Animals exploit time to survive in the world. Temporal information is required for higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, decision making, communication, and effective cooperation. Since time is an inseparable part of cognition, there is a growing interest in the artificial intelligence approach to subjective time, which has a possibility of advancing the field. The current survey study aims to provide researchers with an interdisciplinary perspective on time perception. Firstly, we introduce a brief background from the psychology and neuroscience literature, covering the characteristics and models of time perception and related abilities. Secondly, we summarize the emergent computational and robotic models of time perception. A general overview to the literature reveals that a substantial amount of timing models are based on a dedicated time processing like the emergence of a clock-like mechanism from the neural network dynamics and reveal a relationship between the embodiment and time perception. We also notice that most models of timing are developed for either sensory timing (i.e. ability to assess an interval) or motor timing (i.e. ability to reproduce an interval). The number of timing models capable of retrospective timing, which is the ability to track time without paying attention, is insufficient. In this light, we discuss the possible research directions to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of time perception.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour（唐德斯脑、认知与行为研究所）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
Unlike robots, humans learn, adapt and perceive their bodies by interacting with the world. Discovering how the brain represents the body and generates actions is of major importance for robotics and artificial intelligence. Here we discuss how neuroscience findings open up opportunities to improve current estimation and control algorithms in robotics. In particular, how active inference, a mathematical formulation of how the brain resists a natural tendency to disorder, provides a unified recipe to potentially solve some of the major challenges in robotics, such as adaptation, robustness, fle…
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of RF-Grasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully-occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. Unlike prior systems that are constrained by the line-of-sight perception of vision and infrared sensors, RF-Grasp employs RF (Radio Frequency) perception to identify and locate target objects through occlusions, and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in non-line-of-sight settings. RF-Grasp relies on an eye-in-hand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. It introduces two main inno…
Multi-modal perception for soft robotic interactions using generative models
The BioRobotics Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies（圣安娜高级研究院生物机器人研究所）；Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies（圣安娜高级研究院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Commentaries on "Learning Sensorimotor Control with Neuromorphic Sensors: Toward Hyperdimensional Active Perception" [Science Robotics Vol. 4 Issue 30 (2019) 1-10
Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典研究机构）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Luleå University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）
While learning from synthetic training data has recently gained an increased attention, in real-world robotic applications, there are still performance deficiencies due to the so-called Sim-to-Real gap. In practice, this gap is hard to resolve with only synthetic data. Therefore, we focus on an efficient acquisition of real data within a Sim-to-Real learning pipeline. Concretely, we employ deep Bayesian active learning to minimize manual annotation efforts and devise an autonomous learning paradigm to select the data that is considered useful for the human expert to annotate. To achieve this, …
Robotics has long been a field riddled with complex systems architectures whose modules and connections, whether traditional or learning-based, require significant human expertise and prior knowledge. Inspired by large pre-trained language models, this work introduces a paradigm for pre-training a general purpose representation that can serve as a starting point for multiple tasks on a given robot. We present the Perception-Action Causal Transformer (PACT), a generative transformer-based architecture that aims to build representations directly from robot data in a self-supervised fashion. Thro…
Fairness is a principal social value that can be observed in civilisations around the world. A manifestation of this is in social agreements, often described in texts, such as contracts. Yet, despite the prevalence of such, a fairness metric for texts describing a social act remains wanting. To address this, we take a step back to consider the problem based on first principals. Instead of using rules or templates, we utilise social psychology literature to determine the principal factors that humans use when making a fairness assessment. We then attempt to digitise these using word embeddings …
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；National University of Tainan（台南大学）
In this paper, we propose an AI-FML robotic agent for student learning behavior ontology construction which can be applied in English speaking and listening domain. The AI-FML robotic agent with the ontology contains the perception intelligence, computational intelligence, and cognition intelligence for analyzing student learning behavior. In addition, there are three intelligent agents, including a perception agent, a computational agent, and a cognition agent in the AI-FML robotic agent. We deploy the perception agent and the cognition agent on the robot Kebbi Air. Moreover, the computationa…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Cyberbotics（Cyberbotics公司）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；PAL Robotics（PAL机器人公司）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Agrointelli（Agrointelli公司）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）
Existing Deep Learning (DL) frameworks typically do not provide ready-to-use solutions for robotics, where very specific learning, reasoning, and embodiment problems exist. Their relatively steep learning curve and the different methodologies employed by DL compared to traditional approaches, along with the high complexity of DL models, which often leads to the need of employing specialized hardware accelerators, further increase the effort and cost needed to employ DL models in robotics. Also, most of the existing DL methods follow a static inference paradigm, as inherited by the traditional …
From Visual Perception to Deep Empathy: An Automated Assessment Framework for House-Tree-Person Drawings Using Multimodal LLMs and Multi-Agent Collaboration
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Education Sciences（深圳市教育科学研究院）；Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine（广州中医药大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Projecting high-dimensional environment observations into lower-dimensional structured representations can considerably improve data-efficiency for reinforcement learning in domains with limited data such as robotics. Can a single generally useful representation be found? In order to answer this question, it is important to understand how the representation will be used by the agent and what properties such a 'good' representation should have. In this paper we systematically evaluate a number of common learnt and hand-engineered representations in the context of three robotics tasks: lifting, …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Reconstructing the scene of robotic surgery from the stereo endoscopic video is an important and promising topic in surgical data science, which potentially supports many applications such as surgical visual perception, robotic surgery education and intra-operative context awareness. However, current methods are mostly restricted to reconstructing static anatomy assuming no tissue deformation, tool occlusion and de-occlusion, and camera movement. However, these assumptions are not always satisfied in minimal invasive robotic surgeries. In this work, we present an efficient reconstruction pipel…
