With the advent of large foundation model based planning, there is a dire need to ensure their output aligns with the stakeholder's intent. When these models are deployed in the real world, the need for alignment is magnified due to the potential cost to life and infrastructure due to unexpected faliures. Temporal Logic specifications have long provided a way to constrain system behaviors and are a natural fit for these use cases. In this work, we propose a novel approach to factor in signal temporal logic specifications while using autoregressive transformer models for trajectory planning. We also provide a trajectory dataset for pretraining and evaluating foundation models. Our proposed technique acheives 74.3 % higher specification satisfaction over the baselines.
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…
Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校机器人研究中心）；TCS Research（塔塔咨询服务公司研究部）
Table-top Rearrangement and Planning is a challenging problem that relies heavily on an excellent perception stack. The perception stack involves observing and registering the 3D scene on the table, detecting what objects are on the table, and how to manipulate them. Consequently, it greatly influences the system's task-planning and motion-planning stacks that follow. We present a comprehensive overview and discuss the different challenges associated with the perception module. This work is a result of our extensive involvement in the ICRA 2022 Open Cloud Robot Table Organization Challenge, in…
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）
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）
This correspondence comments on the findings reported in a recent Science Robotics article by Mitrokhin et al. [1]. The main goal of this commentary is to expand on some of the issues touched on in that article. Our experience is that hyperdimensional computing is very different from other approaches to computation and that it can take considerable exposure to its concepts before attaining practically useful understanding. Therefore, in order to provide an overview of the area to the first time reader of [1], the commentary includes a brief historic overview as well as connects the findings of…
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 character…
NEC Corporation（日本电气股份有限公司）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Today, even the most compute-and-power constrained robots can measure complex, high data-rate video and LIDAR sensory streams. Often, such robots, ranging from low-power drones to space and subterranean rovers, need to transmit high-bitrate sensory data to a remote compute server if they are uncertain or cannot scalably run complex perception or mapping tasks locally. However, today's representations for sensory data are mostly designed for human, not robotic, perception and thus often waste precious compute or wireless network resources to transmit unimportant parts of a scene that are unnece…
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, …
To solve its task, a robot needs to have the ability to interpret its perceptions. In vision, this interpretation is particularly difficult and relies on the understanding of the structure of the scene, at least to the extent of its task and sensorimotor abilities. A robot with the ability to build and adapt this interpretation process according to its own tasks and capabilities would push away the limits of what robots can achieve in a non controlled environment. A solution is to provide the robot with processes to build such representations that are not specific to an environment or a situat…
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…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳研究院）
Autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can collect trolleys are widely used to liberate human resources and fight epidemics. Most prior robotic trolley collection solutions only detect trolleys with 2D poses or are merely based on specific marks and lack the formal design of planning algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel mobile manipulation system with applications in luggage trolley collection. The proposed system integrates a compact hardware design and a progressive perception and planning framework, enabling the system to efficiently and robustly collect trolleys in dynamic and…
Today's robots often interface with data-driven perception and planning models with classical model-predictive controllers (MPC). Often, such learned perception/planning models produce erroneous waypoint predictions on out-of-distribution (OoD) or even adversarial visual inputs, which increase control costs. However, today's methods to train robust perception models are largely task-agnostic - they augment a dataset using random image transformations or adversarial examples targeted at the vision model in isolation. As such, they often introduce pixel perturbations that are ultimately benign f…
Population ageing and pandemics recently demonstrate to cause isolation of elderly people in their houses, generating the need for a reliable assistive figure. Robotic assistants are the new frontier of innovation for domestic welfare, and elderly monitoring is one of the services a robot can handle for collective well-being. Despite these emerging needs, in the actual landscape of robotic assistants there are no platform which successfully combines a reliable mobility in cluttered domestic spaces, with lightweight and offline Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for perception and interacti…
Unified Linear Parametric Map Modeling and Perception-aware Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robotics
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology（沈阳理工大学信息科学与工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Synthetic Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University（东北大学过程工业综合自动化重点实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所机器人重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
To better optimise the global food supply chain, robotic solutions are needed to automate tasks currently completed by humans. Namely, phenotyping, quality analysis and harvesting are all open problems in the field of agricultural robotics. Robotic perception is a key challenge for autonomous solutions to such problems as scene understanding and object detection are vital prerequisites to any grasping tasks that a robot may undertake. This work conducts a brief review of modern robot perception models and discusses their efficacy within the agri-food domain.
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 …
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Robotic perception models, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), are becoming more computationally intensive and there are several models being trained with accuracy and latency trade-offs. However, modern latency accuracy trade-offs largely report mean accuracy for single-step vision tasks, but there is little work showing which model to invoke for multi-step control tasks in robotics. The key challenge in a multi-step decision making is to make use of the right models at right times to accomplish the given task. That is, the accomplishment of the task with a minimum control cost and minimum p…
Learning to Optimize Edge Robotics: A Fast Integrated Perception-Motion-Communication Approach
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（深圳先进技术研究院，中国科学院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚研究理事会机器人视觉卓越中心）；The Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学机器人中心）
As deep learning continues to dominate all state-of-the-art computer vision tasks, it is increasingly becoming an essential building block for robotic perception. This raises important questions concerning the safety and reliability of learning-based perception systems. There is an established field that studies safety certification and convergence guarantees of complex software systems at design-time. However, the unknown future deployment environments of an autonomous system and the complexity of learning-based perception make the generalization of design-time verification to run-time proble…
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学计算机科学系）
The integration of visual-tactile stimulus is common while humans performing daily tasks. In contrast, using unimodal visual or tactile perception limits the perceivable dimensionality of a subject. However, it remains a challenge to integrate the visual and tactile perception to facilitate robotic tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the cross-modal sensory data generation for visual and tactile perception. Taking texture perception as an example, we apply conditional generative adversarial networks to generate pseudo visual images or tactile outputs from data of the other m…
The following paper reviews recent developments in the field of optimization of space robotics. The extent of focus of this paper is on the perception (robotic sense of analyzing surroundings) in space robots in the exploration of extra-terrestrial planets. Robots play a crucial role in exploring extra-terrestrial and planetary bodies. Their advantages are far from being counted on finger tips. With the advent of autonomous robots in the field of robotics, the role for space exploration has further hustled up. Optimization of such autonomous robots has turned into a necessity of the hour. Opti…
The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information for the robot to understand the object, such as distributed pressure, temperature, vibrations and texture. During robot grasping, vision is often occluded by its end-effectors, whereas tactile sensing can measure areas that are not accessible by vision. In the past decades, a number of tactile sensors have been developed for robots and used for different rob…
The development of automatic perception systems and techniques for bio-inspired flapping-wing robots is severely hampered by the high technical complexity of these platforms and the installation of onboard sensors and electronics. Besides, flapping-wing robot perception suffers from high vibration levels and abrupt movements during flight, which cause motion blur and strong changes in lighting conditions. This paper presents a perception dataset for bird-scale flapping-wing robots as a tool to help alleviate the aforementioned problems. The presented data include measurements from onboard sens…
Siemens（西门子）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Active perception systems maximizing information gain to support both monitoring and decision making have seen considerable application in recent work. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a method of acquiring and extrapolating information in an active sensory system through use of a Bayesian Filter. Our approach is motivated by manufacturing processes, where automated visual tracking of system states may aid in fault diagnosis, certification of parts and safety; in extreme cases, our approach may enable novel manufacturing processes relying on monitoring solutions beyond passive percept…
Cross-Modal Benchmarking for Robotic Perception in Natural Environments
CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia（CSIRO机器人研究所，CSIRO，澳大利亚）；University of Sydney (USyd), Australia（悉尼大学（USyd），澳大利亚）；Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia（昆士兰理工大学（QUT），澳大利亚）
A General One-Shot Multimodal Active Perception Framework for Robotic Manipulation: Learning to Predict Optimal Viewpoint
Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information Systems, College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University（机器人与自动信息系统研究所，人工智能学院，南开大学）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics, Nankai University（智能机器人重点实验室，南开大学）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University（人工智能学院，南开大学）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（computing 部门，香港理工大学）
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Robotic automation in surgery requires precise tracking of surgical tools and mapping of deformable tissue. Previous works on surgical perception frameworks require significant effort in developing features for surgical tool and tissue tracking. In this work, we overcome the challenge by exploiting deep learning methods for surgical perception. We integrated deep neural networks, capable of efficient feature extraction, into the tissue reconstruction and instrument pose estimation processes. By leveraging transfer learning, the deep learning based approach requires minimal training data and re…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
A vast literature shows that the learning-based visual perception model is sensitive to adversarial noises, but few works consider the robustness of robotic perception models under widely-existing camera motion perturbations. To this end, we study the robustness of the visual perception model under camera motion perturbations to investigate the influence of camera motion on robotic perception. Specifically, we propose a motion smoothing technique for arbitrary image classification models, whose robustness under camera motion perturbations could be certified. The proposed robustness certificati…
