Precision agriculture is rapidly attracting research to efficiently introduce automation and robotics solutions to support agricultural activities. Robotic navigation in vineyards and orchards offers competitive advantages in autonomously monitoring and easily accessing crops for harvesting, spraying and performing time-consuming necessary tasks. Nowadays, autonomous navigation algorithms exploit expensive sensors which also require heavy computational cost for data processing. Nonetheless, vineyard rows represent a challenging outdoor scenario where GPS and Visual Odometry techniques often struggle to provide reliable positioning information. In this work, we combine Edge AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning to propose a cutting-edge lightweight solution to tackle the problem of autonomous vineyard navigation without exploiting precise localization data and overcoming task-tailored algorithms with a flexible learning-based approach. We train an end-to-end sensorimotor agent which directly maps noisy depth images and position-agnostic robot state information to velocity commands and guides the robot to the end of a row, continuously adjusting its heading for a collision-free central trajectory. Our extensive experimentation in realistic simulated vineyards demonstrates the effectiveness of our solution and the generalization capabilities of our agent.
Precision agriculture is a fast-growing field that aims at introducing affordable and effective automation into agricultural processes. Nowadays, algorithmic solutions for navigation in vineyards require expensive sensors and high computational workloads that preclude large-scale applicability of autonomous robotic platforms in real business case scenarios. From this perspective, our novel proposed control leverages the latest advancement in machine perception and edge AI techniques to achieve highly affordable and reliable navigation inside vineyard rows with low computational and power consu…
There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous navigation stack for the robot pruning a vineyard. The Vinum project is using the quadruped robot HyQReal. This paper introduces an architecture for a quadruped robot to autonomously move through a vineyard by identifying and approaching grapevines for pruning. The higher level control is a state machine switching between searching for destination positions, autonomo…
Cornell AgriTech（康奈尔农业科技中心）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；USDA ARS Grape Genetics Research Unit（美国农业部农业研究局葡萄遗传学研究组）
Autonomous navigation is the key to achieving the full automation of agricultural research and production management (e.g., disease management and yield prediction) using agricultural robots. In this paper, we introduced a vision-based autonomous navigation framework for agriculture robots in trellised cropping systems such as vineyards. To achieve this, we proposed a novel learning-based method to estimate the path traversibility heatmap directly from an RGB-D image and subsequently convert the heatmap to a preferred traversal path. An automatic annotation pipeline was developed to form a tra…
VinePT-Map: Pole-Trunk Semantic Mapping for Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Vineyards
Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino（电子与电信系，托斯纳大学）；PoliTO Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics (PIC4SeR)（PoliTO 服务机器人跨部门中心（PIC4SeR））
TEMPO-VINE: A Multi-Temporal Sensor Fusion Dataset for Localization and Mapping in Vineyards
Department of Electronics and Communications, Politecnico di Torino（电子与通信系，politecnico di torino大学）；University Institute for Engineering Research, Miguel Hernández University（工程研究大学学院，miguel hernández大学）
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Recent research efforts enable study for natural language grounded navigation in photo-realistic environments, e.g., following natural language instructions or dialog. However, existing methods tend to overfit training data in seen environments and fail to generalize well in previously unseen environments. To close the gap between seen and unseen environments, we aim at learning a generalized navigation model from two novel perspectives: (1) we introduce a multitask navigation model that can be seamlessly trained on both Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) and Navigation from Dialog History (NDH)…
Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad（印度信息技术与管理研究所海得拉巴分校机器人研究中心）；TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司TCS研究院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
Autonomous navigation of a robot in agricultural fields is essential for every task from crop monitoring to weed management and fertilizer application. Many current approaches rely on accurate GPS, however, such technology is expensive and also prone to failure (e.g. through lack of coverage). As such, autonomous navigation through sensors that can interpret their environment (such as cameras) is important to achieve the goal of autonomy in agriculture. In this paper, we introduce a purely vision-based navigation scheme that is able to reliably guide the robot through row-crop fields without m…
In audio-visual navigation (AVN), an intelligent agent needs to navigate to a constantly sound-making object in complex 3D environments based on its audio and visual perceptions. While existing methods attempt to improve the navigation performance with preciously designed path planning or intricate task settings, none has improved the model generalisation on unheard sounds with task settings unchanged. We thus propose a contrastive learning-based method to tackle this challenge by regularising the audio encoder, where the sound-agnostic goal-driven latent representations can be learnt from var…
University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业大学）
For mobile robots, mobile manipulators, and autonomous vehicles to safely navigate around populous places such as streets and warehouses, human observers must be able to understand their navigation intent. One way to enable such understanding is by visualizing this intent through projections onto the surrounding environment. But despite the demonstrated effectiveness of such projections, no open codebase with an integrated hardware setup exists. In this work, we detail the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of such directional projections, and share a robot-agnostic implementation of suc…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
We study the problem of developing autonomous agents that can follow human instructions to infer and perform a sequence of actions to complete the underlying task. Significant progress has been made in recent years, especially for tasks with short horizons. However, when it comes to long-horizon tasks with extended sequences of actions, an agent can easily ignore some instructions or get stuck in the middle of the long instructions and eventually fail the task. To address this challenge, we propose a model-agnostic milestone-based task tracker (M-TRACK) to guide the agent and monitor its progr…
Two-Stage Multi-modal Learning for Dynamic Audio-Visual Navigation: From Physical Alignment to Scene Aggregation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Joint Research Laboratory for Embodied Intelligence, Xinjiang University（新疆大学具身智能联合研究实验室）；Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Road Multilingual Cognitive Computing, Xinjiang University（新疆大学丝绸之路多语言认知计算联合国际研究实验室）
Ghent University - imec（根特大学-imec）；University of Antwerp - Flanders Make（安特卫普大学-Flanders Make）
Biologically inspired algorithms for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) such as RatSLAM have been shown to yield effective and robust robot navigation in both indoor and outdoor environments. One drawback however is the sensitivity to perceptual aliasing due to the template matching of low-dimensional sensory templates. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised representation learning method that yields low-dimensional latent state descriptors that can be used for RatSLAM. Our method is sensor agnostic and can be applied to any sensor modality, as we illustrate for camera images, rad…
MolmoSpaces: A Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Navigation and Manipulation
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Automation and Systems Research Institute（自动化与系统研究所）；Artificial Intelligence Institute of Seoul National University（首尔国立大学人工智能研究所）
Current reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers when solving a challenging exploration problem where the desired outcomes or high rewards are rarely observed. Even though curriculum RL, a framework that solves complex tasks by proposing a sequence of surrogate tasks, shows reasonable results, most of the previous works still have difficulty in proposing curriculum due to the absence of a mechanism for obtaining calibrated guidance to the desired outcome state without any prior domain knowledge. To alleviate it, we propose an uncertainty & temporal distance-aware curriculum goal generation me…
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Mila（米拉）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔综合理工学院）；CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大高级研究院人工智能主席）
Gradient-based meta-learners such as Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) have shown strong few-shot performance in supervised and reinforcement learning settings. However, specifically in the case of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL), we can show that gradient-based meta-learners are sensitive to task distributions. With the wrong curriculum, agents suffer the effects of meta-overfitting, shallow adaptation, and adaptation instability. In this work, we begin by highlighting intriguing failure cases of gradient-based meta-RL and show that task distributions can wildly affect algorithmic out…
Mercedes-Benz AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰股份公司）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America（梅赛德斯-奔驰北美研发中心）
The prediction of surrounding agents' motion is a key for safe autonomous driving. In this paper, we explore navigation maps as an alternative to the predominant High Definition (HD) maps for learning-based motion prediction. Navigation maps provide topological and geometrical information on road-level, HD maps additionally have centimeter-accurate lane-level information. As a result, HD maps are costly and time-consuming to obtain, while navigation maps with near-global coverage are freely available. We describe an approach to integrate navigation maps into learning-based motion prediction mo…
This work studies the problem of object goal navigation which involves navigating to an instance of the given object category in unseen environments. End-to-end learning-based navigation methods struggle at this task as they are ineffective at exploration and long-term planning. We propose a modular system called, `Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration' which builds an episodic semantic map and uses it to explore the environment efficiently based on the goal object category. Empirical results in visually realistic simulation environments show that the proposed model outperforms a wide range of ba…
Consider an assistive system that guides visually impaired users through speech and haptic feedback to their destination. Existing robotic and ubiquitous navigation technologies (e.g., portable, ground, or wearable systems) often operate in a generic, user-agnostic manner. However, to minimize confusion and navigation errors, our real-world analysis reveals a crucial need to adapt the instructional guidance across different end-users with diverse mobility skills. To address this practical issue in scalable system design, we propose a novel model-based reinforcement learning framework for perso…
