OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Barely-Visible Surface Crack Detection for Wind Turbine Sustainability
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

The production of wind energy is a crucial part of sustainable development and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. Maintaining the integrity of wind turbines to produce this energy is a costly and time-consuming task requiring repeated inspection and maintenance. While autonomous drones have proven to make this process more efficient, the algorithms for detecting anomalies to prevent catastrophic damage to turbine blades have fallen behind due to some dangerous defects, such as hairline cracks, being barely-visible. Existing datasets and literature are lacking and tend towards detecting obvious and visible defects in addition to not being geographically diverse. In this paper we introduce a novel and diverse dataset of barely-visible hairline cracks collected from numerous wind turbine inspections. To prove the efficacy of our dataset, we detail our end-to-end deployed turbine crack detection pipeline from the image acquisition stage to the use of predictions in providing automated maintenance recommendations to extend the life and efficiency of wind turbines.
Learning to Imitate Spatial Organization in Multi-robot Systems
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding collective behavior and how it evolves is important to ensure that robot swarms can be trusted in a shared environment. One way to understand the behavior of the swarm is through collective behavior reconstruction using prior demonstrations. Existing approaches often require access to the swarm controller which may not be available. We reconstruct collective behaviors in distinct swarm scenarios involving shared environments without using swarm controller information. We achieve this by transforming prior demonstrations into features that describe multi-agent interactions before behavior reconstruction with multi-agent generative adversarial imitation learning (MA-GAIL). We show that our approach outperforms existing algorithms in spatial organization, and can be used to observe and reconstruct a swarm's behavior for further analysis and testing, which might be impractical or undesirable on the original robot swarm.
Immersive Human-in-the-Loop Control: Real-Time 3D Surface Meshing and Physics Simulation
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the TactiMesh Teleoperator Interface (TTI), a novel predictive visual and haptic system designed explicitly for human-in-the-loop robot control using a head-mounted display (HMD). By employing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)in tandem with a space carving method (CARV), TTI creates a real time 3D surface mesh of remote environments from an RGB camera mounted on a Barrett WAM arm. The generated mesh is integrated into a physics simulator, featuring a digital twin of the WAM robot arm to create a virtual environment. In this virtual environment, TTI provides haptic feedback directly in response to the operator's movements, eliminating the problem with delayed response from the haptic follower robot. Furthermore, texturing the 3D mesh with keyframes from SLAM allows the operator to control the viewpoint of their Head Mounted Display (HMD) independently of the arm-mounted robot camera, giving a better visual immersion and improving manipulation speed. Incorporating predictive visual and haptic feedback significantly improves teleoperation in applications such as search and rescue, inspection, and remote maintenance.
Hybrid Continuum-Eversion Robot: Precise Navigation and Decontamination in Nuclear Environments using Vine Robot
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Soft growing vine robots show great potential for navigation and decontamination tasks in the nuclear industry. This paper introduces a novel hybrid continuum-eversion robot designed to address certain challenges in relation to navigating and operating within pipe networks and enclosed remote vessels. The hybrid robot combines the flexibility of a soft eversion robot with the precision of a continuum robot at its tip, allowing for controlled steering and movement in hard to access and/or complex environments. The design enables the delivery of sensors, liquids, and aerosols to remote areas, supporting remote decontamination activities. This paper outlines the design and construction of the robot and the methods by which it achieves selective steering. We also include a comprehensive review of current related work in eversion robotics, as well as other steering devices and actuators currently under research, which underpin this novel active steering approach. This is followed by an experimental evaluation that demonstrates the robot's real-world capabilities in delivering liquids and aerosols to remote locations. The experiments reveal successful outcomes, with over 95% success in precision spraying tests. The paper concludes by discussing future work alongside limitations in the current design, ultimately showcasing its potential as a solution for remote decontamination operations in the nuclear industry.
Structure-Invariant Range-Visual-Inertial Odometry
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

The Mars Science Helicopter (MSH) mission aims to deploy the next generation of unmanned helicopters on Mars, targeting landing sites in highly irregular terrain such as Valles Marineris, the largest canyons in the Solar system with elevation variances of up to 8000 meters. Unlike its predecessor, the Mars 2020 mission, which relied on a state estimation system assuming planar terrain, MSH requires a novel approach due to the complex topography of the landing site. This work introduces a novel range-visual-inertial odometry system tailored for the unique challenges of the MSH mission. Our system extends the state-of-the-art xVIO framework by fusing consistent range information with visual and inertial measurements, preventing metric scale drift in the absence of visual-inertial excitation (mono camera and constant velocity descent), and enabling landing on any terrain structure, without requiring any planar terrain assumption. Through extensive testing in image-based simulations using actual terrain structure and textures collected in Mars orbit, we demonstrate that our range-VIO approach estimates terrain-relative velocity meeting the stringent mission requirements, and outperforming existing methods.
Visual-Geometry GP-based Navigable Space for Autonomous Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous navigation in unknown environments is challenging and demands the consideration of both geometric and semantic information in order to parse the navigability of the environment. In this work, we propose a novel space modeling framework, Visual-Geometry Sparse Gaussian Process (VG-SGP), that simultaneously considers semantics and geometry of the scene. Our proposed approach can overcome the limitation of visual planners that fail to recognize geometry associated with the semantic and the geometric planners that completely overlook the semantic information which is very critical in real-world navigation. The proposed method leverages dual Sparse Gaussian Processes in an integrated manner; the first is trained to forecast geometrically navigable spaces while the second predicts the semantically navigable areas. This integrated model is able to pinpoint the overlapping (geometric and semantic) navigable space. The simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that the ability of the proposed VG-SGP model, coupled with our innovative navigation strategy, outperforms models solely reliant on visual or geometric navigation algorithms, highlighting a superior adaptive behavior.
MEMROC: Multi-Eye to Mobile RObot Calibration
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents MEMROC (Multi-Eye to Mobile RObot Calibration), a novel motion-based calibration method that simplifies the process of accurately calibrating multiple cameras relative to a mobile robot's reference frame. MEMROC utilizes a known calibration pattern to facilitate accurate calibration with a lower number of images during the optimization process. Additionally, it leverages robust ground plane detection for comprehensive 6-DoF extrinsic calibration, overcoming a critical limitation of many existing methods that struggle to estimate the complete camera pose. The proposed method addresses the need for frequent recalibration in dynamic environments, where cameras may shift slightly or alter their positions due to daily usage, operational adjustments, or vibrations from mobile robot movements. MEMROC exhibits remarkable robustness to noisy odometry data, requiring minimal calibration input data. This combination makes it highly suitable for daily operations involving mobile robots. A comprehensive set of experiments on both synthetic and real data proves MEMROC's efficiency, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and ease of use. To facilitate further research, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/davidea97/MEMROC.git.
Neuromorphic force-control in an industrial task: validating energy and latency benefits
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

As robots become smarter and more ubiquitous, optimizing the power consumption of intelligent compute becomes imperative towards ensuring the sustainability of technological advancements. Neuromorphic computing hardware makes use of biologically inspired neural architectures to achieve energy and latency improvements compared to conventional von Neumann computing architecture. Applying these benefits to robots has been demonstrated in several works in the field of neurorobotics, typically on relatively simple control tasks. Here, we introduce an example of neuromorphic computing applied to the real-world industrial task of object insertion. We trained a spiking neural network (SNN) to perform force-torque feedback control using a reinforcement learning approach in simulation. We then ported the SNN to the Intel neuromorphic research chip Loihi interfaced with a KUKA robotic arm. At inference time we show latency competitive with current CPU/GPU architectures, and one order of magnitude less energy usage in comparison to state-of-the-art low-energy edge-hardware. We offer this example as a proof of concept implementation of a neuromoprhic controller in real-world robotic setting, highlighting the benefits of neuromorphic hardware for the development of intelligent controllers for robots.
Beyond the Cascade: Juggling Vanilla Siteswap Patterns
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Being widespread in human motor behavior, dynamic movements demonstrate higher efficiency and greater capacity to address a broader range of skill domains compared to their quasi-static counterparts. Among the frequently studied dynamic manipulation problems, robotic juggling tasks stand out due to their inherent ability to scale their difficulty levels to arbitrary extents, making them an excellent subject for investigation. In this study, we explore juggling patterns with mixed throw heights, following the vanilla siteswap juggling notation, which jugglers widely adopted to describe toss juggling patterns. This requires extending our previous analysis of the simpler cascade juggling task by a throw-height sequence planner and further constraints on the end effector trajectory. These are not necessary for cascade patterns but are vital to achieving patterns with mixed throw heights. Using a simulated environment, we demonstrate successful juggling of most common 3-9 ball siteswap patterns up to 9 ball height, transitions between these patterns, and random sequences covering all possible vanilla siteswap patterns with throws between 2 and 9 ball height. https://kai-ploeger.com/beyond-cascades
JUICER: Data-Efficient Imitation Learning for Robotic Assembly
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

While learning from demonstrations is powerful for acquiring visuomotor policies, high-performance imitation without large demonstration datasets remains challenging for tasks requiring precise, long-horizon manipulation. This paper proposes a pipeline for improving imitation learning performance with a small human demonstration budget. We apply our approach to assembly tasks that require precisely grasping, reorienting, and inserting multiple parts over long horizons and multiple task phases. Our pipeline combines expressive policy architectures and various techniques for dataset expansion and simulation-based data augmentation. These help expand dataset support and supervise the model with locally corrective actions near bottleneck regions requiring high precision. We demonstrate our pipeline on four furniture assembly tasks in simulation, enabling a manipulator to assemble up to five parts over nearly 2500 time steps directly from RGB images, outperforming imitation and data augmentation baselines. Project website: https://imitation-juicer.github.io/.
R2SNet: Scalable Domain Adaptation for Object Detection in Cloud-Based Robotic Ecosystems via Proposal Refinement
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a novel approach for scalable domain adaptation in cloud robotics scenarios where robots rely on third-party AI inference services powered by large pre-trained deep neural networks. Our method is based on a downstream proposal-refinement stage running locally on the robots, exploiting a new lightweight DNN architecture, R2SNet. This architecture aims to mitigate performance degradation from domain shifts by adapting the object detection process to the target environment, focusing on relabeling, rescoring, and suppression of bounding-box proposals. Our method allows for local execution on robots, addressing the scalability challenges of domain adaptation without incurring significant computational costs. Real-world results on mobile service robots performing door detection show the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving scalable domain adaptation.
Switching Sampling Space of Model Predictive Path-Integral Controller to Balance Efficiency and Safety in 4WIDS Vehicle Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Four-wheel independent drive and steering vehicle (4WIDS Vehicle, Swerve Drive Robot) has the ability to move in any direction by its eight degrees of freedom (DoF) control inputs. Although the high maneuverability enables efficient navigation in narrow spaces, obtaining the optimal command is challenging due to the high dimension of the solution space. This paper presents a navigation architecture using the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control algorithm to avoid collisions with obstacles of any shape and reach a goal point. The key idea to make the problem easier is to explore the optimal control input in a reasonably reduced dimension that is adequate for navigation. Through evaluation in simulation, we found that selecting the sampling space of MPPI greatly affects navigation performance. In addition, our proposed controller which switches multiple sampling spaces according to the real-time situation can achieve balanced behavior between efficiency and safety. Source code is available at https://github.com/MizuhoAOKI/mppi_swerve_drive_ros
EMPOWER: Embodied Multi-role Open-vocabulary Planning with Online Grounding and Execution
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

Task planning for robots in real-life settings presents significant challenges. These challenges stem from three primary issues: the difficulty in identifying grounded sequences of steps to achieve a goal; the lack of a standardized mapping between high-level actions and low-level commands; and the challenge of maintaining low computational overhead given the limited resources of robotic hardware. We introduce EMPOWER, a framework designed for open-vocabulary online grounding and planning for embodied agents aimed at addressing these issues. By leveraging efficient pre-trained foundation models and a multi-role mechanism, EMPOWER demonstrates notable improvements in grounded planning and execution. Quantitative results highlight the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an average success rate of 0.73 across six different real-life scenarios using a TIAGo robot.
Accurately Tracking Relative Positions of Moving Trackers based on UWB Ranging and Inertial Sensing without Anchors
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

We present a tracking system for relative positioning that can operate on entirely moving tracking nodes without the need for stationary anchors. Each node embeds a 9-DOF magnetic and inertial measurement unit and a single-antenna ultra-wideband radio. We introduce a multi-stage filtering pipeline through which our system estimates the relative layout of all tracking nodes within the group. The key novelty of our method is the integration of a custom Extended Kalman filter (EKF) with a refinement step via multidimensional scaling (MDS). Our method integrates the MDS output back into the EKF, thereby creating a dynamic feedback loop for more robust estimates. We complement our method with UWB ranging protocol that we designed to allow tracking nodes to opportunistically join and leave the group. In our evaluation with constantly moving nodes, our system estimated relative positions with an error of 10.2cm (in 2D) and 21.7cm (in 3D), including obstacles that occluded the line of sight between tracking nodes. Our approach requires no external infrastructure, making it particularly suitable for operation in environments where stationary setups are impractical.
Active Information Gathering for Long-Horizon Navigation Under Uncertainty by Learning the Value of Information
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

We address the task of long-horizon navigation in partially mapped environments for which active gathering of information about faraway unseen space is essential for good behavior. We present a novel planning strategy that, at training time, affords tractable computation of the value of information associated with revealing potentially informative regions of unseen space, data used to train a graph neural network to predict the goodness of temporally-extended exploratory actions. Our learning-augmented model-based planning approach predicts the expected value of information of revealing unseen space and is capable of using these predictions to actively seek information and so improve long-horizon navigation. Across two simulated office-like environments, our planner outperforms competitive learned and non-learned baseline navigation strategies, achieving improvements of up to 63.76% and 36.68%, demonstrating its capacity to actively seek performance-critical information.
A Service Robot in the Wild: Analysis of Users Intentions, Robot Behaviors, and Their Impact on the Interaction
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of chocolates towards a given target. We run the system for more than 5 hours across 3 days and two different crowded public locations; the system implements three possible behaviors that are randomly toggled every few minutes: passive (e.g. never performing the offering gesture); or active, triggered by either a naive distance-based rule, or a smart approach that relies on various behavioral cues of the user. We collect a real-world dataset that includes information on 1777 users with several spontaneous human-robot interactions and study the influence of robot actions on people's behavior. Our comprehensive analysis suggests that users are more prone to engage with the robot when it proactively starts the interaction. We release the dataset and provide insights to make our work reproducible for the community. Also, we report qualitative observations collected during the acquisition campaign and identify future challenges and research directions in the domain of social human-robot interaction.
Differentiable Collision-Free Parametric Corridors
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a method to compute differentiable collision-free parametric corridors. In contrast to existing solutions that decompose the obstacle-free space into multiple convex sets, the continuous corridors computed by our method are smooth and differentiable, making them compatible with existing numerical techniques for learning and optimization. To achieve this, we represent the collision-free corridors as a path-parametric off-centered ellipse with a polynomial basis. We show that the problem of maximizing the volume of such corridors is convex, and can be efficiently solved. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we examine its performance in a synthetic case study and subsequently evaluate its applicability in a real-world scenario from the KITTI dataset.
VLPG-Nav: Object Navigation Using Visual Language Pose Graph and Object Localization Probability Maps
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

We present VLPG-Nav, a visual language navigation method for guiding robots to specified objects within household scenes. Unlike existing methods primarily focused on navigating the robot toward objects, our approach considers the additional challenge of centering the object within the robot's camera view. Our method builds a visual language pose graph (VLPG) that functions as a spatial map of VL embeddings. Given an open vocabulary object query, we plan a viewpoint for object navigation using the VLPG. Despite navigating to the viewpoint, real-world challenges like object occlusion, displacement, and the robot's localization error can prevent visibility. We build an object localization probability map that leverages the robot's current observations and prior VLPG. When the object isn't visible, the probability map is updated and an alternate viewpoint is computed. In addition, we propose an object-centering formulation that locally adjusts the robot's pose to center the object in the camera view. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through simulations and real-world experiments, evaluating its ability to successfully view and center the object within the camera field of view. VLPG-Nav demonstrates improved performance in locating the object, navigating around occlusions, and centering the object within the robot's camera view, outperforming the selected baselines in the evaluation metrics.
Answerability Fields: Answerable Location Estimation via Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference IROS 2024
Year: 2024

In an era characterized by advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics, enabling machines to interact with and understand their environment is a critical research endeavor. In this paper, we propose Answerability Fields, a novel approach to predicting answerability within complex indoor environments. Leveraging a 3D question answering dataset, we construct a comprehensive Answerability Fields dataset, encompassing diverse scenes and questions from ScanNet. Using a diffusion model, we successfully infer and evaluate these Answerability Fields, demonstrating the importance of objects and their locations in answering questions within a scene. Our results showcase the efficacy of Answerability Fields in guiding scene-understanding tasks, laying the foundation for their application in enhancing interactions between intelligent agents and their environments.