Few-Shot Adaptation to Non-Stationary Environments via Latent Trend Embedding for Robotics
College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学信息科学与工程学院）；Production & Technology Department, NIPPN CORPORATION（NIPPN公司生产与技术部门）；University of Osaka（大阪大学）；National Institute of Technology, Ichinoseki College（国立Ichinoseki学院）
Robotic systems operating in real-world environments often suffer from concept shift, where the input-output relationship changes due to latent environmental factors that are not directly observable. Conventional adaptation methods update model parameters, which may cause catastrophic forgetting and incur high computational cost. This paper proposes a latent Trend ID-based framework for few-shot adaptation in non-stationary environments. Instead of modifying model weights, a low-dimensional environmental state, referred to as the Trend ID, is estimated via backpropagation while the model parameters remain fixed. To prevent overfitting caused by per-sample latent variables, we introduce temporal regularization and a state transition model that enforces smooth evolution of the latent space. Experiments on a quantitative food grasping task demonstrate that the learned Trend IDs are distributed across distinct regions of the latent space with temporally consistent trajectories, and that few-shot adaptation to unseen environments is achieved without modifying model parameters. The proposed framework provides a scalable and interpretable solution for robotics applications operating across diverse and evolving environments.
Robotic grasping is one of the most fundamental robotic manipulation tasks and has been actively studied. However, how to quickly teach a robot to grasp a novel target object in clutter remains challenging. This paper attempts to tackle the challenge by leveraging object attributes that facilitate recognition, grasping, and quick adaptation. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end learning method of attribute-based robotic grasping with one-grasp adaptation capability. Our approach fuses the embeddings of a workspace image and a query text using a gated-attention mechanism and learns to predi…
Escaping the Diversity Trap in Robotic Manipulation via Anchor-Centric Adaptation
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Institude for Information Research, A STAR（A*STAR信息研究所）
In this survey, we study how recent advances in machine intelligence are disrupting the world of business processes. Over the last decade, there has been steady progress towards the automation of business processes under the umbrella of ``robotic process automation'' (RPA). However, we are currently at an inflection point in this evolution, as a new paradigm called ``Intelligent Process Automation'' (IPA) emerges, bringing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to bear in order to improve business process outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey o…
Instrumenting and collecting annotated visual grasping datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. An appealing alternative is to use off-the-shelf simulators to render synthetic data for which ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on simulated data often fail to generalize to the real world. We study how randomized simulated environments and domain adaptation methods can be extended to train a grasping system to grasp novel objects from raw monocular RGB images. We extensively evaluate…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；LORIA（洛林计算机科学与应用数学实验室）
Repertoire-based learning is a data-efficient adaptation approach based on a two-step process in which (1) a large and diverse set of policies is learned in simulation, and (2) a planning or learning algorithm chooses the most appropriate policies according to the current situation (e.g., a damaged robot, a new object, etc.). In this paper, we relax the assumption of previous works that a single repertoire is enough for adaptation. Instead, we generate repertoires for many different situations (e.g., with a missing leg, on different floors, etc.) and let our algorithm selects the most useful p…
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology（林肯农业食品技术研究所）
Robots learning a new manipulation task from a small amount of demonstrations are increasingly demanded in different workspaces. A classifier model assessing the quality of actions can predict the successful completion of a task, which can be used by intelligent agents for action-selection. This paper presents a novel classifier that learns to classify task completion only from a few demonstrations. We carry out a comprehensive comparison of different neural classifiers, e.g. fully connected-based, fully convolutional-based, sequence2sequence-based, and domain adaptation-based classification. …
The quest for the efficient adaptation of multilegged robotic systems to changing conditions is expected to render new insights into robotic control and locomotion. In this paper, we study the performance frontiers of the enumerative (factorial) encoding of hexapod gaits for fast recovery to conditions of leg failures. Our computational studies using five nature-inspired gradient-free optimization heuristics have shown that it is possible to render feasible recovery gait strategies that achieve minimal deviation to desired locomotion directives with a few evaluations (trials). For instance, it…
The population explosion of the 21st century has adversely affected the natural resources with restricted availability of cultivable land, increased average temperatures due to global warming, and carbon footprint resulting in a drastic increase in floods as well as droughts thus making food security significant anxiety for most countries. The traditional methods were no longer sufficient which paved the way for technological ascents such as a substantial rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), as well as Robotics that provides high productivity, functional efficiency, …
The methodology of Software-Defined Robotics hierarchical-based and stand-alone framework can be designed and implemented to program and control different sets of robots, regardless of their manufacturers' parameters and specifications, with unified commands and communications. This framework approach will increase the capability of (re)programming a specific group of robots during the runtime without affecting the others as desired in the critical missions and industrial operations, expand the shared bandwidth, enhance the reusability of code, leverage the computational processing power, decr…
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel behavior of individual entities. But the robotics adaptations of these swarm's behaviors haven't yet made it to the real world at a large enough scale of commonly being used due to the limitations in the existing approaches to the swarm robotics construction. This paper presents an approach that combines the existing swarm construction approaches which results …
Roborobo! is a multi-platform, highly portable, robot simulator for large-scale collective robotics experiments. Roborobo! is coded in C++, and follows the KISS guideline ("Keep it simple"). Therefore, its external dependency is solely limited to the widely available SDL library for fast 2D Graphics. Roborobo! is based on a Khepera/ePuck model. It is targeted for fast single and multi-robots simulation, and has already been used in more than a dozen published research mainly concerned with evolutionary swarm robotics, including environment-driven self-adaptation and distributed evolutionary op…
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…
Reinforcement learning has shown a wide usage in robotics tasks, such as insertion and grasping. However, without a practical sim2real strategy, the policy trained in simulation could fail on the real task. There are also wide researches in the sim2real strategies, but most of those methods rely on heavy image rendering, domain randomization training, or tuning. In this work, we solve the insertion task using a pure visual reinforcement learning solution with minimum infrastructure requirement. We also propose a novel sim2real strategy, Real2Sim, which provides a novel and easier solution in p…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Reinforcement learning methods can achieve significant performance but require a large amount of training data collected on the same robotic platform. A policy trained with expensive data is rendered useless after making even a minor change to the robot hardware. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of adapting a policy, trained to perform a task, to a novel robotic hardware platform given only few demonstrations of robot motion trajectories on the target robot. We formulate it as a few-shot meta-learning problem where the goal is to find a meta-model that captures the common stru…
The multidisciplinary nature of response robotics has brought about a diversified research community with extended expertise. Motivated by the recent accelerated rate of publications in the field, this paper analyzes the technical content, statistics, and implications of the literature from bibliometric standpoints. The aim is to study the global progress of response robotics research and identify the contemporary trends. To that end, we investigated the collaboration mapping together with the citation network to formally recognize impactful and contributing authors, publications, sources, ins…
DecompGrind: A Decomposition Framework for Robotic Grinding via Cutting-Surface Planning and Contact-Force Adaptation
Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR)（国际电气通信基础技术研究所）
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…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Toyota NA-R&D（丰田北美研发中心）
Guaranteeing safety in human-centric applications is critical in robot learning as the learned policies may demonstrate unsafe behaviors in formerly unseen scenarios. We present a framework to locally repair an erroneous policy network to satisfy a set of formal safety constraints using Mixed Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP). Our MIQP formulation explicitly imposes the safety constraints to the learned policy while minimizing the original loss function. The policy network is then verified to be locally safe. We demonstrate the application of our framework to derive safe policies for a robo…
Safe Continual Domain Adaptation after Sim2Real Transfer of Reinforcement Learning Policies in Robotics
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；L3S Research Center, Leibniz Universität Hannover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学L3S研究中心）
Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation in Intent Inferral on a Robotic Hand Orthosis for Stroke
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University in the City of New York（机械工程系，哥伦比亚大学（纽约市））；Department of Computer Science, Columbia University in the City of New York（计算机科学系，哥伦比亚大学（纽约市））；Department of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center（康复与再生医学系，哥伦比亚大学伊万斯医学中心）
Preventing Robotic Jailbreaking via Multimodal Domain Adaptation
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Örebro University（奥雷布罗大学）；NVIDIA Research（NVIDIA研究）
A*STAR Artificial Intelligence Initiative (A*AI)（新加坡科技研究局人工智能倡议（A*AI））；Institute of Information Research（信息研究院）；Institute of High Performance Computing（高性能计算研究院）
Learning-based methods have been used to pro-gram robotic tasks in recent years. However, extensive training is usually required not only for the initial task learning but also for generalizing the learned model to the same task but in different environments. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm for efficient task generalization and environment adaptation in the robotic task learning problem. The proposed method is able to efficiently generalize the previously learned task by model fusion to solve the environment adaptation problem. The proposed Deep Model Fu…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；NUSRI Suzhou China（新加坡国立大学苏州研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Duke-NUS Medical School（杜克-新加坡国立大学医学院）
Generating a surgical report in robot-assisted surgery, in the form of natural language expression of surgical scene understanding, can play a significant role in document entry tasks, surgical training, and post-operative analysis. Despite the state-of-the-art accuracy of the deep learning algorithm, the deployment performance often drops when applied to the Target Domain (TD) data. For this purpose, we develop a multi-layer transformer-based model with the gradient reversal adversarial learning to generate a caption for the multi-domain surgical images that can describe the semantic relation…
Studying and understanding the computational primitives of our neural system requires for a diverse and complementary set of techniques. In this work, we use the Neuro-robotic Platform (NRP)to evaluate the vestibulo ocular cerebellar adaptatIon (Vestibulo-ocular reflex, VOR)mediated by two STDP mechanisms located at the cerebellar molecular layer and the vestibular nuclei respectively. This simulation study adopts an experimental setup (rotatory VOR)widely used by neuroscientists to better understand the contribution of certain specific cerebellar properties (i.e. distributed STDP, neural prop…
Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across appl…
Appearance changes due to weather and seasonal conditions represent a strong impediment to the robust implementation of machine learning systems in outdoor robotics. While supervised learning optimises a model for the training domain, it will deliver degraded performance in application domains that underlie distributional shifts caused by these changes. Traditionally, this problem has been addressed via the collection of labelled data in multiple domains or by imposing priors on the type of shift between both domains. We frame the problem in the context of unsupervised domain adaptation and de…
In this paper, we propose a new strategy for learning inertial robotic navigation models. The proposed strategy enhances the generalisability of end-to-end inertial modelling, and is aimed at wheeled robotic deployments. Concretely, the paper describes the following. (1) Using precision robotics, we empirically characterise the effect of changing the sensor position during navigation on the distribution of raw inertial signals, as well as the corresponding impact on learnt latent spaces. (2) We propose neural architectures and algorithms to assimilate knowledge from an indexed set of sensor po…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University Libre du Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所IPA）
Self-adaptation can be used in robotics to increase system robustness and reliability. This work describes the Metacontrol method for self-adaptation in robotics. Particularly, it details how the MROS (Metacontrol for ROS Systems) framework implements and packages Metacontrol, and it demonstrate how MROS can be applied in a navigation scenario where a mobile robot navigates in a factory floor. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISe9aMskJuE
GeCo-SRT: Geometry-aware Continual Adaptation for Robotic Cross-Task Sim-to-Real Transfer
Beijing Forestry University（北京林业大学）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance（北京大型模型与智能治理研究重点实验室）；Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE（下一代智能搜索与推荐工程研究中心，教育部）
Collecting and automatically obtaining reward signals from real robotic visual data for the purposes of training reinforcement learning algorithms can be quite challenging and time-consuming. Methods for utilizing unlabeled data can have a huge potential to further accelerate robotic learning. We consider here the problem of performing manipulation tasks from pixels. In such tasks, choosing an appropriate state representation is crucial for planning and control. This is even more relevant with real images where noise, occlusions and resolution affect the accuracy and reliability of state estim…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）
Meta-learning algorithms can accelerate the model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms by finding an initial set of parameters for the dynamical model such that the model can be trained to match the actual dynamics of the system with only a few data-points. However, in the real world, a robot might encounter any situation starting from motor failures to finding itself in a rocky terrain where the dynamics of the robot can be significantly different from one another. In this paper, first, we show that when meta-training situations (the prior situations) have such diverse dynamics, usi…
