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Index of papers presented at ICRA 2020 and published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org | [] | Index of papers presented at ICRA 2020 and published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters |
Metrically-Scaled Monocular SLAM using Learned Scale Factors | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196900/ | [
"W. Nicholas Greene",
"Nicholas Roy",
"W. Nicholas Greene",
"Nicholas Roy"
] | We propose an efficient method for monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) that is capable of estimating metrically-scaled motion without additional sensors or hardware acceleration by integrating metric depth predictions from a neural network into a geometric SLAM factor graph. Unlike learned end-to-end SLAM systems, ours does not ignore the relative geometry directly observable in... |
Inertial-Only Optimization for Visual-Inertial Initialization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197334/ | [
"Carlos Campos",
"José M.M. Montiel",
"Juan D. Tardós",
"Carlos Campos",
"José M.M. Montiel",
"Juan D. Tardós"
] | We formulate for the first time visual-inertial initialization as an optimal estimation problem, in the sense of maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) estimation. This allows us to properly take into account IMU measurement uncertainty, which was neglected in previous methods that either solved sets of algebraic equations, or minimized ad-hoc cost functions using least squares. Our exhaustive initialization ... |
Hierarchical Quadtree Feature Optical Flow Tracking Based Sparse Pose-Graph Visual-Inertial SLAM | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197278/ | [
"Hongle Xie",
"Weidong Chen",
"Jingchuan Wang",
"Hesheng Wang",
"Hongle Xie",
"Weidong Chen",
"Jingchuan Wang",
"Hesheng Wang"
] | Accurate, robust and real-time localization under constrained-resources is a critical problem to be solved. In this paper, we present a new sparse pose-graph visual-inertial SLAM (SPVIS). Unlike the existing methods that are costly to deal with a large number of redundant features and 3D map points, which are inefficient for improving positioning accuracy, we focus on the concise visual cues for h... |
Keypoint Description by Descriptor Fusion Using Autoencoders | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197205/ | [
"Zhuang Dai",
"Xinghong Huang",
"Weinan Chen",
"Chuangbing Chen",
"Li He",
"Shuhuan Wen",
"Hong Zhang",
"Zhuang Dai",
"Xinghong Huang",
"Weinan Chen",
"Chuangbing Chen",
"Li He",
"Shuhuan Wen",
"Hong Zhang"
] | Keypoint matching is an important operation in computer vision and its applications such as visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in robotics. This matching operation heavily depends on the descriptors of the keypoints, and it must be performed reliably when images undergo conditional changes such as those in illumination and viewpoint. In this paper, a descriptor fusion model (DFM) ... |
Towards Noise Resilient SLAM | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196745/ | [
"Anirud Thyagharajan",
"Om Ji Omer",
"Dipan Mandal",
"Sreenivas Subramoney",
"Anirud Thyagharajan",
"Om Ji Omer",
"Dipan Mandal",
"Sreenivas Subramoney"
] | Sparse-indirect SLAM systems have been dominantly popular due to their computational efficiency and photometric invariance properties. Depth sensors are critical to SLAM frameworks for providing scale information to the 3D world, yet known to be plagued by a wide variety of noise sources, possessing lateral and axial components. In this work, we demonstrate the detrimental impact of these depth no... |
LAMP: Large-Scale Autonomous Mapping and Positioning for Exploration of Perceptually-Degraded Subterranean Environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197082/ | [
"Kamak Ebadi",
"Yun Chang",
"Matteo Palieri",
"Alex Stephens",
"Alex Hatteland",
"Eric Heiden",
"Abhishek Thakur",
"Nobuhiro Funabiki",
"Benjamin Morrell",
"Sally Wood",
"Luca Carlone",
"Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi",
"Kamak Ebadi",
"Yun Chang",
"Matteo Palieri",
"Alex Stephens",
"Alex Hatteland",
"Eric Heiden",
"Abhishek Thakur",
"Nobuhiro Funabiki",
"Benjamin Morrell",
"Sally Wood",
"Luca Carlone",
"Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi"
] | Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in large-scale, unknown, and complex subterranean environments is a challenging problem. Sensors must operate in off-nominal conditions; uneven and slippery terrains make wheel odometry inaccurate, while long corridors without salient features make exteroceptive sensing ambiguous and prone to drift; finally, spurious loop closures that are frequent in e... |
BayesOD: A Bayesian Approach for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Object Detectors | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196544/ | [
"Ali Harakeh",
"Michael Smart",
"Steven L. Waslander",
"Ali Harakeh",
"Michael Smart",
"Steven L. Waslander"
] | When incorporating deep neural networks into robotic systems, a major challenge is the lack of uncertainty measures associated with their output predictions. Methods for uncertainty estimation in the output of deep object detectors (DNNs) have been proposed in recent works, but have had limited success due to 1) information loss at the detectors nonmaximum suppression (NMS) stage, and 2) failure t... |
Learning Object Placements For Relational Instructions by Hallucinating Scene Representations | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197472/ | [
"Oier Mees",
"Alp Emek",
"Johan Vertens",
"Wolfram Burgard",
"Oier Mees",
"Alp Emek",
"Johan Vertens",
"Wolfram Burgard"
] | Robots coexisting with humans in their environment and performing services for them need the ability to interact with them. One particular requirement for such robots is that they are able to understand spatial relations and can place objects in accordance with the spatial relations expressed by their user. In this work, we present a convolutional neural network for estimating pixelwise object pla... |
FADNet: A Fast and Accurate Network for Disparity Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197031/ | [
"Qiang Wang",
"Shaohuai Shi",
"Shizhen Zheng",
"Kaiyong Zhao",
"Xiaowen Chu",
"Qiang Wang",
"Shaohuai Shi",
"Shizhen Zheng",
"Kaiyong Zhao",
"Xiaowen Chu"
] | Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in the area of computer vision. The disparity estimation problem tends to be addressed by DNNs which achieve much better prediction accuracy in stereo matching than traditional hand-crafted feature based methods. On one hand, however, the designed DNNs require significant memory and computation resources to accurately predict the disparity, e... |
Training Adversarial Agents to Exploit Weaknesses in Deep Control Policies | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197351/ | [
"Sampo Kuutti",
"Saber Fallah",
"Richard Bowden",
"Sampo Kuutti",
"Saber Fallah",
"Richard Bowden"
] | Deep learning has become an increasingly common technique for various control problems, such as robotic arm manipulation, robot navigation, and autonomous vehicles. However, the downside of using deep neural networks to learn control policies is their opaque nature and the difficulties of validating their safety. As the networks used to obtain state-of-the-art results become increasingly deep and ... |
TRASS: Time Reversal as Self-Supervision | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196862/ | [
"Suraj Nair",
"Mohammad Babaeizadeh",
"Chelsea Finn",
"Sergey Levine",
"Vikash Kumar",
"Suraj Nair",
"Mohammad Babaeizadeh",
"Chelsea Finn",
"Sergey Levine",
"Vikash Kumar"
] | A longstanding challenge in robot learning for manipulation tasks has been the ability to generalize to varying initial conditions, diverse objects, and changing objectives. Learning based approaches have shown promise in producing robust policies, but require heavy supervision and large number of environment interactions, especially from visual inputs. We propose a novel self-supervision techniqu... |
Advanced BIT* (ABIT*): Sampling-Based Planning with Advanced Graph-Search Techniques | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196580/ | [
"Marlin P. Strub",
"Jonathan D. Gammell",
"Marlin P. Strub",
"Jonathan D. Gammell"
] | Path planning is an active area of research essential for many applications in robotics. Popular techniques include graph-based searches and sampling-based planners. These approaches are powerful but have limitations.This paper continues work to combine their strengths and mitigate their limitations using a unified planning paradigm. It does this by viewing the path planning problem as the two sub... |
Voxel-based General Voronoi Diagram for Complex Data with Application on Motion Planning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196775/ | [
"Sebastian Dorn",
"Nicola Wolpert",
"Elmar Schömer",
"Sebastian Dorn",
"Nicola Wolpert",
"Elmar Schömer"
] | One major challenge in Assembly Sequence Planning (ASP) for complex real-world CAD-scenarios is to find appropriate disassembly paths for all assembled parts. Such a path places demands on its length and clearance. In the past, it became apparent that planning the disassembly path based on the (approximate) General Voronoi Diagram (GVD) is a good approach to achieve these requirements. But for com... |
Dynamic Movement Primitives for moving goals with temporal scaling adaptation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196765/ | [
"Leonidas Koutras",
"Zoe Doulgeri",
"Leonidas Koutras",
"Zoe Doulgeri"
] | In this work, we propose an augmentation to the Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) framework which allows the system to generalize to moving goals without the use of any known or approximation model for estimating the goal's motion. We aim to maintain the demonstrated velocity levels during the execution to the moving goal, generating motion profiles appropriate for human robot collaboration. The p... |
Navigating Discrete Difference Equation Governed WMR by Virtual Linear Leader Guided HMPC | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197375/ | [
"Chao Huang",
"Xin Chen",
"Enyi Tang",
"Mengda He",
"Lei Bu",
"Shengchao Qin",
"Yifeng Zeng",
"Chao Huang",
"Xin Chen",
"Enyi Tang",
"Mengda He",
"Lei Bu",
"Shengchao Qin",
"Yifeng Zeng"
] | In this paper, we revisit model predictive control (MPC) for the classical wheeled mobile robot (WMR) navigation problem. We prove that the reachable set based hierarchical MPC (HMPC), a state-of-the-art MPC, cannot handle WMR navigation in theory due to the non-existence of non-trivial linear system with an under-approximate reachable set of WMR. Nevertheless, we propose a virtual linear leader g... |
Aggregation and localization of simple robots in curved environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197198/ | [
"Rachel A. Moan",
"Victor M. Baez",
"Aaron T. Becker",
"Jason M. O’Kane",
"Rachel A. Moan",
"Victor M. Baez",
"Aaron T. Becker",
"Jason M. O’Kane"
] | This paper is about the closely-related problems of localization and aggregation for extremely simple robots, for which the only available action is to move in a given direction as far as the geometry of the environment allows. Such problems may arise, for example, in biomedical applications, wherein a large group of tiny robots moves in response to a shared external stimulus. Specifically, we ext... |
Stable Control in Climbing and Descending Flight under Upper Walls using Ceiling Effect Model based on Aerodynamics | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197137/ | [
"Takuzumi Nishio",
"Moju Zhao",
"Fan Shi",
"Tomoki Anzai",
"Kento Kawaharazuka",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba",
"Takuzumi Nishio",
"Moju Zhao",
"Fan Shi",
"Tomoki Anzai",
"Kento Kawaharazuka",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba"
] | Stable flight control under ceilings is difficult for multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The wake interaction between rotors and upper walls, called the "ceiling effect", causes an increase of rotor thrust. As a result of the thrust increase, multi-rotors are drawn upward abruptly and collide with ceilings. In previous work, several thrust models of the ceiling effect have been proposed f... |
Motion Primitives-based Path Planning for Fast and Agile Exploration using Aerial Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196964/ | [
"Mihir Dharmadhikari",
"Tung Dang",
"Lukas Solanka",
"Johannes Loje",
"Huan Nguyen",
"Nikhil Khedekar",
"Kostas Alexis",
"Mihir Dharmadhikari",
"Tung Dang",
"Lukas Solanka",
"Johannes Loje",
"Huan Nguyen",
"Nikhil Khedekar",
"Kostas Alexis"
] | This paper presents a novel path planning strategy for fast and agile exploration using aerial robots. Tailored to the combined need for large-scale exploration of challenging and confined environments, despite the limited endurance of micro aerial vehicles, the proposed planner employs motion primitives to identify admissible paths that search the configuration space, while exploiting the dynamic... |
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Self-flying Delivery Drones | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197074/ | [
"Vikas Sindhwani",
"Hakim Sidahmed",
"Krzysztof Choromanski",
"Brandon Jones",
"Vikas Sindhwani",
"Hakim Sidahmed",
"Krzysztof Choromanski",
"Brandon Jones"
] | We propose a novel anomaly detection framework for a fleet of hybrid aerial vehicles executing high-speed package pickup and delivery missions. The detection is based on machine learning models of normal flight profiles, trained on millions of flight log measurements of control inputs and sensor readings. We develop a new scalable algorithm for robust regression which can simultaneously fit predic... |
Keyfilter-Aware Real-Time UAV Object Tracking | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196943/ | [
"Yiming Li",
"Changhong Fu",
"Ziyuan Huang",
"Yinqiang Zhang",
"Jia Pan",
"Yiming Li",
"Changhong Fu",
"Ziyuan Huang",
"Yinqiang Zhang",
"Jia Pan"
] | Correlation filter-based tracking has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with high efficiency. However, it has two imperfections, i.e., boundary effect and filter corruption. Several methods enlarging the search area can mitigate boundary effect, yet introducing undesired background distraction. Existing frame-by-frame context learning strategies for repressing background distrac... |
Aerial Regrasping: Pivoting with Transformable Multilink Aerial Robot | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196576/ | [
"Fan Shi",
"Moju Zhao",
"Masaki Murooka",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba",
"Fan Shi",
"Moju Zhao",
"Masaki Murooka",
"Kei Okada",
"Masayuki Inaba"
] | Regrasping is one of the most common and important manipulation skills used in our daily life. However, aerial regrasping has not been seriously investigated yet, since most of the aerial manipulator lacks dexterous manipulation abilities except for the basic pick-and-place. In this paper, we focus on pivoting a long box, which is one of the most classical problems among regrasping researches, usi... |
Grounding Language to Landmarks in Arbitrary Outdoor Environments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197068/ | [
"Matthew Berg",
"Deniz Bayazit",
"Rebecca Mathew",
"Ariel Rotter-Aboyoun",
"Ellie Pavlick",
"Stefanie Tellex",
"Matthew Berg",
"Deniz Bayazit",
"Rebecca Mathew",
"Ariel Rotter-Aboyoun",
"Ellie Pavlick",
"Stefanie Tellex"
] | Robots operating in outdoor, urban environments need the ability to follow complex natural language commands which refer to never-before-seen landmarks. Existing approaches to this problem are limited because they require training a language model for the landmarks of a particular environment before a robot can understand commands referring to those landmarks. To generalize to new environments out... |
Deep Merging: Vehicle Merging Controller Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning with Embedding Network | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197559/ | [
"Ippei Nishitani",
"Hao Yang",
"Rui Guo",
"Shalini Keshavamurthy",
"Kentaro Oguchi",
"Ippei Nishitani",
"Hao Yang",
"Rui Guo",
"Shalini Keshavamurthy",
"Kentaro Oguchi"
] | Vehicles at highway merging sections must make lane changes to join the highway. This lane change can generate congestion. To reduce congestion, vehicles should merge so as not to affect traffic flow as much as possible. In our study, we propose a vehicle controller called Deep Merging that uses deep reinforcement learning to improve the merging efficiency of vehicles while considering the impact ... |
Radar as a Teacher: Weakly Supervised Vehicle Detection using Radar Labels | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196855/ | [
"Simon Chadwick",
"Paul Newman",
"Simon Chadwick",
"Paul Newman"
] | It has been demonstrated that the performance of an object detector degrades when it is used outside the domain of the data used to train it. However, obtaining training data for a new domain can be time consuming and expensive. In this work we demonstrate how a radar can be used to generate plentiful (but noisy) training data for image-based vehicle detection. We then show that the performance of... |
Robust Lane Detection with Binary Integer Optimization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197098/ | [
"Kathleen Brandes",
"Allen Wang",
"Rushina Shah",
"Kathleen Brandes",
"Allen Wang",
"Rushina Shah"
] | Formula Student Driverless (FSD) is a competition where student teams compete to build an autonomous racecar. The main dynamic event in FSD is trackdrive, where the racecar traverses an unknown track with lanes demarcated by cones. One major challenge of the event is to determine the boundaries of the lane from cones perceived online despite false positive cone detections and sharp turns. We prese... |
A Synchronization Approach for Achieving Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Based Non-Stop Intersection Passing | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196991/ | [
"Zhe Liu",
"Huanshu Wei",
"Hanjiang Hu",
"Chuanzhe Suo",
"Hesheng Wang",
"Haoang Li",
"Yun-Hui Liu",
"Zhe Liu",
"Huanshu Wei",
"Hanjiang Hu",
"Chuanzhe Suo",
"Hesheng Wang",
"Haoang Li",
"Yun-Hui Liu"
] | Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) of intelligent vehicles contributes to improving cruise control performance, reducing traffic congestion, saving energy and increasing traffic flow capacity. In this paper, we resolve the CACC problem from the viewpoint of synchronization control, our main idea is to introduce the spatial-temporal synchronization mechanism into vehicle platoon control to ... |
Urban Driving with Conditional Imitation Learning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197408/ | [
"Jeffrey Hawke",
"Richard Shen",
"Corina Gurau",
"Siddharth Sharma",
"Daniele Reda",
"Nikolay Nikolov",
"Przemysław Mazur",
"Sean Micklethwaite",
"Nicolas Griffiths",
"Amar Shah",
"Alex Kndall",
"Jeffrey Hawke",
"Richard Shen",
"Corina Gurau",
"Siddharth Sharma",
"Daniele Reda",
"Nikolay Nikolov",
"Przemysław Mazur",
"Sean Micklethwaite",
"Nicolas Griffiths",
"Amar Shah",
"Alex Kndall"
] | Hand-crafting generalised decision-making rules for real-world urban autonomous driving is hard. Alternatively, learning behaviour from easy-to-collect human driving demonstrations is appealing. Prior work has studied imitation learning (IL) for autonomous driving with a number of limitations. Examples include only performing lane-following rather than following a user-defined route, only using a ... |
Vehicle Localization Based on Visual Lane Marking and Topological Map Matching | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197543/ | [
"Rabbia Asghar",
"Mario Garzón",
"Jérôme Lussereau",
"Christian Laugier",
"Rabbia Asghar",
"Mario Garzón",
"Jérôme Lussereau",
"Christian Laugier"
] | Accurate and reliable localization is crucial to autonomous vehicle navigation and driver assistance systems. This paper presents a novel approach for online vehicle localization in a digital map. Two distinct map matching algorithms are proposed: i) Iterative Closest Point (ICP) based lane level map matching is performed with visual lane tracker and grid map ii) decision-rule based approach is us... |
RISE: A Novel Indoor Visual Place Recogniser | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196871/ | [
"Carlos Sánchez-Belenguer",
"Erik Wolfart",
"Vítor Sequeira",
"Carlos Sánchez-Belenguer",
"Erik Wolfart",
"Vítor Sequeira"
] | This paper presents a new technique to solve the Indoor Visual Place Recognition problem from the Deep Learning perspective. It consists on an image retrieval approach supported by a novel image similarity metric. Our work uses a 3D laser sensor mounted on a backpack with a calibrated spherical camera i) to generate the data for training the deep neural network and ii) to build a database of geo-r... |
Beyond Photometric Consistency: Gradient-based Dissimilarity for Improving Visual Odometry and Stereo Matching | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197483/ | [
"Jan Quenzel",
"Radu Alexandru Rosu",
"Thomas Läbe",
"Cyrill Stachniss",
"Sven Behnke",
"Jan Quenzel",
"Radu Alexandru Rosu",
"Thomas Läbe",
"Cyrill Stachniss",
"Sven Behnke"
] | Pose estimation and map building are central ingredients of autonomous robots and typically rely on the registration of sensor data. In this paper, we investigate a new metric for registering images that builds upon on the idea of the photometric error. Our approach combines a gradient orientation-based metric with a magnitude-dependent scaling term. We integrate both into stereo estimation as wel... |
ICS: Incremental Constrained Smoothing for State Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196649/ | [
"Paloma Sodhi",
"Sanjiban Choudhury",
"Joshua G. Mangelson",
"Michael Kaess",
"Paloma Sodhi",
"Sanjiban Choudhury",
"Joshua G. Mangelson",
"Michael Kaess"
] | A robot operating in the world constantly receives information about its environment in the form of new measurements at every time step. Smoothing-based estimation methods seek to optimize for the most likely robot state estimate using all measurements up till the current time step. Existing methods solve for this smoothing objective efficiently by framing the problem as that of incremental uncons... |
Drone-aided Localization in LoRa IoT Networks | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196869/ | [
"Victor Delafontaine",
"Fabrizio Schiano",
"Giuseppe Cocco",
"Alexandru Rusu",
"Dario Floreano",
"Victor Delafontaine",
"Fabrizio Schiano",
"Giuseppe Cocco",
"Alexandru Rusu",
"Dario Floreano"
] | Besides being part of the Internet of Things (IoT), drones can play a relevant role in it as enablers. The 3D mobility of UAVs can be exploited to improve node localization in IoT networks for, e.g., search and rescue or goods localization and tracking. One of the widespread IoT communication technologies is Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), which allows achieving long communication distance... |
A fast and practical method of indoor localization for resource-constrained devices with limited sensing | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197215/ | [
"Jan Wietrzykowski",
"Piotr Skrzypczyński",
"Jan Wietrzykowski",
"Piotr Skrzypczyński"
] | We describe and experimentally demonstrate a practical method for indoor localization using measurements obtained from resource-constrained devices with limited sensing capabilities. We focus on handheld/mobile devices but the method can be useful for a variety of wearable devices. Our system works with sparse WiFi or image-based measurements, avoiding laborious site surveying for dense signal map... |
Long-Term Robot Navigation in Indoor Environments Estimating Patterns in Traversability Changes | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197078/ | [
"Lorenzo Nardi",
"Cyrill Stachniss",
"Lorenzo Nardi",
"Cyrill Stachniss"
] | Nowadays, mobile robots are deployed in many indoor environments such as offices or hospitals. These environments are subject to changes in the traversability that often happen following patterns. In this paper, we investigate the problem of navigating in such environments over extended periods of time by capturing and exploiting these patterns to make informed decisions for navigation. Our approa... |
Sample-and-computation-efficient Probabilistic Model Predictive Control with Random Features | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197449/ | [
"Cheng-Yu Kuo",
"Yunduan Cui",
"Takamitsu Matsubara",
"Cheng-Yu Kuo",
"Yunduan Cui",
"Takamitsu Matsubara"
] | Gaussian processes (GPs) based Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods with Model Predictive Control (MPC) have demonstrated their excellent sample efficiency. However, since the computational cost of GPs largely depends on the training sample size, learning an accurate dynamics using GPs result in low control frequency in MPC. To alleviate this trade-off and achieve a sample-and-computation-efficient... |
Sample-Efficient Robot Motion Learning using Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196658/ | [
"Juan Antonio Delgado-Guerrero",
"Adrià Colomé",
"Carme Torras",
"Juan Antonio Delgado-Guerrero",
"Adrià Colomé",
"Carme Torras"
] | Robotic manipulators are reaching a state where we could see them in household environments in the following decade. Nevertheless, such robots need to be easy to instruct by lay people. This is why kinesthetic teaching has become very popular in recent years, in which the robot is taught a motion that is encoded as a parametric function - usually a Movement Primitive (MP)-. This approach produces ... |
Iterative Learning based feedforward control for Transition of a Biplane-Quadrotor Tailsitter UAS | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196671/ | [
"Nidhish Raj",
"Ashutosh Simha",
"Mangal Kothari",
"Abhishek",
"Ravi N. Banavar",
"Nidhish Raj",
"Ashutosh Simha",
"Mangal Kothari",
"Abhishek",
"Ravi N. Banavar"
] | This paper provides a real time on-board algorithm for a biplane-quadrotor to iteratively learn a forward transition maneuver via repeated flight trials. The maneuver is controlled by regulating the pitch angle and propeller thrust according to feedforward control laws that are parameterized by polynomials. Based on a nominal model with simplified aerodynamics, the optimal coefficients of the poly... |
Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Illumination with X-rays | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196614/ | [
"Jean-Raymond Betterton",
"Daniel Ratner",
"Samuel Webb",
"Mykel Kochenderfer",
"Jean-Raymond Betterton",
"Daniel Ratner",
"Samuel Webb",
"Mykel Kochenderfer"
] | We propose a learning algorithm for automating image sampling in scientific applications. We consider settings where images are sampled by controlling a probe beam's scanning trajectory over the image surface. We explore alternatives to obtaining images by the standard rastering method. We formulate the scanner control problem as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem and train a policy to adaptive... |
Efficient Updates for Data Association with Mixtures of Gaussian Processes | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196734/ | [
"Ki Myung Brian Lee",
"Wolfram Martens",
"Jayant Khatkar",
"Robert Fitch",
"Ramgopal Mettu",
"Ki Myung Brian Lee",
"Wolfram Martens",
"Jayant Khatkar",
"Robert Fitch",
"Ramgopal Mettu"
] | Gaussian processes (GPs) enable a probabilistic approach to important estimation and classification tasks that arise in robotics applications. Meanwhile, most GP-based methods are often prohibitively slow, thereby posing a substantial barrier to practical applications. Existing "sparse" methods to speed up GPs seek to either make the model more sparse, or find ways to more efficiently manage a lar... |
Real-time Data Driven Precision Estimator for RAVEN-II Surgical Robot End Effector Position | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196915/ | [
"Haonan Peng",
"Xingjian Yang",
"Yun-Hsuan Su",
"Blake Hannaford",
"Haonan Peng",
"Xingjian Yang",
"Yun-Hsuan Su",
"Blake Hannaford"
] | Surgical robots have been introduced to operating rooms over the past few decades due to their high sensitivity, small size, and remote controllability. The cable-driven nature of many surgical robots allows the systems to be dexterous and lightweight, with diameters as low as 5mm. However, due to the slack and stretch of the cables and the backlash of the gears, inevitable uncertainties are broug... |
Temporal Segmentation of Surgical Sub-tasks through Deep Learning with Multiple Data Sources | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196560/ | [
"Yidan Qin",
"Sahba Aghajani Pedram",
"Seyedshams Feyzabadi",
"Max Allan",
"A. Jonathan McLeod",
"Joel W. Burdick",
"Mahdi Azizian",
"Yidan Qin",
"Sahba Aghajani Pedram",
"Seyedshams Feyzabadi",
"Max Allan",
"A. Jonathan McLeod",
"Joel W. Burdick",
"Mahdi Azizian"
] | Many tasks in robot-assisted surgeries (RAS) can be represented by finite-state machines (FSMs), where each state represents either an action (such as picking up a needle) or an observation (such as bleeding). A crucial step towards the automation of such surgical tasks is the temporal perception of the current surgical scene, which requires a real-time estimation of the states in the FSMs. The ob... |
Controlling Assistive Robots with Learned Latent Actions | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197197/ | [
"Dylan P. Losey",
"Krishnan Srinivasan",
"Ajay Mandlekar",
"Animesh Garg",
"Dorsa Sadigh",
"Dylan P. Losey",
"Krishnan Srinivasan",
"Ajay Mandlekar",
"Animesh Garg",
"Dorsa Sadigh"
] | Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot has more degrees-of-freedom than the human can directly coordinate with a handheld joystick. Our insight is that we can make assistive robots easier for humans to... |
On the efficient control of series-parallel compliant articulated robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196786/ | [
"Vishnu Dev Amara",
"Jörn Malzahn",
"Zeyu Ren",
"Wesley Roozing",
"Nikos Tsagarakis",
"Vishnu Dev Amara",
"Jörn Malzahn",
"Zeyu Ren",
"Wesley Roozing",
"Nikos Tsagarakis"
] | Torque distribution in redundant robots that combine the potential of asymmetric series-parallel actuated branches and multi-articulation pose a non-trivial challenge. To address the problem, this work proposes a novel optimization based controller that can accommodate various quadratic criteria to perform the torque distribution among dissimilar series and parallel actuators in order to maximize ... |
Preintegrated Velocity Bias Estimation to Overcome Contact Nonlinearities in Legged Robot Odometry | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197214/ | [
"David Wisth",
"Marco Camurri",
"Maurice Fallon",
"David Wisth",
"Marco Camurri",
"Maurice Fallon"
] | In this paper, we present a novel factor graph formulation to estimate the pose and velocity of a quadruped robot on slippery and deformable terrain. The factor graph introduces a preintegrated velocity factor that incorporates velocity inputs from leg odometry and also estimates related biases. From our experimentation we have seen that it is difficult to model uncertainties at the contact point ... |
Optimized Foothold Planning and Posture Searching for Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion over Challenging Terrains | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197135/ | [
"Lu Chen",
"Shusheng Ye",
"Caiming Sun",
"Aidong Zhang",
"Ganyu Deng",
"Tianjiao Liao",
"Lu Chen",
"Shusheng Ye",
"Caiming Sun",
"Aidong Zhang",
"Ganyu Deng",
"Tianjiao Liao"
] | Energy-efficient locomotion is of primary importance for legged robot to extend operation time in practical applications. This paper presents an approach to achieve energy-efficient locomotion for a quadrupedal robot walking over challenging terrains. Firstly, we optimize the nominal stance parameters based on the analysis of leg torque distribution. Secondly, we proposed the foothold planner and ... |
Extracting Legged Locomotion Heuristics with Regularized Predictive Control | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197488/ | [
"Gerardo Bledt",
"Sangbae Kim",
"Gerardo Bledt",
"Sangbae Kim"
] | Optimization based predictive control is a powerful tool that has improved the ability of legged robots to execute dynamic maneuvers and traverse increasingly difficult terrains. However, it is often challenging and unintuitive to design meaningful cost functions and build high-fidelity models while adhering to timing restrictions. A novel framework to extract and design principled regularization ... |
Learning Generalizable Locomotion Skills with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196642/ | [
"Tianyu Li",
"Nathan Lambert",
"Roberto Calandra",
"Franziska Meier",
"Akshara Rai",
"Tianyu Li",
"Nathan Lambert",
"Roberto Calandra",
"Franziska Meier",
"Akshara Rai"
] | Learning to locomote to arbitrary goals on hardware remains a challenging problem for reinforcement learning. In this paper, we present a hierarchical framework that improves sample-efficiency and generalizability of learned locomotion skills on real-world robots. Our approach divides the problem of goal-oriented locomotion into two sub-problems: learning diverse primitives skills, and using model... |
SoRX: A Soft Pneumatic Hexapedal Robot to Traverse Rough, Steep, and Unstable Terrain | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196731/ | [
"Zhichao Liu",
"Zhouyu Lu",
"Konstantinos Karydis",
"Zhichao Liu",
"Zhouyu Lu",
"Konstantinos Karydis"
] | Soft robotics technology creates new ways for legged robots to interact with and adapt to their environment. In this paper we develop i) a new 2-degree-of-freedom soft pneumatic actuator, and ii) a novel soft robotic hexapedal robot called SoRX that leverages the new actuators. Simulation and physical testing confirm that the proposed actuator can generate cyclic foot trajectories that are appropr... |
UBAT: On Jointly Optimizing UAV Trajectories and Placement of Battery Swap Stations | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197227/ | [
"Myounggyu Won",
"Myounggyu Won"
] | Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many applications. The limited flight time of UAVs, however, still remains as a major challenge. Although numerous approaches have been developed to recharge the battery of UAVs effectively, little is known about optimal methodologies to deploy charging stations. In this paper, we address the charging station deployment problem with an aim t... |
Efficient Multi-Agent Trajectory Planning with Feasibility Guarantee using Relative Bernstein Polynomial | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197162/ | [
"Jungwon Park",
"Junha Kim",
"Inkyu Jang",
"H. Jin Kim",
"Jungwon Park",
"Junha Kim",
"Inkyu Jang",
"H. Jin Kim"
] | This paper presents a new efficient algorithm which guarantees a solution for a class of multi-agent trajectory planning problems in obstacle-dense environments. Our algorithm combines the advantages of both grid-based and optimization-based approaches, and generates safe, dynamically feasible trajectories without suffering from an erroneous optimization setup such as imposing infeasible collision... |
Optimal Sequential Task Assignment and Path Finding for Multi-Agent Robotic Assembly Planning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197527/ | [
"Kyle Brown",
"Oriana Peltzer",
"Martin A. Sehr",
"Mac Schwager",
"Mykel J. Kochenderfer",
"Kyle Brown",
"Oriana Peltzer",
"Martin A. Sehr",
"Mac Schwager",
"Mykel J. Kochenderfer"
] | We study the problem of sequential task assignment and collision-free routing for large teams of robots in applications with inter-task precedence constraints (e.g., task A and task B must both be completed before task C may begin). Such problems commonly occur in assembly planning for robotic manufacturing applications, in which sub-assemblies must be completed before they can be combined to form... |
Cooperative Multi-Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environment with Deep Reinforcement Learning | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197209/ | [
"Ruihua Han",
"Shengduo Chen",
"Qi Hao",
"Ruihua Han",
"Shengduo Chen",
"Qi Hao"
] | The challenges of multi-robot navigation in dynamic environments lie in uncertainties in obstacle complexities, partially observation of robots, and policy implementation from simulations to the real world. This paper presents a cooperative approach to address the multi-robot navigation problem (MRNP) under dynamic environments using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, which can help mu... |
Adaptive Directional Path Planner for Real-Time, Energy-Efficient, Robust Navigation of Mobile Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197417/ | [
"Mallikarjuna Rao Nimmagadda",
"Shreela Dattawadkar",
"Sriram Muthukumar",
"Vinayak Honkote",
"Mallikarjuna Rao Nimmagadda",
"Shreela Dattawadkar",
"Sriram Muthukumar",
"Vinayak Honkote"
] | Autonomous navigation through unknown and complex environments is a fundamental capability that is essential in almost all robotic applications. Optimal robot path planning is critical to enable efficient navigation. Path planning is a complex, compute and memory intensive task. Traditional methods employ either graph based search methods or sample based methods to implement path planning, which a... |
Exploiting sparsity in robot trajectory optimization with direct collocation and geometric algorithms | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196668/ | [
"Daniel Cardona-Ortiz",
"Alvaro Paz",
"Gustavo Arechavaleta",
"Daniel Cardona-Ortiz",
"Alvaro Paz",
"Gustavo Arechavaleta"
] | This paper presents a robot trajectory optimization formulation that builds upon numerical optimal control and Lie group methods. In particular, the inherent sparsity of direct collocation is carefully analyzed to dramatically reduce the number of floating-point operations to get first-order information of the problem. We describe how sparsity exploitation is employed with both numerical and analy... |
Bi-Convex Approximation of Non-Holonomic Trajectory Optimization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197092/ | [
"Arun Kumar Singh",
"Raghu Ram Theerthala",
"Mithun Babu",
"Unni Krishnan R Nair",
"K. Madhava Krishna",
"Arun Kumar Singh",
"Raghu Ram Theerthala",
"Mithun Babu",
"Unni Krishnan R Nair",
"K. Madhava Krishna"
] | Autonomous cars and fixed-wing aerial vehicles have the so-called non-holonomic kinematics which non-linearly maps control input to states. As a result, trajectory optimization with such a motion model becomes highly non-linear and non-convex. In this paper, we improve the computational tractability of non-holonomic trajectory optimization by reformulating it in terms of a set of bi-convex cost an... |
Fast, Versatile, and Open-loop Stable Running Behaviors with Proprioceptive-only Sensing using Model-based Optimization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196542/ | [
"Wei Gao",
"Charles Young",
"John Nicholson",
"Christian Hubicki",
"Jonathan Clark",
"Wei Gao",
"Charles Young",
"John Nicholson",
"Christian Hubicki",
"Jonathan Clark"
] | As we build our legged robots smaller and cheaper, stable and agile control without expensive inertial sensors becomes increasingly important. We seek to enable versatile dynamic behaviors on robots with limited modes of state feedback, specifically proprioceptive-only sensing. This work uses model-based trajectory optimization methods to design open-loop stable motion primitives. We specifically ... |
Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Motion Planning and Control with Safety Constraints Using Conditional Value-at-Risk | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196857/ | [
"Astghik Hakobyan",
"Insoon Yang",
"Astghik Hakobyan",
"Insoon Yang"
] | In this paper, we propose an optimization-based decision-making tool for safe motion planning and control in an environment with randomly moving obstacles. The unique feature of the proposed method is that it limits the risk of unsafety by a pre-specified threshold even when the true probability distribution of the obstacles' movements deviates, within a Wasserstein ball, from an available empiric... |
Grasping Fragile Objects Using A Stress-Minimization Metric | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196938/ | [
"Zherong Pan",
"Xifeng Gao",
"Dinesh Manocha",
"Zherong Pan",
"Xifeng Gao",
"Dinesh Manocha"
] | We present a new method to generate optimal grasps for brittle and fragile objects using a novel stress- minimization (SM) metric. Our approach is designed for objects that are composed of homogeneous isotopic materials. Our SM metric measures the maximal resistible external wrenches that would not result in fractures in the target objects. In this paper, we propose methods to compute our new metr... |
Grasp Control for Enhancing Dexterity of Parallel Grippers | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196873/ | [
"Marco Costanzo",
"Giuseppe De Maria",
"Gaetano Lettera",
"Ciro Natale",
"Marco Costanzo",
"Giuseppe De Maria",
"Gaetano Lettera",
"Ciro Natale"
] | A robust grasp controller for both slipping avoidance and controlled sliding is proposed based on force/tactile feedback only. The model-based algorithm exploits a modified LuGre friction model to consider rotational frictional sliding motions. The modification relies on the Limit Surface concept where a novel computationally efficient method is introduced to compute in real-time the minimum grasp... |
Theoretical Derivation and Realization of Adaptive Grasping Based on Rotational Incipient Slip Detection | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196615/ | [
"Tetsuya Narita",
"Satoko Nagakari",
"William Conus",
"Toshimitsu Tsuboi",
"Kenichiro Nagasaka",
"Tetsuya Narita",
"Satoko Nagakari",
"William Conus",
"Toshimitsu Tsuboi",
"Kenichiro Nagasaka"
] | Manipulating objects whose physical properties are unknown remains one of the greatest challenges in robotics. Controlling grasp force is an essential aspect of handling unknown objects without slipping or crushing them. Although extensive research has been carried out on grasp force control, unknown object manipulation is still difficult because conventional approaches assume that object properti... |
Grasp State Assessment of Deformable Objects Using Visual-Tactile Fusion Perception | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196787/ | [
"Shaowei Cui",
"Rui Wang",
"Junhang Wei",
"Fanrong Li",
"Shuo Wang",
"Shaowei Cui",
"Rui Wang",
"Junhang Wei",
"Fanrong Li",
"Shuo Wang"
] | Humans can quickly determine the force required to grasp a deformable object to prevent its sliding or excessive deformation through vision and touch, which is still a challenging task for robots. To address this issue, we propose a novel 3D convolution-based visual-tactile fusion deep neural network (C3D-VTFN) to evaluate the grasp state of various deformable objects in this paper. Specifically, ... |
Beyond Top-Grasps Through Scene Completion | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197320/ | [
"Jens Lundell",
"Francesco Verdoja",
"Ville Kyrki",
"Jens Lundell",
"Francesco Verdoja",
"Ville Kyrki"
] | Current end-to-end grasp planning methods propose grasps in the order of seconds that attain high grasp success rates on a diverse set of objects, but often by constraining the workspace to top-grasps. In this work, we present a method that allows end-to-end top-grasp planning methods to generate full six-degree-of-freedom grasps using a single RGBD view as input. This is achieved by estimating th... |
Dex-Net AR: Distributed Deep Grasp Planning Using a Commodity Cellphone and Augmented Reality App | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197247/ | [
"Harry Zhang",
"Jeffrey Ichnowski",
"Yahav Avigal",
"Joseph Gonzales",
"Ion Stoica",
"Ken Goldberg",
"Harry Zhang",
"Jeffrey Ichnowski",
"Yahav Avigal",
"Joseph Gonzales",
"Ion Stoica",
"Ken Goldberg"
] | Consumer demand for augmented reality (AR) in mobile phone applications, such as the Apple ARKit. Such applications have potential to expand access to robot grasp planning systems such as Dex-Net. AR apps use structure from motion methods to compute a point cloud from a sequence of RGB images taken by the camera as it is moved around an object. However, the resulting point clouds are often noisy d... |
OmniSLAM: Omnidirectional Localization and Dense Mapping for Wide-baseline Multi-camera Systems | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196695/ | [
"Changhee Won",
"Hochang Seok",
"Zhaopeng Cui",
"Marc Pollefeys",
"Jongwoo Lim",
"Changhee Won",
"Hochang Seok",
"Zhaopeng Cui",
"Marc Pollefeys",
"Jongwoo Lim"
] | In this paper, we present an omnidirectional localization and dense mapping system for a wide-baseline multiview stereo setup with ultra-wide field-of-view (FOV) fisheye cameras, which has a 360° coverage of stereo observations of the environment. For more practical and accurate reconstruction, we first introduce improved and light-weighted deep neural networks for the omnidirectional depth estima... |
What’s in my Room? Object Recognition on Indoor Panoramic Images | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197335/ | [
"Julia Guerrero-Viu",
"Clara Fernandez-Labrador",
"Cédric Demonceaux",
"Jose J. Guerrero",
"Julia Guerrero-Viu",
"Clara Fernandez-Labrador",
"Cédric Demonceaux",
"Jose J. Guerrero"
] | In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in taking advantage of the 360° panoramic images potential, while managing the new challenges they imply. While several tasks have been improved thanks to the contextual information these images offer, object recognition in indoor scenes still remains a challenging problem that has not been deeply investigated. This paper provides an object ... |
FisheyeDistanceNet: Self-Supervised Scale-Aware Distance Estimation using Monocular Fisheye Camera for Autonomous Driving | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197319/ | [
"Varun Ravi Kumar",
"Sandesh Athni Hiremath",
"Markus Bach",
"Stefan Milz",
"Christian Witt",
"Clément Pinard",
"Senthil Yogamani",
"Patrick Mäder",
"Varun Ravi Kumar",
"Sandesh Athni Hiremath",
"Markus Bach",
"Stefan Milz",
"Christian Witt",
"Clément Pinard",
"Senthil Yogamani",
"Patrick Mäder"
] | Fisheye cameras are commonly used in applications like autonomous driving and surveillance to provide a large field of view (> 180o). However, they come at the cost of strong non-linear distortions which require more complex algorithms. In this paper, we explore Euclidean distance estimation on fisheye cameras for automotive scenes. Obtaining accurate and dense depth supervision is difficult in pr... |
360SD-Net: 360° Stereo Depth Estimation with Learnable Cost Volume | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196975/ | [
"Ning-Hsu Wang",
"Bolivar Solarte",
"Yi-Hsuan Tsai",
"Wei-Chen Chiu",
"Min Sun",
"Ning-Hsu Wang",
"Bolivar Solarte",
"Yi-Hsuan Tsai",
"Wei-Chen Chiu",
"Min Sun"
] | Recently, end-to-end trainable deep neural networks have significantly improved stereo depth estimation for perspective images. However, 360° images captured under equirectangular projection cannot benefit from directly adopting existing methods due to distortion introduced (i.e., lines in 3D are not projected onto lines in 2D). To tackle this issue, we present a novel architecture specifically de... |
Omnidirectional Depth Extension Networks | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197123/ | [
"Xinjing Cheng",
"Peng Wang",
"Yanqi Zhou",
"Chenye Guan",
"Ruigang Yang",
"Xinjing Cheng",
"Peng Wang",
"Yanqi Zhou",
"Chenye Guan",
"Ruigang Yang"
] | Omnidirectional 360° camera proliferates rapidly for autonomous robots since it significantly enhances the perception ability by widening the field of view (FoV). However, corresponding 360° depth sensors, which are also critical for the perception system, are still difficult or expensive to have. In this paper, we propose a low-cost 3D sensing system that combines an omnidirectional camera with a... |
3D Orientation Estimation and Vanishing Point Extraction from Single Panoramas Using Convolutional Neural Network | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196966/ | [
"Yongjie Shi",
"Xin Tong",
"Jingsi Wen",
"He Zhao",
"Xianghua Ying",
"Hongbin Zha",
"Yongjie Shi",
"Xin Tong",
"Jingsi Wen",
"He Zhao",
"Xianghua Ying",
"Hongbin Zha"
] | 3D orientation estimation is a key component of many important computer vision tasks such as autonomous navigation and 3D scene understanding. This paper presents a new CNN architecture to estimate the 3D orientation of an omnidirectional camera with respect to the world coordinate system from a single spherical panorama. To train the proposed architecture, we leverage a dataset of panoramas named... |
Curvature sensing with a spherical tactile sensor using the color-interference of a marker array | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197050/ | [
"Xi Lin",
"Laurence Willemet",
"Alexandre Bailleul",
"Michaël Wiertlewski",
"Xi Lin",
"Laurence Willemet",
"Alexandre Bailleul",
"Michaël Wiertlewski"
] | The only way to perceive a small object held between our fingers is to trust our sense of touch. Touch provides cues about the state of the contact even if its view is occluded by the finger. The interaction between the soft fingers and the surface reveals crucial information, such as the local shape of the object, that plays a central role in fine manipulation. In this work, we present a new sphe... |
Center-of-Mass-based Robust Grasp Planning for Unknown Objects Using Tactile-Visual Sensors | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196815/ | [
"Qian Feng",
"Zhaopeng Chen",
"Jun Deng",
"Chunhui Gao",
"Jianwei Zhang",
"Alois Knoll",
"Qian Feng",
"Zhaopeng Chen",
"Jun Deng",
"Chunhui Gao",
"Jianwei Zhang",
"Alois Knoll"
] | An unstable grasp pose can lead to slip, thus an unstable grasp pose can be predicted by slip detection. A regrasp is required afterwards to correct the grasp pose in order to finish the task. In this work, we propose a novel regrasp planner with multi-sensor modules to plan grasp adjustments with the feedback from a slip detector. Then a regrasp planner is trained to estimate the location of cent... |
OmniTact: A Multi-Directional High-Resolution Touch Sensor | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196712/ | [
"Akhil Padmanabha",
"Frederik Ebert",
"Stephen Tian",
"Roberto Calandra",
"Chelsea Finn",
"Sergey Levine",
"Akhil Padmanabha",
"Frederik Ebert",
"Stephen Tian",
"Roberto Calandra",
"Chelsea Finn",
"Sergey Levine"
] | Incorporating touch as a sensing modality for robots can enable finer and more robust manipulation skills. Existing tactile sensors are either flat, have small sensitive fields or only provide low-resolution signals. In this paper, we introduce OmniTact, a multi-directional high-resolution tactile sensor. OmniTact is designed to be used as a fingertip for robotic manipulation with robotic hands, a... |
Highly sensitive bio-inspired sensor for fine surface exploration and characterization | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197305/ | [
"Pedro Ribeiro",
"Susana Cardoso",
"Alexandre Bernardino",
"Lorenzo Jamone",
"Pedro Ribeiro",
"Susana Cardoso",
"Alexandre Bernardino",
"Lorenzo Jamone"
] | Texture sensing is one of the types of information sensed by humans through touch, and is thus of interest to robotics that this type of information can be acquired and processed. In this work we present a texture topography sensor based on a ciliary structure, a biological structure found in many organisms. The device consists of up to 9 elastic cilia with permanent magnetization assembled on top... |
Implementing Tactile and Proximity Sensing for Crack Detection | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196936/ | [
"Francesca Palermo",
"Jelizaveta Konstantinova",
"Kaspar Althoefer",
"Stefan Poslad",
"Ildar Farkhatdinov",
"Francesca Palermo",
"Jelizaveta Konstantinova",
"Kaspar Althoefer",
"Stefan Poslad",
"Ildar Farkhatdinov"
] | Remote characterisation of the environment during physical robot-environment interaction is an important task commonly accomplished in telerobotics. This paper demonstrates how tactile and proximity sensing can be efficiently used to perform automatic crack detection. A custom-designed integrated tactile and proximity sensor is implemented. It measures the deformation of its body when interacting ... |
Novel Proximity Sensor for Realizing Tactile Sense in Suction Cups | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196726/ | [
"Sayaka Doi",
"Hiroki Koga",
"Tomonori Seki",
"Yutaro Okuno",
"Sayaka Doi",
"Hiroki Koga",
"Tomonori Seki",
"Yutaro Okuno"
] | We propose a new capacitive proximity sensor that detects deformations of a suction cup as a tactile sense. We confirmed that one sensor module provides three applications for reliable picking and a simplified setup. The first application is the picking height decision. The second one is the placing height decision for detecting whether the grasped object is placed on the placement surface. These ... |
Constrained Filtering-based Fusion of Images, Events, and Inertial Measurements for Pose Estimation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197248/ | [
"Jae Hyung Jung",
"Chan Gook Park",
"Jae Hyung Jung",
"Chan Gook Park"
] | In this paper, we propose a novel filtering-based method that fuses events from a dynamic vision sensor (DVS), images, and inertial measurements to estimate camera poses. A DVS is a bio-inspired sensor that generates events triggered by brightness changes. It can cover the drawbacks of a conventional camera by virtual of its independent pixels and high dynamic range. Specifically, we focus on opti... |
Schmidt-EKF-based Visual-Inertial Moving Object Tracking | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197352/ | [
"Kevin Eckenhoff",
"Patrick Geneva",
"Nathaniel Merrill",
"Guoquan Huang",
"Kevin Eckenhoff",
"Patrick Geneva",
"Nathaniel Merrill",
"Guoquan Huang"
] | In this paper we investigate the effect of tightly-coupled estimation on the performance of visual-inertial localization and dynamic object pose tracking. In particular, we show that while a joint estimation system outperforms its decoupled counterpart when given a "proper" model for the target's motion, inconsistent modeling, such as choosing improper levels for the target's propagation noises, c... |
Learning View and Target Invariant Visual Servoing for Navigation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197136/ | [
"Yimeng Li",
"Jana Košecka",
"Yimeng Li",
"Jana Košecka"
] | The advances in deep reinforcement learning recently revived interest in data-driven learning based approaches to navigation. In this paper we propose to learn viewpoint invariant and target invariant visual servoing for local mobile robot navigation; given an initial view and the goal view or an image of a target, we train deep convolutional network controller to reach the desired goal. We presen... |
Tightly-Coupled Single-Anchor Ultra-wideband-Aided Monocular Visual Odometry System | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196794/ | [
"Thien Hoang Nguyen",
"Thien-Minh Nguyen",
"Lihua Xie",
"Thien Hoang Nguyen",
"Thien-Minh Nguyen",
"Lihua Xie"
] | In this work, we propose a tightly-coupled odometry framework, which combines monocular visual feature observations with distance measurements provided by a single ultra-wideband (UWB) anchor with an initial guess for its location. Firstly, the scale factor and the anchor position in the vision frame will be simultaneously estimated using a variant of Levenberg-Marquardt non-linear least squares o... |
Scaling Local Control to Large-Scale Topological Navigation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196644/ | [
"Xiangyun Meng",
"Nathan Ratliff",
"Yu Xiang",
"Dieter Fox",
"Xiangyun Meng",
"Nathan Ratliff",
"Yu Xiang",
"Dieter Fox"
] | Visual topological navigation has been revitalized recently thanks to the advancement of deep learning that substantially improves robot perception. However, the scalability and reliability issue remain challenging due to the complexity and ambiguity of real world images and mechanical constraints of real robots. We present an intuitive approach to show that by accurately measuring the capability ... |
Zero-shot Imitation Learning from Demonstrations for Legged Robot Visual Navigation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196602/ | [
"Xinlei Pan",
"Tingnan Zhang",
"Brian Ichter",
"Aleksandra Faust",
"Jie Tan",
"Sehoon Ha",
"Xinlei Pan",
"Tingnan Zhang",
"Brian Ichter",
"Aleksandra Faust",
"Jie Tan",
"Sehoon Ha"
] | Imitation learning is a popular approach for training effective visual navigation policies. However, collecting expert demonstrations for legged robots is challenging as these robots can be hard to control, move slowly, and cannot operate continuously for long periods of time. In this work, we propose a zero-shot imitation learning framework for training a goal-driven visual navigation policy on a... |
Pressure-Driven Manipulator with Variable Stiffness Structure | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197401/ | [
"Canberk Sozer",
"Linda Paternò",
"Giuseppe Tortora",
"Arianna Menciassi",
"Canberk Sozer",
"Linda Paternò",
"Giuseppe Tortora",
"Arianna Menciassi"
] | The high deformability and compliance of soft robots allow safer interaction with the environment. On the other hand, these advantages bring along controllability and predictability challenges which result in loss of force and stiffness output. Such challenges should be addressed in order to improve the overall functional performance and to meet the requirements of real-scenario applications. In t... |
Human Interface for Teleoperated Object Manipulation with a Soft Growing Robot | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197094/ | [
"Fabio Stroppa",
"Ming Luo",
"Kyle Yoshida",
"Margaret M. Coad",
"Laura H. Blumenschein",
"Allison M. Okamura",
"Fabio Stroppa",
"Ming Luo",
"Kyle Yoshida",
"Margaret M. Coad",
"Laura H. Blumenschein",
"Allison M. Okamura"
] | Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be challenging to teleoperate due to their unique degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose a human-centered interface that allows users to teleoperate a soft growing ro... |
Modulating hip stiffness with a robotic exoskeleton immediately changes gait | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197054/ | [
"Jongwoo Lee",
"Haley R. Warren",
"Vibha Agarwal",
"Meghan E. Huber",
"Neville Hogan",
"Jongwoo Lee",
"Haley R. Warren",
"Vibha Agarwal",
"Meghan E. Huber",
"Neville Hogan"
] | Restoring healthy kinematics is a critical component of assisting and rehabilitating impaired locomotion. Here we tested whether spatiotemporal gait patterns can be modulated by applying mechanical impedance to hip joints. Using the Samsung GEMS-H exoskeleton, we emulated a virtual spring (positive and negative) between the user's legs. We found that applying positive stiffness with the exoskeleto... |
Swing-Assist for Enhancing Stair Ambulation in a Primarily-Passive Knee Prosthesis | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196974/ | [
"J.T. Lee",
"M. Goldfarb",
"J.T. Lee",
"M. Goldfarb"
] | This paper presents the design and implementation of a controller for stair ascent and descent in a primarily-passive stance-controlled swing-assist (SCSA) prosthesis. The prosthesis and controller enable users to perform both step-over and step-to stair ascent and descent. The efficacy of the controller and SCSA prosthesis prototype in providing improved stair ambulation was tested on a unilatera... |
Proof-of-concept of a Pneumatic Ankle Foot Orthosis Powered by a Custom Compressor for Drop Foot Correction | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196817/ | [
"Sangjoon J. Kim",
"Junghoon Park",
"Wonseok Shin",
"Dong Yeon Lee",
"Jung Kim",
"Sangjoon J. Kim",
"Junghoon Park",
"Wonseok Shin",
"Dong Yeon Lee",
"Jung Kim"
] | Pneumatic transmission has several advantages in developing powered ankle foot orthosis (AFO) systems, such as the flexibility in placing pneumatic components for mass distribution and providing high back-drivability via simple valve control. However, pneumatic systems are generally tethered to large stationary air compressors that restrict them for being used as daily assistive devices. In this s... |
Knowledge-Guided Reinforcement Learning Control for Robotic Lower Limb Prosthesis | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196749/ | [
"Xiang Gao",
"Jennie Si",
"Yue Wen",
"Minhan Li",
"He Helen Huang",
"Xiang Gao",
"Jennie Si",
"Yue Wen",
"Minhan Li",
"He Helen Huang"
] | Robotic prostheses provide new opportunities to better restore lost functions than passive prostheses for trans-femoral amputees. But controlling a prosthesis device automatically for individual users in different task environments is an unsolved problem. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a naturally promising tool. For prosthesis control with a user in the loop, it is desirable that the controlled p... |
Development of a Twisted String Actuator-based Exoskeleton for Hip Joint Assistance in Lifting Tasks | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197359/ | [
"Hyeon-Seok Seong",
"Do-Hyeong Kim",
"Igor Gaponov",
"Jee-Hwan Ryu",
"Hyeon-Seok Seong",
"Do-Hyeong Kim",
"Igor Gaponov",
"Jee-Hwan Ryu"
] | This paper presents a study on a compliant cable-driven exoskeleton for hip assistance in lifting tasks that is aimed at preventing low-back pain and injuries in the vocational setting. In the proposed concept, we used twisted string actuator (TSA) to design a light-weight and powerful exoskeleton that benefits from inherent TSA advantages. We have noted that nonlinear nature of twisted strings’ t... |
A Novel Portable Lower Limb Exoskeleton for Gravity Compensation during Walking | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197422/ | [
"Libo Zhou",
"Weihai Chen",
"Wenjie Chen",
"Shaoping Bai",
"Jianhua Wang",
"Libo Zhou",
"Weihai Chen",
"Wenjie Chen",
"Shaoping Bai",
"Jianhua Wang"
] | This paper presents a novel portable passive lower limb exoskeleton for walking assistance. The exoskeleton is designed with built-in spring mechanisms at the hip and knee joints to realize gravity balancing of the human leg. A pair of mating gears is used to convert the tension force from the built-in springs into balancing torques at hip and knee joints for overcoming the influence of gravity. S... |
Steerable Burrowing Robot: Design, Modeling and Experiments | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9196648/ | [
"Moran Barenboim",
"Amir Degani",
"Moran Barenboim",
"Amir Degani"
] | This paper investigates a burrowing robot that can maneuver and steer while being submerged in a granular medium. The robot locomotes using an internal vibro-impact mechanism and steers using a rotating bevel-tip head. We formulate and investigate a non-holonomic model for the steering mechanism and a hybrid dynamics model for the thrusting mechanism. We perform a numerical analysis of the dynamic... |
High Force Density Gripping with UV Activation and Sacrificial Adhesion | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197246/ | [
"Esther Lee",
"Zachary Goddard",
"Joshua Ngotiaoco",
"Noe Monterrosa",
"Anirban Mazumdar",
"Esther Lee",
"Zachary Goddard",
"Joshua Ngotiaoco",
"Noe Monterrosa",
"Anirban Mazumdar"
] | This paper presents a novel physical gripping framework intended for controlled, high force density attachment on a range of surfaces. Our framework utilizes a light-activated chemical adhesive to attach to surfaces. The cured adhesive is part of a "sacrificial layer," which is shed when the gripper separates from the surface. In order to control adhesive behavior we utilize ultraviolet (UV) light... |
Stiffness optimization of a cable driven parallel robot for additive manufacturing | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197368/ | [
"D. Gueners",
"H. Chanal",
"B. C. Bouzgarrou",
"D. Gueners",
"H. Chanal",
"B. C. Bouzgarrou"
] | In this paper, the optimization of the anchor points of a cable driven parallel robot (CDPR) for 3D printing is proposed in order to maximize the rigidity. Indeed, in the context of 3D printing, robot stiffness should guarantee a high level of tool path following accuracy. The optimized platform showed a rigidity improvement in simulation, but also experimentally with a first study of vibration mo... |
CAMI - Analysis, Design and Realization of a Force-Compliant Variable Cam System | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197019/ | [
"Dominik Mannhart",
"Fabio Dubois",
"Karen Bodie",
"Victor Klemm",
"Alessandro Morra",
"Marco Hutter",
"Dominik Mannhart",
"Fabio Dubois",
"Karen Bodie",
"Victor Klemm",
"Alessandro Morra",
"Marco Hutter"
] | This work presents a novel design concept that achieves multi-legged locomotion using a three-dimensional cam system. A computational framework has been developed to analyze and dimension this cam apparatus, that can perform arbitrary end effector motions within its design constraints. The mechanism enables continuous gait transition and inherent force compliance. With only two motors, any traject... |
Using Manipulation to Enable Adaptive Ground Mobility | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197061/ | [
"Raymond Kim",
"Alex Debate",
"Stephen Balakirsky",
"Anirban Mazumdar",
"Raymond Kim",
"Alex Debate",
"Stephen Balakirsky",
"Anirban Mazumdar"
] | In order to accomplish various missions, autonomous ground vehicles must operate on a wide range of terrain. While many systems such as wheels and whegs can navigate some types of terrain, none are optimal across all. This creates a need for physical adaptation. This paper presents a broad new approach to physical adaptation that relies on manipulation. Specifically, we explore how multipurpose ma... |
SNIAE-SSE Deformation Mechanism Enabled Scalable Multicopter: Design, Modeling and Flight Performance Validation | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197025/ | [
"Tao Yang",
"Yujing Zhang",
"Peng Li",
"Yantao Shen",
"Yunhui Liu",
"Haoyao Chen",
"Tao Yang",
"Yujing Zhang",
"Peng Li",
"Yantao Shen",
"Yunhui Liu",
"Haoyao Chen"
] | This paper focuses on designing, modeling and validating a novel scalable multicopter whose deformation mechanism, called SNIAE-SSE, relies on a combination of simple non-intersecting angulated elements (SNIAEs) and straight scissor-like elements (SSEs). The proposed SNIAE-SSE mechanism has the advantages of single degree-of-freedom, fast actuation capability and large deformation ratio. In this w... |
Cooperative Autonomy and Data Fusion for Underwater Surveillance With Networked AUVs | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197367/ | [
"Gabriele Ferri",
"Pietro Stinco",
"Giovanni De Magistris",
"Alessandra Tesei",
"Kevin D. LePage",
"Gabriele Ferri",
"Pietro Stinco",
"Giovanni De Magistris",
"Alessandra Tesei",
"Kevin D. LePage"
] | Cooperative autonomy and data sharing can largely improve the mission performance of robotic networks in underwater surveillance applications. In this paper, we describe the cooperative autonomy used to control the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) acting as sonar receiver nodes in the CMRE Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) network. The paper focuses on a track management module that was integrated... |
Bidirectional Resonant Propulsion and Localization for AUVs | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197363/ | [
"Thomas W. Secord",
"Troy R. Louwagie",
"Thomas W. Secord",
"Troy R. Louwagie"
] | Battery life, reliability, and localization are prominent challenges in the design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). This work aims to address facets of these challenges using a single system. We describe the design of a bidirectional resonant pump that uses a single electromagnetic voice coil motor (VCM) capable of rotation around a central two degree-of-freedom flexure stage axis. This a... |
Hierarchical Planning in Time-Dependent Flow Fields for Marine Robots | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197513/ | [
"James Ju Heon Lee",
"Chanyeol Yoo",
"Stuart Anstee",
"Robert Fitch",
"James Ju Heon Lee",
"Chanyeol Yoo",
"Stuart Anstee",
"Robert Fitch"
] | We present an efficient approach for finding shortest paths in flow fields that vary as a sequence of flow predictions over time. This approach is applicable to motion planning for slow marine robots that are subject to dynamic ocean currents. Although the problem is NP-hard in general form, we incorporate recent results from the theory of finding shortest paths in time-dependent graphs to constru... |
Navigation in the Presence of Obstacles for an Agile Autonomous Underwater Vehicle | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197558/ | [
"Marios Xanthidis",
"Nare Karapetyan",
"Hunter Damron",
"Sharmin Rahman",
"James Johnson",
"Allison O’Connell",
"Jason M. O’Kane",
"Ioannis Rekleitis",
"Marios Xanthidis",
"Nare Karapetyan",
"Hunter Damron",
"Sharmin Rahman",
"James Johnson",
"Allison O’Connell",
"Jason M. O’Kane",
"Ioannis Rekleitis"
] | Navigation underwater traditionally is done by keeping a safe distance from obstacles, resulting in "fly-overs" of the area of interest. Movement of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) through a cluttered space, such as a shipwreck or a decorated cave, is an extremely challenging problem that has not been addressed in the past. This paper proposes a novel navigation framework utilizing an enhan... |
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