Perceiving a three-dimensional (3D) scene with multiple objects while moving indoors is essential for vision-based mobile cobots, especially for enhancing their manipulation tasks. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline with instance segmentation, feature matching, and point-set registration for egocentric robots with binocular vision, and demonstrate the robot's grasping capability through the proposed pipeline. First, we design an RGB image-based segmentation approach for single-view 3D semantic scene segmentation, leveraging common object classes in 2D datasets to encapsulate 3D points into point clouds of object instances through corresponding depth maps. Next, 3D correspondences of two consecutive segmented point clouds are extracted based on matched keypoints between objects of interest in RGB images from the prior step. In addition, to be aware of spatial changes in 3D feature distribution, we also weigh each 3D point pair based on the estimated distribution using kernel density estimation (KDE), which subsequently gives robustness with less central correspondences while solving for rigid transformations between point clouds. Finally, we test our proposed pipeline on the 7-DOF dual-arm Baxter robot with a mounted Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D camera. The result shows that our robot can segment objects of interest, register multiple views while moving, and grasp the target object. The source code is available at https://github.com/mkhangg/semantic_scene_perception.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；NVIDIA Research（英伟达研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
The ability to forecast human-environment collisions from egocentric observations is vital to enable collision avoidance in applications such as VR, AR, and wearable assistive robotics. In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of predicting collisions in diverse environments from multi-view egocentric videos captured from body-mounted cameras. Solving this problem requires a generalizable perception system that can classify which human body joints will collide and estimate a collision region heatmap to localize collisions in the environment. To achieve this, we propose a transformer-…
Face versus Body Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction: An Egocentric Dataset
Furhat Robotics；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Division of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（语音、音乐和听觉研究所，皇家理工学院）
We present JRDB, a novel egocentric dataset collected from our social mobile manipulator JackRabbot. The dataset includes 64 minutes of annotated multimodal sensor data including stereo cylindrical 360$^\circ$ RGB video at 15 fps, 3D point clouds from two Velodyne 16 Lidars, line 3D point clouds from two Sick Lidars, audio signal, RGB-D video at 30 fps, 360$^\circ$ spherical image from a fisheye camera and encoder values from the robot's wheels. Our dataset incorporates data from traditionally underrepresented scenes such as indoor environments and pedestrian areas, all from the ego-perspectiv…
PhysBrain: Human Egocentric Data as a Bridge from Vision Language Models to Physical Intelligence
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence（中关村人工智能研究院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
To provide insight into cloth perception and manipulation with an active binocular robotic vision system, we compiled a database of 80 stereo-pair colour images with corresponding horizontal and vertical disparity maps and mask annotations, for 3D garment point cloud rendering has been created and released. The stereo-image garment database is part of research conducted under the EU-FP7 Clothes Perception and Manipulation (CloPeMa) project and belongs to a wider database collection released through CloPeMa (www.clopema.eu). This database is based on 16 different off-the-shelve garments. Each g…
Humans have an innate ability to sense their surroundings, as they can extract the spatial representation from the egocentric perception and form an allocentric semantic map via spatial transformation and memory updating. However, endowing mobile agents with such a spatial sensing ability is still a challenge, due to two difficulties: (1) the previous convolutional models are limited by the local receptive field, thus, struggling to capture holistic long-range dependencies during observation; (2) the excessive computational budgets required for success, often lead to a separation of the mappin…
Australian Centre for Field Robotics（澳大利亚野外机器人中心）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
The fusion of sensor data from heterogeneous sensors is crucial for robust perception in various robotics applications that involve moving platforms, for instance, autonomous vehicle navigation. In particular, combining camera and lidar sensors enables the projection of precise range information of the surrounding environment onto visual images. It also makes it possible to label each lidar point with visual segmentation/classification results for 3D mapping, which facilitates a higher level understanding of the scene. The task is however considered non-trivial due to intrinsic and extrinsic s…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学）
Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), which links language instructions to perception and control in the real world, is a core capability of embodied robots. Recently, large-scale pretrained foundation models have been leveraged as shared priors for perception, reasoning, and action, enabling zero-shot VLN without task-specific training. However, existing zero-shot VLN methods depend on costly perception and passive scene understanding, collapsing control to point-level choices. As a result, they are expensive to deploy, misaligned in action semantics, and short-s…
EgoTraj: Real-World Egocentric Human Trajectory Dataset for Multimodal Prediction
Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin（土木、建筑与环境工程系，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Meta Reality Labs（Meta现实实验室）；School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin（建筑学院，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
KiVi: Kinesthetic-Visuospatial Integration for Dynamic and Safe Egocentric Legged Locomotion
MARMot Lab, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学MARMot实验室）；Center of X-Mechanics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学X力学中心）；Robot and Robot Intelligence Lab, Zhejiang University（浙江大学机器人与机器人智能实验室）
A binocular system developed by the author in terms of projective Fourier transform (PFT) of the conformal camera, which numerically integrates the head, eyes, and visual cortex, is used to process visual information during saccadic eye movements. Although we make three saccades per second at the eyeball's maximum speed of 700 deg/sec, our visual system accounts for these incisive eye movements to produce a stable percept of the world. This visual constancy is maintained by neuronal receptive field shifts in various retinotopically organized cortical areas prior to saccade onset, giving the br…
One-Shot Affordance Grounding of Deformable Objects in Egocentric Organizing Scenes
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, China（人工智能与机器人学院，湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, China（机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心，湖南大学）
Depth perception is fundamental for robots to understand the surrounding environment. As the view of cognitive neuroscience, visual depth perception methods are divided into three categories, namely binocular, active, and pictorial. The first two categories have been studied for decades in detail. However, research for the exploration of the third category is still in its infancy and has got momentum by the advent of deep learning methods in recent years. In cognitive neuroscience, it is known that pictorial depth perception mechanisms are dependent on the perception of seen objects. Inspired …
