense image alignment works by minimizing the photometric error of two images since it is assumed that the illumination changes between images close in time remain the same—this is what is called the brightness constancy assumption. However, this assumption does not hold with long-term maps since illumination changes continually from day to day (morning, afternoon, evening) and is dependent on cer... |
roboSLAM: Dense RGB-D SLAM for Humanoid Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636044/ | [
"Emmanouil Hourdakis",
"Stylianos Piperakis",
"Panos Trahanias",
"Emmanouil Hourdakis",
"Stylianos Piperakis",
"Panos Trahanias"
] | In the current paper we investigate the challenges of localizing walking humanoid robots using Visual SLAM (VSLAM). We propose a novel dense RGB-D SLAM framework that seamlessly integrates with the dynamic state of a humanoid, to provide real-time localization and dense mapping of its surroundings. Following the path of recent research in humanoid localization, in the current work we explore the i... |
Finding Robust 2D-to-3D Correspondence with LSTM Score Estimation for Camera Localization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636516/ | [
"Tsu-Kuan Huang",
"Po-Heng Chen",
"Li-Yang Wang",
"Kuan-Wen Chen",
"Tsu-Kuan Huang",
"Po-Heng Chen",
"Li-Yang Wang",
"Kuan-Wen Chen"
] | 2D-to-3D correspondence estimation is the key step of 3D model-based image localization, and most of the existing research in this field focuses on improving the feature matching performance. Even with the best feature matching method, there are still some outliers, and thus, almost all the methods simply apply the RANSAC algorithm to select the inliers and estimate the camera pose afterwards. How... |
Deep Unsupervised Learning Based Visual Odometry with Multi-scale Matching and Latent Feature Constraint | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636131/ | [
"Zhenzhen Liang",
"Qixin Wang",
"Yuanlong Yu",
"Zhenzhen Liang",
"Qixin Wang",
"Yuanlong Yu"
] | A novel siamese autoencoder visual odometry system named SAEVO is proposed in this paper. SAEVO can jointly estimate the 6-DoF pose and the depth using deep neural networks trained with monocular clips only. The main idea of the proposed method is an unsupervised deep learning scheme that combines siamese networks with auto-encoder for multi-scale matching to estimate ego-motion. Also, two unsuper... |
EventVLAD: Visual Place Recognition with Reconstructed Edges from Event Cameras | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635907/ | [
"Alex Junho Lee",
"Ayoung Kim",
"Alex Junho Lee",
"Ayoung Kim"
] | Event cameras are neuromorphic vision sensors that are able to capture high dynamic range with low latency in microseconds, without motion blur. Their strength lies in the unique representation of data as asynchronous events, enabling detection of scene structures less invariantly from dynamic luminance changes. However, a single event does not represent spatial information, and events must be int... |
Localization with Directional Coordinates | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636122/ | [
"Charles Champagne Cossette",
"Mohammed Shalaby",
"David Saussié",
"James Richard Forbes",
"Charles Champagne Cossette",
"Mohammed Shalaby",
"David Saussié",
"James Richard Forbes"
] | A coordinate system is proposed that replaces the usual three-dimensional Cartesian x, y, z position coordinates, for use in robotic localization applications. Range, azimuth, and elevation measurement models become greatly simplified, and, unlike spherical coordinates, the proposed coordinates do not suffer from the same kinematic singularities and angle wraparound. When compared to Cartesian coo... |
Monte-Carlo Localization in Underground Parking Lots using Parking Slot Numbers | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636465/ | [
"Li Cui",
"Chunyan Rong",
"Jingyi Huang",
"Andre Rosendo",
"Laurent Kneip",
"Li Cui",
"Chunyan Rong",
"Jingyi Huang",
"Andre Rosendo",
"Laurent Kneip"
] | Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP) in an under- ground garage is an emerging smart vehicle solution that the community believes to be solvable with close-to-market sensors. Absence of GPS signals and a high degree of self-similarity however render global visual localization in such environments a highly challenging problem. We present a novel underground parking localization method that relies on text... |
Real-time Geo-localization Using Satellite Imagery and Topography for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636705/ | [
"Shuxiao Chen",
"Xiangyu Wu",
"Mark W. Mueller",
"Koushil Sreenath",
"Shuxiao Chen",
"Xiangyu Wu",
"Mark W. Mueller",
"Koushil Sreenath"
] | The capabilities of autonomous flight with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significantly increased in recent times. However, basic problems such as fast and robust geo-localization in GPS-denied environments still remain unsolved. Existing research has primarily concentrated on improving the accuracy of localization at the cost of long and varying computation time in various situations, which... |
Cross-layer Configuration Optimization for Localization on Resource-constrained Devices | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635978/ | [
"Sandra Hernández",
"José Araujo",
"Patric Jensfelt",
"Ioannis Karagiannis",
"Ananya Muddukrishna",
"Bryan Donyanavard",
"Sandra Hernández",
"José Araujo",
"Patric Jensfelt",
"Ioannis Karagiannis",
"Ananya Muddukrishna",
"Bryan Donyanavard"
] | Mobile devices are increasingly expected to sup-port high-performance cyber-physical applications in small form factors, e.g., drones and rovers. However, the gap between hardware limitations of these devices and application requirements is still prohibitive – conflicting goals such as robust, accurate, and efficient execution must be managed carefully to achieve acceptable operation. In this pape... |
3D Reactive Control and Frontier-Based Exploration for Unstructured Environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636575/ | [
"Shakeeb Ahmad",
"Andrew B. Mills",
"Eugene R. Rush",
"Eric W. Frew",
"J. Sean Humbert",
"Shakeeb Ahmad",
"Andrew B. Mills",
"Eugene R. Rush",
"Eric W. Frew",
"J. Sean Humbert"
] | The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the direct depth sensor information to ensure maximal information gain out of the onboard sensors. A frontier-based pose sampling technique is used with a fast marching ... |
Adaptive Terrain Traversability Prediction based on Multi-Source Transfer Gaussian Processes | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636528/ | [
"Hiroaki Inotsume",
"Takashi Kubota",
"Hiroaki Inotsume",
"Takashi Kubota"
] | This study addresses the challenge of predicting the terrain traversability of off-road vehicles. When an off-road vehicle is operated on rough terrains or slopes of unconsolidated materials, it is crucial to accurately predict terrain traversability for efficient operations and to avoid critical mobility risks. However, the prediction of traversability is challenging, especially for the predictio... |
Multiclass Terrain Classification using Sound and Vibration from Mobile Robot Terrain Interaction | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636237/ | [
"Jacqueline Libby",
"Anthony Stentz",
"Jacqueline Libby",
"Anthony Stentz"
] | Offroad mobile robot perception systems must be able to learn robust terrain classification models. Models built from computer vision often fail in their ability to generalize to new environments where appearance characteristics change. Sound and vibration signals from robot-terrain interaction can be used to classify the terrain from characteristics that vary less between environments. Previous w... |
Perceptive Autonomous Stair Climbing for Quadrupedal Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636302/ | [
"Shuhao Qi",
"Wenchun Lin",
"Zejun Hong",
"Hua Chen",
"Wei Zhang",
"Shuhao Qi",
"Wenchun Lin",
"Zejun Hong",
"Hua Chen",
"Wei Zhang"
] | This paper studies autonomous stair climbing for quadrupedal robots with perception. Enabling quadrupeds to reliably climb staircases greatly expands their applicability in practical scenarios. For this structured task, we develop a simple yet effective perception and control framework for autonomous quadrupedal stair climbing. By exploiting the structural knowledge about the staircases, the propo... |
Trajectory Selection for Power-over-Tether Atmospheric Sensing UAS | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636364/ | [
"Daniel A. Rico",
"Francisco Muñoz-Arriola",
"Carrick Detweiler",
"Daniel A. Rico",
"Francisco Muñoz-Arriola",
"Carrick Detweiler"
] | Power-over-tether aircraft is an effective tool for persistent spatiotemporal monitoring of environmental phenomena. This paper presents the design and evaluation of flight trajectories for the tethered aircraft unmanned system (TAUS) sensing a dynamic temperature field. TAUS is a novel power-over-tether-based unmanned aerial system (UAS) configured for long-term, high throughput atmospheric monit... |
An Industrial Robot for Firewater Piping Inspection and Mapping | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636247/ | [
"Aneesh N. Chand",
"Naji Zuhdi",
"Asmadi Mansor",
"Asif Iqbal",
"Faiz Rustam",
"Walter Baur",
"Aneesh N. Chand",
"Naji Zuhdi",
"Asmadi Mansor",
"Asif Iqbal",
"Faiz Rustam",
"Walter Baur"
] | The design of an industrial pipe inspection robot for 4" firewater piping inspection and mapping with some new and unreported features is presented. The robot consists of a compact 3D MEMs Lidar with non-linear scanning pattern in the form of Lissajous trajectories that produces a dense scan of inner pipe surfaces. Evaluating the surface integrals of these 3D point clouds acquired at pipe turns al... |
A Mixed Reality Supervision and Telepresence Interface for Outdoor Field Robotics | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636090/ | [
"Michael Walker",
"Zhaozhong Chen",
"Matthew Whitlock",
"David Blair",
"Danielle Albers Szafir",
"Christoffer Heckman",
"Daniel Szafir",
"Michael Walker",
"Zhaozhong Chen",
"Matthew Whitlock",
"David Blair",
"Danielle Albers Szafir",
"Christoffer Heckman",
"Daniel Szafir"
] | Collaborative human-robot field operations rely on timely decision-making and coordination, which can be challenging for heterogeneous teams operating in large-scale deployments. In this work, we present the design of an immersive, mixed reality (MR) interface to support sense-making and situational awareness based on the data collection capabilities of both human and robotic team members. Our sol... |
Inclined Quadrotor Landing using Deep Reinforcement Learning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636096/ | [
"Jacob E. Kooi",
"Robert Babuška",
"Jacob E. Kooi",
"Robert Babuška"
] | Landing a quadrotor on an inclined surface is a challenging maneuver. The final state of any inclined landing trajectory is not an equilibrium, which precludes the use of most conventional control methods. We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to design an autonomous landing controller for inclined surfaces. Using the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm with sparse rewards and... |
Self-Supervised Online Reward Shaping in Sparse-Reward Environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636020/ | [
"Farzan Memarian",
"Wonjoon Goo",
"Rudolf Lioutikov",
"Scott Niekum",
"Ufuk Topcu",
"Farzan Memarian",
"Wonjoon Goo",
"Rudolf Lioutikov",
"Scott Niekum",
"Ufuk Topcu"
] | We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between classification-based reward inference and policy update steps—the original sparse reward provides a self-supervisory signal for reward inference by ranking trajectories... |
CLAMGen: Closed-Loop Arm Motion Generation via Multi-view Vision-Based RL | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636369/ | [
"Iretiayo Akinola",
"Zizhao Wang",
"Peter Allen",
"Iretiayo Akinola",
"Zizhao Wang",
"Peter Allen"
] | We propose a vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for closed-loop trajectory generation in an arm reaching problem. Arm trajectory generation is a fundamental robotics problem which entails finding collision-free paths to move the robot’s body (e.g. arm) in order to satisfy a goal (e.g. place end-effector at a point). While classical methods typically require the model of the environm... |
Residual Feedback Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks with Uncertainty | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636176/ | [
"Alireza Ranjbar",
"Ngo Anh Vien",
"Hanna Ziesche",
"Joschka Boedecker",
"Gerhard Neumann",
"Alireza Ranjbar",
"Ngo Anh Vien",
"Hanna Ziesche",
"Joschka Boedecker",
"Gerhard Neumann"
] | While classic control theory offers state of the art solutions in many problem scenarios, it is often desired to improve beyond the structure of such solutions and surpass their limitations. To this end, residual policy learning (RPL) offers a formulation to improve existing controllers with reinforcement learning (RL) by learning an additive "residual" to the output of a given controller. However... |
DEALIO: Data-Efficient Adversarial Learning for Imitation from Observation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636169/ | [
"Faraz Torabi",
"Garrett Warnell",
"Peter Stone",
"Faraz Torabi",
"Garrett Warnell",
"Peter Stone"
] | In imitation learning from observation (IfO), a learning agent seeks to imitate a demonstrating agent using only observations of the demonstrated behavior without access to the control signals generated by the demonstrator. Recent methods based on adversarial imitation learning have led to state-of-the-art performance on IfO problems, but they typically suffer from high sample complexity due to a ... |
Learning to Design and Construct Bridge without Blueprint | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636280/ | [
"Yunfei Li",
"Tao Kong",
"Lei Li",
"Yifeng Li",
"Yi Wu",
"Yunfei Li",
"Tao Kong",
"Lei Li",
"Yifeng Li",
"Yi Wu"
] | Autonomous assembly has been a desired functionality of many intelligent robot systems. We study a new challenging assembly task, designing and constructing a bridge without a blueprint. In this task, the robot needs to first design a feasible bridge architecture for arbitrarily wide cliffs and then manipulate the blocks reliably to construct a stable bridge according to the proposed design. In th... |
Overcoming Obstructions via Bandwidth-Limited Multi-Agent Spatial Handshaking | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636761/ | [
"Nathaniel Glaser",
"Yen-Cheng Liu",
"Junjiao Tian",
"Zsolt Kira",
"Nathaniel Glaser",
"Yen-Cheng Liu",
"Junjiao Tian",
"Zsolt Kira"
] | In this paper, we address bandwidth-limited and obstruction-prone collaborative perception, specifically in the context of multi-agent semantic segmentation. This setting presents several key challenges, including processing and ex-changing unregistered robotic swarm imagery. To be successful, solutions must effectively leverage multiple non-static and intermittently-overlapping RGB perspectives, ... |
Scene Descriptor Expressing Ambiguity in Information Recovery Based on Incomplete Partial Observation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636576/ | [
"Takaaki Fukui",
"Tadashi Matsuo",
"Nobutaka Shimada",
"Takaaki Fukui",
"Tadashi Matsuo",
"Nobutaka Shimada"
] | In recent studies, the widespread of deep learning has made many kinds of large-scale image datasets available and it has enabled to improve the performance of image-based 3-D scene reconstruction. Several studies estimate whole 3-D scenes including occluded or unseen parts consistent with the obtained partial observations by integrating prior knowledge from training datasets with them, under no c... |
Bootstrapped Self-Supervised Training with Monocular Video for Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636330/ | [
"Yihao Zhang",
"John J. Leonard",
"Yihao Zhang",
"John J. Leonard"
] | For a robot deployed in the world, it is desirable to have the ability of autonomous learning to improve its initial pre-set knowledge. We formalize this as a bootstrapped self-supervised learning problem where a system is initially bootstrapped with supervised training on a labeled dataset and we look for a self-supervised training method that can subsequently improve the system over the supervis... |
Automatic Learning System for Object Function Points from Random Shape Generation and Physical Validation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635895/ | [
"Kosuke Takeuchi",
"Iori Yanokura",
"Yohei Kakiuchi",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba",
"Kosuke Takeuchi",
"Iori Yanokura",
"Yohei Kakiuchi",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba"
] | In this paper, we aim to recognize function points of category-agnostic objects and perform object manipulation. To recognize function points of various shapes, it is necessary to train with a large amount of training data. Also, it is necessary to take into account not only visual information but also physics and interaction between objects. To solve these problems, we are working on the automati... |
Fast Image-Anomaly Mitigation for Autonomous Mobile Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635855/ | [
"Gianmario Fumagalli",
"Yannick Huber",
"Marcin Dymczyk",
"Roland Siegwart",
"Renaud Dubé",
"Gianmario Fumagalli",
"Yannick Huber",
"Marcin Dymczyk",
"Roland Siegwart",
"Renaud Dubé"
] | Camera anomalies like rain or dust can severely degrade image quality and its related tasks, such as localization and segmentation. In this work we address this important issue by implementing a pre-processing step that can effectively mitigate such artifacts in a real-time fashion, thus supporting the deployment of autonomous systems with limited compute capabilities. We propose a shallow generat... |
Visual Identification of Articulated Object Parts | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636054/ | [
"Vicky Zeng",
"Tabitha Edith Lee",
"Jacky Liang",
"Oliver Kroemer",
"Vicky Zeng",
"Tabitha Edith Lee",
"Jacky Liang",
"Oliver Kroemer"
] | As autonomous robots interact and navigate around real-world environments such as homes, it is useful to reliably identify and manipulate articulated objects, such as doors and cabinets. Many prior works in object articulation identification require manipulation of the object, either by the robot or a human. While recent works have addressed predicting articulation types from visual observations a... |
Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning with Integrated Intrinsics and Spatio-Temporal Constraints | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636030/ | [
"Kenny Chen",
"Alexandra Pogue",
"Brett T. Lopez",
"Ali-Akbar Agha-Mohammadi",
"Ankur Mehta",
"Kenny Chen",
"Alexandra Pogue",
"Brett T. Lopez",
"Ali-Akbar Agha-Mohammadi",
"Ankur Mehta"
] | Monocular depth inference has gained tremendous attention from researchers in recent years and remains as a promising replacement for expensive time-of-flight sensors, but issues with scale acquisition and implementation overhead still plague these systems. To this end, this work presents an unsupervised learning framework that is able to predict at-scale depth maps and egomotion, in addition to c... |
BogieBot: A Climbing Robot in Cluttered Confined Space of Bogies with Ferrous Metal Surfaces | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636412/ | [
"Mohammad Adinehvand",
"Ehsan Asadi",
"Chow Y. Lai",
"Hamid Khayyam",
"Kevin Tan",
"Reza Hoseinnezhad",
"Mohammad Adinehvand",
"Ehsan Asadi",
"Chow Y. Lai",
"Hamid Khayyam",
"Kevin Tan",
"Reza Hoseinnezhad"
] | Proactive inspection is essential for prediction and prevention of rolling stock component failures. The conventional process for inspecting bogies under trains presents significant challenges for inspectors who need to visually check the tight and cluttered environment. We propose a miniature multi-link climbing robot, called BogieBot, that can be deployed inside the undercarriage areas of trains... |
Design and analysis of a robotic out-pipe grinding system with friction actuating | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636189/ | [
"Mingyuan Wang",
"Sheng Bao",
"Jianjun Yuan",
"Shugen Ma",
"Shijie Guo",
"Weiwei Wan",
"Mingyuan Wang",
"Sheng Bao",
"Jianjun Yuan",
"Shugen Ma",
"Shijie Guo",
"Weiwei Wan"
] | To cope with the requirements on efficiency and labour-saving of the out-pipe surface grinding tasks in the wild, several proposals are revealed and discussed. The one benefiting from the characteristics of planetary gear transmission and friction actuating mechanism are expatiated. To realize full coverage of out-pipe surface, the self-rotation and revolution motions of every polishing tool (cutt... |
Modular Pipe Climber III with Three-Output Open Differential | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635853/ | [
"Rama Vadapalli",
"Saharsh Agarwal",
"Vishnu Kumar",
"Kartik Suryavanshi",
"Nagamanikandan G",
"K Madhava Krishna",
"Rama Vadapalli",
"Saharsh Agarwal",
"Vishnu Kumar",
"Kartik Suryavanshi",
"Nagamanikandan G",
"K Madhava Krishna"
] | The paper introduces the novel Modular Pipe Climber III with a Three-Output Open Differential (3-OOD) mechanism to eliminate slipping of the tracks due to the changing cross-sections of the pipe. This will be achieved in any orientation of the robot. Previous pipe climbers use three-wheel/track modules, each with an individual driving mechanism to achieve stable traversing. Slipping of tracks is p... |
Modeling and Analysis of Tensegrity Robot for Passive Dynamic Walking | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636633/ | [
"Yanqiu Zheng",
"Longchuan Li",
"Fumihiko Asano",
"Cong Yan",
"Xindi Zhao",
"Haosong Chen",
"Yanqiu Zheng",
"Longchuan Li",
"Fumihiko Asano",
"Cong Yan",
"Xindi Zhao",
"Haosong Chen"
] | This paper introduces a planar tensegrity robot that walks passively and cyclically on a gentle downhill, where its gait versatility can be strengthened by applying actuation forces on the connection cables. The novelty of this work is that we design the structure of this passive robot inspired by the rimless wheel, which naturally generates cyclic locomotion. Consequently, its mathematical model ... |
A Highly Maneuverable Hybrid Energy-Efficient Rolling/Flying System | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636811/ | [
"Sahand Sabet",
"Mohit Singh",
"Mohammad Poursina",
"Parviz E. Nikravesh",
"Sahand Sabet",
"Mohit Singh",
"Mohammad Poursina",
"Parviz E. Nikravesh"
] | Spherical robots are typically comprised of an actuation unit enclosed by a spherical shell. Among nonholonomic systems, spherical robots offer the best maneuverability and lowest energy consumption (due to their omnidirectional movement and single contact point with the ground). This allows them to traverse rough and uneven terrains. Further, using their ability to roll on the ground, they can pr... |
HanGrawler 2: Super-high-speed and Large-payload Ceiling Mobile Robot Using Crawler | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636228/ | [
"Takehito Yoshida",
"Yudai Yamada",
"Shin’Ichi Warisawa",
"Rui Fukui",
"Takehito Yoshida",
"Yudai Yamada",
"Shin’Ichi Warisawa",
"Rui Fukui"
] | Ceiling mobile robots are anticipated for trans-porting component parts in production sites. In our previous study, we had developed a crawler-type ceiling mobile robot named "HanGrawler." In this study, we aim to realize 1 m/s and 90°/s speed movement on par with existing ground carriers, and reveal the factors contributing to the improvement in speed and stabilization. Accordingly, we develop Ha... |
Mechanical Design and Evaluation of a Selectively-actuated MRI-compatible Continuum Neurosurgical Robot | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636128/ | [
"Shing Shin Cheng",
"Xuefeng Wang",
"Seokhwan Jeong",
"Matt Kole",
"Steven Roys",
"Rao P. Gullapalli",
"Shing Shin Cheng",
"Xuefeng Wang",
"Seokhwan Jeong",
"Matt Kole",
"Steven Roys",
"Rao P. Gullapalli"
] | The combination of a dexterous continuum robot and magnetic resonance imaging can potentially improve surgical precision and minimize brain manipulation in a minimally invasive neurosurgical procedure. In this work, a seven degree-of-freedom (DoF) continuum neurosurgical robot was developed. The main innovation lies in the design of a safe and robust switching mechanism and gear-based quick-connec... |
Interpretable Run-Time Prediction and Planning in Co-Robotic Environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636282/ | [
"Rahul Peddi",
"Nicola Bezzo",
"Rahul Peddi",
"Nicola Bezzo"
] | Mobile robots are traditionally developed to be reactive and avoid collisions with surrounding humans, often moving in unnatural ways without following social protocols, forcing people to behave very differently from human-human interaction rules. Humans, on the other hand, are seamlessly able to understand why they may interfere with surrounding humans and change their behavior based on their rea... |
HyperPlan: A Framework for Motion Planning Algorithm Selection and Parameter Optimization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636651/ | [
"Mark Moll",
"Constantinos Chamzas",
"Zachary Kingston",
"Lydia E. Kavraki",
"Mark Moll",
"Constantinos Chamzas",
"Zachary Kingston",
"Lydia E. Kavraki"
] | Over the years, many motion planning algorithms have been proposed. It is often unclear which algorithm might be best suited for a particular class of problems. The problem is compounded by the fact that algorithm performance can be highly dependent on parameter settings. This paper shows that hyperparameter optimization is an effective tool in both algorithm selection and parameter tuning over a ... |
Generation of Human-like Arm Motions using Sampling-based Motion Planning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636068/ | [
"Carl Gäbert",
"Sascha Kaden",
"Ulrike Thomas",
"Carl Gäbert",
"Sascha Kaden",
"Ulrike Thomas"
] | Natural and human-like arm motions are promising features to facilitate social understanding of humanoid robots. To this end, we integrate biophysical characteristics of human arm-motions into sampling-based motion planning. We show the generality of our method by evaluating it with multiple manipulators. Our first contribution is to introduce a set of cost functions to optimize for human-like arm... |
PlannerFlows: Learning Motion Samplers with Normalising Flows | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636190/ | [
"Tin Lai",
"Fabio Ramos",
"Tin Lai",
"Fabio Ramos"
] | Sampling-based motion planning is the predominant paradigm in many real-world robotic applications, but its performance is immensely dependent on the quality of the samples. The majority of traditional planners are inefficient as they use uninformative sampling distributions instead of exploiting structures and patterns in the problem to guide better sampling strategies. Moreover, most current lea... |
Safe and Fast Path Planner for Minimally Invasive Surgery | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636268/ | [
"Shubhangi Nema",
"Leena Vachhani",
"Shubhangi Nema",
"Leena Vachhani"
] | Path planning of a tool in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) can provide assistance to the surgeons by giving solutions for faster and safe tool movements during the surgery. However, the main challenge in this problem is to address non-uniform tool shape for planning that can change due to the tool’s dexterity. A typical robotic path planning approach by describing the robot’s feasible movements u... |
Downing a Rogue Drone with a Team of Aerial Radio Signal Jammers | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636065/ | [
"Savvas Papaioannou",
"Panayiotis Kolios",
"Georgios Ellinas",
"Savvas Papaioannou",
"Panayiotis Kolios",
"Georgios Ellinas"
] | This work proposes a novel distributed control framework in which a team of pursuer agents equipped with a radio jamming device cooperate in order to track and radio-jam a rogue target in 3D space, with the ultimate purpose of disrupting its communication and navigation circuitry. The target evolves in 3D space according to a stochastic dynamical model and it can appear and disappear from the surv... |
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Visibility-based Persistent Monitoring | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635898/ | [
"Jingxi Chen",
"Amrish Baskaran",
"Zhongshun Zhang",
"Pratap Tokekar",
"Jingxi Chen",
"Amrish Baskaran",
"Zhongshun Zhang",
"Pratap Tokekar"
] | The Visibility-based Persistent Monitoring (VPM) problem seeks to find a set of trajectories (or controllers) for robots to persistently monitor a changing environment. Each robot has a sensor, such as a camera, with a limited field-of-view that is obstructed by obstacles in the environment. The robots may need to coordinate with each other to ensure no point in the environment is left unmonitored... |
Planning for Aerial Robot Teams for Wide-Area Biometric and Phenotypic Data Collection | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636549/ | [
"Shashwata Mandal",
"Tianshuang Gao",
"Sourabh Bhattacharya",
"Shashwata Mandal",
"Tianshuang Gao",
"Sourabh Bhattacharya"
] | This work presents an efficient and implementable solution to the problem of joint task allocation and path planning in a multi-UAV platform. The sensing requirement associated with the task gives rise to an uncanny variant of the traditional vehicle routing problem with coverage/sensing constraints. As is the case in several multi-robot path-planning problems, our problem reduces to an mTSP probl... |
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures: Towards Risk-Adaptive Task Allocation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635955/ | [
"Max Rudolph",
"Sonia Chernova",
"Harish Ravichandar",
"Max Rudolph",
"Sonia Chernova",
"Harish Ravichandar"
] | Multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problems involve optimizing the allocation of robots to tasks. MRTA problems are known to be challenging when tasks require multiple robots and the team is composed of heterogeneous robots. These challenges are further exacerbated when we need to account for uncertainties encountered in the real-world. In this work, we address coalition formation in heterogeneous... |
Source Seeking by Dynamic Source Location Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636841/ | [
"Tianpeng Zhang",
"Victor Qin",
"Yujie Tang",
"Na Li",
"Tianpeng Zhang",
"Victor Qin",
"Yujie Tang",
"Na Li"
] | This paper focuses on the problem of multi-robot source-seeking, where a group of mobile sensors localizes and moves close to a single source using only local measurements. Drawing inspiration from the optimal sensor placement research, we develop an algorithm that estimates the source location while approaches the source following gradient descent steps on a loss function defined on the Fisher in... |
Market-based Multi-robot coordination with HTN planning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636286/ | [
"Antoine Milot",
"Estelle Chauveau",
"Simon Lacroix",
"Charles Lesire",
"Antoine Milot",
"Estelle Chauveau",
"Simon Lacroix",
"Charles Lesire"
] | We propose a decentralized approach that simultaneously allocates and decomposes high level tasks among various robots. The approach exploits HTN structures and algorithms, that are used within an auction-based allocation scheme, and aims at dealing with complex tasks with causal or temporal relations. The paper formalizes the approach, and depicts how HTN planning processes are used to estimate b... |
Monocular Teach-and-Repeat Navigation using a Deep Steering Network with Scale Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635912/ | [
"Cheng Zhao",
"Li Sun",
"Tomáš Krajník",
"Tom Duckett",
"Zhi Yan",
"Cheng Zhao",
"Li Sun",
"Tomáš Krajník",
"Tom Duckett",
"Zhi Yan"
] | This paper proposes a novel monocular teach-and-repeat navigation system with the capability of scale awareness, i.e. the absolute distance between observation and goal images. It decomposes the navigation task into a sequence of visual servoing sub-tasks to approach consecutive goal/node images in a topological map. To be specific, a novel hybrid model, named deep steering network is proposed to ... |
Self-Supervised Scale Recovery for Monocular Depth and Egomotion Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635938/ | [
"Brandon Wagstaff",
"Jonathan Kelly",
"Brandon Wagstaff",
"Jonathan Kelly"
] | The self-supervised loss formulation for jointly training depth and egomotion neural networks with monocular images is well studied and has demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy. One of the main limitations of this approach, however, is that the depth and egomotion estimates are only determined up to an unknown scale. In this paper, we present a novel scale recovery loss that enforces consistency... |
Assembly Action Understanding from Fine-Grained Hand Motions, a Multi-camera and Deep Learning Approach | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636715/ | [
"Enrique Coronado",
"Kosuke Fukuda",
"Ixchel G. Ramirez-Alpizar",
"Natsuki Yamanobe",
"Gentiane Venture",
"Kensuke Harada",
"Enrique Coronado",
"Kosuke Fukuda",
"Ixchel G. Ramirez-Alpizar",
"Natsuki Yamanobe",
"Gentiane Venture",
"Kensuke Harada"
] | This article presents a novel software architecture enabling the analysis of assembly actions from fine-grained hand motions. Unlike previous works that compel humans to wear ad-hoc devices or visual markers in the human body, our approach enables users to move without additional burdens. Modules developed are able to: (i) reconstruct the 3D motions of body and hands keypoints using multi-camera s... |
Robust and Long-term Monocular Teach and Repeat Navigation using a Single-experience Map | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635886/ | [
"Li Sun",
"Marwan Taher",
"Christopher Wild",
"Cheng Zhao",
"Yu Zhang",
"Filip Majer",
"Zhi Yan",
"Tomáš Krajník",
"Tony Prescott",
"Tom Duckett",
"Li Sun",
"Marwan Taher",
"Christopher Wild",
"Cheng Zhao",
"Yu Zhang",
"Filip Majer",
"Zhi Yan",
"Tomáš Krajník",
"Tony Prescott",
"Tom Duckett"
] | This paper presents a robust monocular visual teach-and-repeat (VT&R) navigation system for long-term operation in outdoor environments. The approach leverages deep-learned descriptors to deal with the high illumination variance of the real world. In particular, a tailored self-supervised descriptor, DarkPoint, is proposed for autonomous navigation in outdoor environments. We seamlessly integrate ... |
Self Attention Guided Depth Completion using RGB and Sparse LiDAR Point Clouds | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636310/ | [
"Siddharth Srivastava",
"Gaurav Sharma",
"Siddharth Srivastava",
"Gaurav Sharma"
] | We address the problem of completing per pixel dense depth map using a single RGB image and the sparse point cloud of the scene. Depth prediction from RGB image is a hard problem and while dense point clouds obtained from LiDAR sensors can be used in addition to RGB image, the cost of such sensors is a significant barrier. Having LiDAR sensors which capture sparse point clouds is a reasonable midd... |
Laser-Based Side-by-Side Following for Human-Following Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636458/ | [
"Hanchen Yao",
"Houde Dai",
"Enhao Zhao",
"Penghua Liu",
"Ran Zhao",
"Hanchen Yao",
"Houde Dai",
"Enhao Zhao",
"Penghua Liu",
"Ran Zhao"
] | A mobile robot that follows behind humans in structured environments has to face the challenge of full occlusion caused by the walls when the target person makes a turn at the corridor intersections. This may result in short-term, even a permanent loss of the target from the field of view of the Human-Following Robots (HFRs). Concerning this issue, a novel side-by-side following method for HFRs is... |
Deep Leg Tracking by Detection and Gait Analysis in 2D Range Data for Intelligent Robotic Assistants | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636588/ | [
"Danai Efstathiou",
"Georgia Chalvatzaki",
"Athanasios Dometios",
"Dionisios Spiliopoulos",
"Costas S. Tzafestas",
"Danai Efstathiou",
"Georgia Chalvatzaki",
"Athanasios Dometios",
"Dionisios Spiliopoulos",
"Costas S. Tzafestas"
] | Online human leg tracking and gait analysis are crucial functionalities for mobility assistant robots, like intelligent walkers. Usually, such walkers are equipped with various sensors for the extraction of human-related features for adaptive human-robot interaction and assistance. We treat the gait detection problem jointly, presenting a novel method for detecting and recognizing gait features fr... |
Explaining the Decisions of Deep Policy Networks for Robotic Manipulations | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636594/ | [
"Seongun Kim",
"Jaesik Choi",
"Seongun Kim",
"Jaesik Choi"
] | Deep policy networks enable robots to learn behaviors to solve various real-world complex tasks in an end-to-end fashion. However, they lack transparency to provide the reasons of actions. Thus, such a black-box model often results in low reliability and disruptive actions during the deployment of the robot in practice. To enhance its transparency, it is important to explain robot behaviors by con... |
An Adversarial Objective for Scalable Exploration | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636298/ | [
"Bernadette Bucher",
"Karl Schmeckpeper",
"Nikolai Matni",
"Kostas Daniilidis",
"Bernadette Bucher",
"Karl Schmeckpeper",
"Nikolai Matni",
"Kostas Daniilidis"
] | Collecting new experience is costly in many robotic tasks, so determining how to efficiently explore in a new environment to learn as much as possible in as few trials as possible is an important problem for robotics. In this paper, we propose a method for exploring for the purpose of learning a dynamics model. Our key idea is to minimize a score given by a discriminator network as an objective fo... |
Robotic Occlusion Reasoning for Efficient Object Existence Prediction | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635947/ | [
"Mengdi Li",
"Cornelius Weber",
"Matthias Kerzel",
"Jae Hee Lee",
"Zheni Zeng",
"Zhiyuan Liu",
"Stefan Wermter",
"Mengdi Li",
"Cornelius Weber",
"Matthias Kerzel",
"Jae Hee Lee",
"Zheni Zeng",
"Zhiyuan Liu",
"Stefan Wermter"
] | Reasoning about potential occlusions is essential for robots to efficiently predict whether an object exists in an environment. Though existing work shows that a robot with active perception can achieve various tasks, it is still unclear if occlusion reasoning can be achieved. To answer this question, we introduce the task of robotic object existence prediction: when being asked about an object, a... |
Multimodal VAE Active Inference Controller | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636394/ | [
"Cristian Meo",
"Pablo Lanillos",
"Cristian Meo",
"Pablo Lanillos"
] | Active inference, a theoretical construct inspired by brain processing, is a promising alternative to control artificial agents. However, current methods do not yet scale to high-dimensional inputs in continuous control. Here we present a novel active inference torque controller for industrial arms that maintains the adaptive characteristics of previous proprioceptive approaches but also enables l... |
Large-Area Conformable Sensor for Proximity, Light Touch, and Pressure-Based Gesture Recognition | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635943/ | [
"Mirza S. Sarwar",
"Katsu Yamane",
"Mirza S. Sarwar",
"Katsu Yamane"
] | In this paper, we present a capacitance-based sensor array for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) applications that can measure the proximity, near-zero-force (NZF) contacts, and pressure between a robot and human body. The top segment including the electrodes is made of soft, stretchable materials, while the bottom segment consists of electrodes patterned from a thin copper film. The resulti... |
Tactile Slip Detection in the Wild Leveraging Distributed Sensing of both Normal and Shear Forces | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636602/ | [
"Rodrigo Zenha",
"Brice Denoun",
"Claudio Coppola",
"Lorenzo Jamone",
"Rodrigo Zenha",
"Brice Denoun",
"Claudio Coppola",
"Lorenzo Jamone"
] | The ability to detect that a grasped object is slipping from the robot gripper is a crucial skill for autonomous robotic manipulation. However, current solutions for automatic slip detection do not perform well in real-world unstructured settings, in which a wide variety of gripper-object interactions could occur. Tactile and force sensing are the most suitable sensory modalities to detect such ev... |
NudgeSeg: Zero-Shot Object Segmentation by Repeated Physical Interaction | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635832/ | [
"Chahat Deep Singh",
"Nitin J. Sanket",
"Chethan M. Parameshwara",
"Cornelia Fermüller",
"Yiannis Aloimonos",
"Chahat Deep Singh",
"Nitin J. Sanket",
"Chethan M. Parameshwara",
"Cornelia Fermüller",
"Yiannis Aloimonos"
] | Recent advances in object segmentation have demonstrated that deep neural networks excel at object segmentation for specific classes in color and depth images. However, their performance is dictated by the number of classes and objects used for training, thereby hindering generalization to never seen objects or zero-shot samples. To exacerbate the problem further, object segmentation using image f... |
Sensor Fusion-based Anthropomorphic Control of Under-Actuated Bionic Hand in Dynamic Environment | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636436/ | [
"Hang Su",
"Junhao Zhang",
"Junling Fu",
"Salih Ertug Ovur",
"Wen Qi",
"Guoxin Li",
"Yingbai Hu",
"Zhijun Li",
"Hang Su",
"Junhao Zhang",
"Junling Fu",
"Salih Ertug Ovur",
"Wen Qi",
"Guoxin Li",
"Yingbai Hu",
"Zhijun Li"
] | Under-actuated bionic hands have achieved tremendous popularity in many fields because of their advantages of lightweight, budget-friendly, satisfactory flexibility, and adaptability. Except for the bionic mechanical design, various anthropomorphic control strategies have been proposed and investigated in the last decades. However, due to its under-actuated characteristic, there are still many cha... |
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