OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Deep Learning Approach for Robust Corridor Following
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

For an autonomous corridor following task where the environment is continuously changing, several forms of environmental noise prevent an automated feature extraction procedure from performing reliably. Moreover, in cases where pre-defined features are absent from the captured data, a well defined control signal for performing the servoing task fails to get produced. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we present in this work, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to directly estimate the required control signal from an image, encompassing feature extraction and control law computation into one single end-to-end framework. In particular, we study the task of autonomous corridor following using a CNN and present clear advantages in cases where a traditional method used for performing the same task fails to give a reliable outcome. We evaluate the performance of our method on this task on a Wheelchair Platform developed at our institute for this purpose.
On Training Flexible Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

The use of robotics in controlled environments has flourished over the last several decades and training robots to perform tasks using control strategies developed from dynamical models of their hardware have proven very effective. However, in many real-world settings, the uncertainties of the environment, the safety requirements and generalized capabilities that are expected of robots make rigid industrial robots unsuitable. This created great research interest into developing control strategies for flexible robot hardware for which building dynamical models are challenging. In this paper, inspired by the success of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in other areas, we systematically study the efficacy of policy search methods using DRL in training flexible robots. Our results indicate that DRL is successfully able to learn efficient and robust policies for complex tasks at various degrees of flexibility. We also note that DRL using Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients can be sensitive to the choice of sensors and adding more informative sensors does not necessarily make the task easier to learn.
A pressure field model for fast, robust approximation of net contact force and moment between nominally rigid objects
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce an approximate model for predicting the net contact wrench between nominally rigid objects for use in simulation, control, and state estimation. The model combines and generalizes two ideas: a bed of springs (an "elastic foundation") and hydrostatic pressure. In this model, continuous pressure fields are computed offline for the interior of each nominally rigid object. Unlike hydrostatics or elastic foundations, the pressure fields need not satisfy mechanical equilibrium conditions. When two objects nominally overlap, a contact surface is defined where the two pressure fields are equal. This static pressure is supplemented with a dissipative rate-dependent pressure and friction to determine tractions on the contact surface. The contact wrench between pairs of objects is an integral of traction contributions over this surface. The model evaluates much faster than elasticity-theory models, while showing the essential trends of force, moment, and stiffness increase with contact load. It yields continuous wrenches even for non-convex objects and coarse meshes. The method shows promise as sufficiently fast, accurate, and robust for design-in-simulation of robot controllers.
Advanced Autonomy on a Low-Cost Educational Drone Platform
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

PiDrone is a quadrotor platform created to accompany an introductory robotics course. Students build an autonomous flying robot from scratch and learn to program it through assignments and projects. Existing educational robots do not have significant autonomous capabilities, such as high-level planning and mapping. We present a hardware and software framework for an autonomous aerial robot, in which all software for autonomy can run onboard the drone, implemented in Python. We present an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) for accurate state estimation. Next, we present an implementation of Monte Carlo (MC) Localization and FastSLAM for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The performance of UKF, localization, and SLAM is tested and compared to ground truth, provided by a motion-capture system. Our evaluation demonstrates that our autonomous educational framework runs quickly and accurately on a Raspberry Pi in Python, making it ideal for use in educational settings.
ORBSLAM-Atlas: a robust and accurate multi-map system
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

We propose ORBSLAM-Atlas, a system able to handle an unlimited number of disconnected sub-maps, that includes a robust map merging algorithm able to detect sub-maps with common regions and seamlessly fuse them. The outstanding robustness and accuracy of ORBSLAM are due to its ability to detect wide-baseline matches between keyframes, and to exploit them by means of non-linear optimization, however it only can handle a single map. ORBSLAM-Atlas brings the wide-baseline matching detection and exploitation to the multiple map arena. The result is a SLAM system significantly more general and robust, able to perform multi-session mapping. If tracking is lost during exploration, instead of freezing the map, a new sub-map is launched, and it can be fused with the previous map when common parts are visited. Our criteria to declare the camera lost contrast with previous approaches that simply count the number of tracked points, we propose to discard also inaccurately estimated camera poses due to bad geometrical conditioning. As a result, the map is split into more accurate sub-maps, that are eventually merged in a more accurate global map, thanks to the multi-mapping capabilities. We provide extensive experimental validation in the EuRoC datasets, where ORBSLAM-Atlas obtains accurate monocular and stereo results in the difficult sequences where ORBSLAM failed. We also build global maps after multiple sessions in the same room, obtaining the best results to date, between 2 and 3 times more accurate than competing multi-map approaches. We also show the robustness and capability of our system to deal with dynamic scenes, quantitatively in the EuRoC datasets and qualitatively in a densely populated corridor where camera occlusions and tracking losses are frequent.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Concurrent Discovery of Compound and Composable Policies
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

A common strategy to deal with the expensive reinforcement learning (RL) of complex tasks is to decompose them into a collection of subtasks that are usually simpler to learn as well as reusable for new problems. However, when a robot learns the policies for these subtasks, common approaches treat every policy learning process separately. Therefore, all these individual (composable) policies need to be learned before tackling the learning process of the complex task through policies composition. Moreover, such composition of individual policies is usually performed sequentially, which is not suitable for tasks that require to perform the subtasks concurrently. In this paper, we propose to combine a set of composable Gaussian policies corresponding to these subtasks using a set of activation vectors, resulting in a complex Gaussian policy that is a function of the means and covariances matrices of the composable policies. Moreover, we propose an algorithm for learning both compound and composable policies within the same learning process by exploiting the off-policy data generated from the compound policy. The algorithm is built on a maximum entropy RL approach to favor exploration during the learning process. The results of the experiments show that the experience collected with the compound policy permits not only to solve the complex task but also to obtain useful composable policies that successfully perform in their corresponding subtasks.
optimization Model for Planning Precision Grasps with Multi-Fingered Hands
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Precision grasps with multi-fingered hands are important for precise placement and in-hand manipulation tasks. Searching precision grasps on the object represented by point cloud, is challenging due to the complex object shape, high-dimensionality, collision and undesired properties of the sensing and positioning. This paper proposes an optimization model to search for precision grasps with multi-fingered hands. The model takes noisy point cloud of the object as input and optimizes the grasp quality by iteratively searching for the palm pose and finger joints positions. The collision between the hand and the object is approximated and penalized by a series of least-squares. The collision approximation is able to handle the point cloud representation of the objects with complex shapes. The proposed optimization model is able to locate collision-free optimal precision grasps efficiently. The average computation time is 0.50 sec/grasp. The searching is robust to the incompleteness and noise of the point cloud. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated by experiments.
An Interactive Indoor Drone Assistant
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

With the rapid advance of sophisticated control algorithms, the capabilities of drones to stabilise, fly and manoeuvre autonomously have dramatically improved, enabling us to pay greater attention to entire missions and the interaction of a drone with humans and with its environment during the course of such a mission. In this paper, we present an indoor office drone assistant that is tasked to run errands and carry out simple tasks at our laboratory, while given instructions from and interacting with humans in the space. To accomplish its mission, the system has to be able to understand verbal instructions from humans, and perform subject to constraints from control and hardware limitations, uncertain localisation information, unpredictable and uncertain obstacles and environmental factors. We combine and evaluate the dialogue, navigation, flight control, depth perception and collision avoidance components. We discuss performance and limitations of our assistant at the component as well as the mission level. A 78% mission success rate was obtained over the course of 27 missions.
Time Series Motion Generation Considering Long Short-Term Motion
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Various adaptive abilities are required for robots interacting with humans in daily life. It is difficult to design adaptive algorithms manually; however, by using end-to-end machine learning, labor can be saved during the design process. In our previous research, a task requiring force adjustment was achieved through imitation learning that considered position and force information using a four-channel bilateral control. Unfortunately, tasks that include long-term (slow) motion are still challenging. Furthermore, during system identification, there is a method known as the multi-decimation (MD) identification method. It separates lower and higher frequencies, and then identifies the parameters characterized at each frequency. Therefore, we proposed utilizing machine learning to take advantage of the MD method to infer short-term and long-term (high and low frequency, respectively) motion. In this paper, long-term motion tasks such as writing a letter using a pen fixed on a robot are discussed. We found differences in suitable sampling periods between position and force information. The validity of the proposed method was then experimentally verified, showing the importance of long-term inference with adequate sampling periods.
Fast Adaptation with Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Trust Modelling in Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

In socially assistive robotics, an important research area is the development of adaptation techniques and their effect on human-robot interaction. We present a meta-learning based policy gradient method for addressing the problem of adaptation in human-robot interaction and also investigate its role as a mechanism for trust modelling. By building an escape room scenario in mixed reality with a robot, we test our hypothesis that bi-directional trust can be influenced by different adaptation algorithms. We found that our proposed model increased the perceived trustworthiness of the robot and influenced the dynamics of gaining human's trust. Additionally, participants evaluated that the robot perceived them as more trustworthy during the interactions with the meta-learning based adaptation compared to the previously studied statistical adaptation model.
GQ-STN: Optimizing One-Shot Grasp Detection based on Robustness Classifier
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Grasping is a fundamental robotic task needed for the deployment of household robots or furthering warehouse automation. However, few approaches are able to perform grasp detection in real time (frame rate). To this effect, we present Grasp Quality Spatial Transformer Network (GQ-STN), a one-shot grasp detection network. Being based on the Spatial Transformer Network (STN), it produces not only a grasp configuration, but also directly outputs a depth image centered at this configuration. By connecting our architecture to an externally-trained grasp robustness evaluation network, we can train efficiently to satisfy a robustness metric via the backpropagation of the gradient emanating from the evaluation network. This removes the difficulty of training detection networks on sparsely annotated databases, a common issue in grasping. We further propose to use this robustness classifier to compare approaches, being more reliable than the traditional rectangle metric. Our GQ-STN is able to detect robust grasps on the depth images of the Dex-Net 2.0 dataset with 92.4 % accuracy in a single pass of the network. We finally demonstrate in a physical benchmark that our method can propose robust grasps more often than previous sampling-based methods, while being more than 60 times faster.
A Fully-Integrated Sensing and Control System for High-Accuracy Mobile Robotic Building Construction
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

We present a fully-integrated sensing and control system which enables mobile manipulator robots to execute building tasks with millimeter-scale accuracy on building construction sites. The approach leverages multi-modal sensing capabilities for state estimation, tight integration with digital building models, and integrated trajectory planning and whole-body motion control. A novel method for high-accuracy localization updates relative to the known building structure is proposed. The approach is implemented on a real platform and tested under realistic construction conditions. We show that the system can achieve sub-cm end-effector positioning accuracy during fully autonomous operation using solely on-board sensing.
Feedback MPC for Torque-Controlled Legged Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

The computational power of mobile robots is currently insufficient to achieve torque level whole-body Model Predictive Control (MPC) at the update rates required for complex dynamic systems such as legged robots. This problem is commonly circumvented by using a fast tracking controller to compensate for model errors between updates. In this work, we show that the feedback policy from a Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) based MPC algorithm is a viable alternative to bridge the gap between the low MPC update rate and the actuation command rate. We propose to augment the DDP approach with a relaxed barrier function to address inequality constraints arising from the friction cone. A frequency-dependent cost function is used to reduce the sensitivity to high-frequency model errors and actuator bandwidth limits. We demonstrate that our approach can find stable locomotion policies for the torque-controlled quadruped, ANYmal, both in simulation and on hardware.
Can a Robot Become a Movie Director? Learning Artistic Principles for Aerial Cinematography
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Aerial filming is constantly gaining importance due to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning agent which supervises motion planning of a filming drone by making desirable shot mode selections based on aesthetical values of video shots. Unlike most of the current state-of-the-art approaches that require explicit guidance by a human expert, our drone learns how to make favorable viewpoint selections by experience. We propose a learning scheme that exploits aesthetical features of retrospective shots in order to extract a desirable policy for better prospective shots. We train our agent in realistic AirSim simulations using both a hand-crafted reward function as well as reward from direct human input. We then deploy the same agent on a real DJI M210 drone in order to test the generalization capability of our approach to real world conditions. To evaluate the success of our approach in the end, we conduct a comprehensive user study in which participants rate the shot quality of our methods. Videos of the system in action can be seen at https://youtu.be/qmVw6mfyEmw.
Affordance Learning for End-to-End Visuomotor Robot Control
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Training end-to-end deep robot policies requires a lot of domain-, task-, and hardware-specific data, which is often costly to provide. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue by employing a deep neural network with a modular architecture, consisting of separate perception, policy, and trajectory parts. Each part of the system is trained fully on synthetic data or in simulation. The data is exchanged between parts of the system as low-dimensional latent representations of affordances and trajectories. The performance is then evaluated in a zero-shot transfer scenario using Franka Panda robot arm. Results demonstrate that a low-dimensional representation of scene affordances extracted from an RGB image is sufficient to successfully train manipulator policies. We also introduce a method for affordance dataset generation, which is easily generalizable to new tasks, objects and environments, and requires no manual pixel labeling.
FIESTA: Fast Incremental Euclidean Distance Fields for Online Motion Planning of Aerial Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) is useful for online motion planning of aerial robots since it can easily query the distance and gradient information against obstacles. Fast incrementally built ESDF map is the bottleneck for conducting real-time motion planning. In this paper, we investigate this problem and propose a mapping system called FIESTA to build global ESDF map incrementally. By introducing two independent updating queues for inserting and deleting obstacles separately, and using Indexing Data Structures and Doubly Linked Lists for map maintenance, our algorithm updates as few as possible nodes using a BFS framework. Our ESDF map has high computational performance and produces near-optimal results. We show our method outperforms other up-to-date methods in term of performance and accuracy by both theory and experiments. We integrate FIESTA into a completed quadrotor system and validate it by both simulation and onboard experiments. We release our method as open-source software for the community.
DeepVIO: Self-supervised Deep Learning of Monocular Visual Inertial Odometry using 3D Geometric Constraints
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents an self-supervised deep learning network for monocular visual inertial odometry (named DeepVIO). DeepVIO provides absolute trajectory estimation by directly merging 2D optical flow feature (OFF) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Specifically, it firstly estimates the depth and dense 3D point cloud of each scene by using stereo sequences, and then obtains 3D geometric constraints including 3D optical flow and 6-DoF pose as supervisory signals. Note that such 3D optical flow shows robustness and accuracy to dynamic objects and textureless environments. In DeepVIO training, 2D optical flow network is constrained by the projection of its corresponding 3D optical flow, and LSTM-style IMU preintegration network and the fusion network are learned by minimizing the loss functions from ego-motion constraints. Furthermore, we employ an IMU status update scheme to improve IMU pose estimation through updating the additional gyroscope and accelerometer bias. The experimental results on KITTI and EuRoC datasets show that DeepVIO outperforms state-of-the-art learning based methods in terms of accuracy and data adaptability. Compared to the traditional methods, DeepVIO reduces the impacts of inaccurate Camera-IMU calibrations, unsynchronized and missing data.
Integer Programming as a General Solution Methodology for Path-Based Optimization in Robotics: Principles, Best Practices, and Applications
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

Integer programming (IP) has proven to be highly effective in solving many path-based optimization problems in robotics. However, the applications of IP are generally done in an ad-hoc, problem specific manner. In this work, after examined a wide range of path-based optimization problems, we describe an IP solution methodology for these problems that is both easy to apply (in two simple steps) and high-performance in terms of the computation time and the achieved optimality. We demonstrate the generality of our approach through the application to three challenging path-based optimization problems: multi-robot path planning (MPP), minimum constraint removal (MCR), and reward collection problems RCPs). Associated experiments show that the approach can efficiently produce (near-)optimal solutions for problems with large state spaces, complex constraints, and complicated objective functions. In conjunction with the proposition of the IP methodology, we introduce two new and practical robotics problems: multi-robot minimum constraint removal (MMCR) and multi-robot path planning (MPP) with partial solutions, which can be quickly and effectively solved using our proposed IP solution pipeline.
Filter Early, Match Late: Improving Network-Based Visual Place Recognition
Venue: Conference IROS 2019
Year: 2019

CNNs have excelled at performing place recognition over time, particularly when the neural network is optimized for localization in the current environmental conditions. In this paper we investigate the concept of feature map filtering, where, rather than using all the activations within a convolutional tensor, only the most useful activations are used. Since specific feature maps encode different visual features, the objective is to remove feature maps that are detract from the ability to recognize a location across appearance changes. Our key innovation is to filter the feature maps in an early convolutional layer, but then continue to run the network and extract a feature vector using a later layer in the same network. By filtering early visual features and extracting a feature vector from a higher, more viewpoint invariant later layer, we demonstrate improved condition and viewpoint invariance. Our approach requires image pairs for training from the deployment environment, but we show that state-of-the-art performance can regularly be achieved with as little as a single training image pair. An exhaustive experimental analysis is performed to determine the full scope of causality between early layer filtering and late layer extraction. For validity, we use three datasets: Oxford RobotCar, Nordland, and Gardens Point, achieving overall superior performance to NetVLAD. The work provides a number of new avenues for exploring CNN optimizations, without full re-training.