OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Design of a Multimodal Fingertip Sensor for Dynamic Manipulation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a spherical fingertip sensor for dynamic manipulation. It is based on barometric pressure and time-of-flight proximity sensors and is low-latency, compact, and physically robust. The sensor uses a trained neural network to estimate the contact location and three-axis contact forces based on data from the pressure sensors, which are embedded within the sensor's sphere of polyurethane rubber. The time-of-flight sensors face in three different outward directions, and an integrated microcontroller samples each of the individual sensors at up to 200 Hz. To quantify the effect of system latency on dynamic manipulation performance, we develop and analyze a metric called the collision impulse ratio and characterize the end-to-end latency of our new sensor. We also present experimental demonstrations with the sensor, including measuring contact transitions, performing coarse mapping, maintaining a contact force with a moving object, and reacting to avoid collisions.
A generic diffusion-based approach for 3D human pose prediction in the wild
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Predicting 3D human poses in real-world scenarios, also known as human pose forecasting, is inevitably subject to noisy inputs arising from inaccurate 3D pose estimations and occlusions. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based approach that can predict given noisy observations. We frame the prediction task as a denoising problem, where both observation and prediction are considered as a single sequence containing missing elements (whether in the observation or prediction horizon). All missing elements are treated as noise and denoised with our conditional diffusion model. To better handle long-term forecasting horizon, we present a temporal cascaded diffusion model. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on four publicly available datasets (Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, AMASS, and 3DPW), outperforming the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we show that our framework is generic enough to improve any 3D pose prediction model as a pre-processing step to repair their inputs and a post-processing step to refine their outputs. The code is available online: \url{https://github.com/vita-epfl/DePOSit}.
Towards Robots that Influence Humans over Long-Term Interaction
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

When humans interact with robots influence is inevitable. Consider an autonomous car driving near a human: the speed and steering of the autonomous car will affect how the human drives. Prior works have developed frameworks that enable robots to influence humans towards desired behaviors. But while these approaches are effective in the short-term (i.e., the first few human-robot interactions), here we explore long-term influence (i.e., repeated interactions between the same human and robot). Our central insight is that humans are dynamic: people adapt to robots, and behaviors which are influential now may fall short once the human learns to anticipate the robot's actions. With this insight, we experimentally demonstrate that a prevalent game-theoretic formalism for generating influential robot behaviors becomes less effective over repeated interactions. Next, we propose three modifications to Stackelberg games that make the robot's policy both influential and unpredictable. We finally test these modifications across simulations and user studies: our results suggest that robots which purposely make their actions harder to anticipate are better able to maintain influence over long-term interaction. See videos here: https://youtu.be/ydO83cgjZ2Q
COLA: COarse LAbel pre-training for 3D semantic segmentation of sparse LiDAR datasets
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Transfer learning is a proven technique in 2D computer vision to leverage the large amount of data available and achieve high performance with datasets limited in size due to the cost of acquisition or annotation. In 3D, annotation is known to be a costly task; nevertheless, pre-training methods have only recently been investigated. Due to this cost, unsupervised pre-training has been heavily favored. In this work, we tackle the case of real-time 3D semantic segmentation of sparse autonomous driving LiDAR scans. Such datasets have been increasingly released, but each has a unique label set. We propose here an intermediate-level label set called coarse labels, which can easily be used on any existing and future autonomous driving datasets, thus allowing all the data available to be leveraged at once without any additional manual labeling. This way, we have access to a larger dataset, alongside a simple task of semantic segmentation. With it, we introduce a new pre-training task: coarse label pre-training, also called COLA. We thoroughly analyze the impact of COLA on various datasets and architectures and show that it yields a noticeable performance improvement, especially when only a small dataset is available for the finetuning task.
TransVisDrone: Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Vision-based Drone-to-Drone Detection in Aerial Videos
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Drone-to-drone detection using visual feed has crucial applications, such as detecting drone collisions, detecting drone attacks, or coordinating flight with other drones. However, existing methods are computationally costly, follow non-end-to-end optimization, and have complex multi-stage pipelines, making them less suitable for real-time deployment on edge devices. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework, \textit{TransVisDrone}, that provides an end-to-end solution with higher computational efficiency. We utilize CSPDarkNet-53 network to learn object-related spatial features and VideoSwin model to improve drone detection in challenging scenarios by learning spatio-temporal dependencies of drone motion. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging real-world datasets (Average Precision@0.5IOU): NPS 0.95, FLDrones 0.75, and AOT 0.80, and a higher throughput than previous methods. We also demonstrate its deployment capability on edge devices and its usefulness in detecting drone-collision (encounter). Project: \url{https://tusharsangam.github.io/TransVisDrone-project-page/}.
RAMP-Net: A Robust Adaptive MPC for Quadrotors via Physics-informed Neural Network
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a state-of-the-art (SOTA) control technique which requires solving hard constrained optimization problems iteratively. For uncertain dynamics, analytical model based robust MPC imposes additional constraints, increasing the hardness of the problem. The problem exacerbates in performance-critical applications, when more compute is required in lesser time. Data-driven regression methods such as Neural Networks have been proposed in the past to approximate system dynamics. However, such models rely on high volumes of labeled data, in the absence of symbolic analytical priors. This incurs non-trivial training overheads. Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have gained traction for approximating non-linear system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with reasonable accuracy. In this work, we propose a Robust Adaptive MPC framework via PINNs (RAMP-Net), which uses a neural network trained partly from simple ODEs and partly from data. A physics loss is used to learn simple ODEs representing ideal dynamics. Having access to analytical functions inside the loss function acts as a regularizer, enforcing robust behavior for parametric uncertainties. On the other hand, a regular data loss is used for adapting to residual disturbances (non-parametric uncertainties), unaccounted during mathematical modelling. Experiments are performed in a simulated environment for trajectory tracking of a quadrotor. We report 7.8% to 43.2% and 8.04% to 61.5% reduction in tracking errors for speeds ranging from 0.5 to 1.75 m/s compared to two SOTA regression based MPC methods.
Hierarchical Whole-body Control of the cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulator endowed with Winch-based Actuation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

During operation, aerial manipulation systems are affected by various disturbances. Among them is a gravitational torque caused by the weight of the robotic arm. Common propeller-based actuation is ineffective against such disturbances because of possible overheating and high power consumption. To overcome this issue, in this paper we propose a winchbased actuation for the crane-stationed cable-suspended aerial manipulator. Three winch-controlled suspension rigging cables produce a desired cable tension distribution to generate a wrench that reduces the effect of gravitational torque. In order to coordinate the robotic arm and the winch-based actuation, a model-based hierarchical whole-body controller is adapted. It resolves two tasks: keeping the robotic arm end-effector at the desired pose and shifting the system center of mass in the location with zero gravitational torque. The performance of the introduced actuation system as well as control strategy is validated through experimental studies.
A Probabilistic Rotation Representation for Symmetric Shapes With an Efficiently Computable Bingham Loss Function
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, a deep learning framework has been widely used for object pose estimation. While quaternion is a common choice for rotation representation, it cannot represent the ambiguity of the observation. In order to handle the ambiguity, the Bingham distribution is one promising solution. However, it requires complicated calculation when yielding the negative log-likelihood (NLL) loss. An alternative easy-to-implement loss function has been proposed to avoid complex computations but has difficulty expressing symmetric distribution. In this paper, we introduce a fast-computable and easy-to-implement NLL loss function for Bingham distribution. We also create the inference network and show that our loss function can capture the symmetric property of target objects from their point clouds.
AutoCharge: Autonomous Charging for Perpetual Quadrotor Missions
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Battery endurance represents a key challenge for long-term autonomy and long-range operations, especially in the case of aerial robots. In this paper, we propose AutoCharge, an autonomous charging solution for quadrotors that combines a portable ground station with a flexible, lightweight charging tether and is capable of universal, highly efficient, and robust charging. We design and manufacture a pair of circular magnetic connectors to ensure a precise orientation-agnostic electrical connection between the ground station and the charging tether. Moreover, we supply the ground station with an electromagnet that largely increases the tolerance to localization and control errors during the docking maneuver, while still guaranteeing smooth un-docking once the charging process is completed. We demonstrate AutoCharge on a perpetual 10 hours quadrotor flight experiment and show that the docking and un-docking performance is solidly repeatable, enabling perpetual quadrotor flight missions.
Planning for Complex Non-prehensile Manipulation Among Movable Objects by Interleaving Multi-Agent Pathfinding and Physics-Based Simulation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable' objects must be rearranged in order to solve the task. In particular, our motivation is to allow the robot to reason over and consider non-prehensile rearrangement actions that lead to complex robot-object and object-object interactions where multiple objects might be moved by the robot simultaneously, and objects might tilt, lean on each other, or topple. To support this, we query a physics-based simulator to forward simulate these interaction dynamics which makes action evaluation during planning computationally very expensive. To make the planner tractable, we establish a connection between the domain of Manipulation Among Movable Objects and Multi-Agent Pathfinding that lets us decompose the problem into two phases our M4M algorithm iterates over. First we solve a multi-agent planning problem that reasons about the configurations of movable objects but does not forward simulate a physics model. Next, an arm motion planning problem is solved that uses a physics-based simulator but does not search over possible configurations of movable objects. We run simulated and real-world experiments with the PR2 robot and compare against relevant baseline algorithms. Our results highlight that M4M generates complex 3D interactions, and solves at least twice as many problems as the baselines with competitive performance.
Generalizable Pose Estimation Using Implicit Scene Representations
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

6-DoF pose estimation is an essential component of robotic manipulation pipelines. However, it usually suffers from a lack of generalization to new instances and object types. Most widely used methods learn to infer the object pose in a discriminative setup where the model filters useful information to infer the exact pose of the object. While such methods offer accurate poses, the model does not store enough information to generalize to new objects. In this work, we address the generalization capability of pose estimation using models that contain enough information about the object to render it in different poses. We follow the line of work that inverts neural renderers to infer the pose. We propose i-$σ$SRN to maximize the information flowing from the input pose to the rendered scene and invert them to infer the pose given an input image. Specifically, we extend Scene Representation Networks (SRNs) by incorporating a separate network for density estimation and introduce a new way of obtaining a weighted scene representation. We investigate several ways of initial pose estimates and losses for the neural renderer. Our final evaluation shows a significant improvement in inference performance and speed compared to existing approaches.
Real-Time Navigation for Autonomous Surface Vehicles In Ice-Covered Waters
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Vessel transit in ice-covered waters poses unique challenges in safe and efficient motion planning. When the concentration of ice is high, it may not be possible to find collision-free trajectories. Instead, ice can be pushed out of the way if it is small or if contact occurs near the edge of the ice. In this work, we propose a real-time navigation framework that minimizes collisions with ice and distance travelled by the vessel. We exploit a lattice-based planner with a cost that captures the ship interaction with ice. To address the dynamic nature of the environment, we plan motion in a receding horizon manner based on updated vessel and ice state information. Further, we present a novel planning heuristic for evaluating the cost-to-go, which is applicable to navigation in a channel without a fixed goal location. The performance of our planner is evaluated across several levels of ice concentration both in simulated and in real-world experiments.
Learning Agent-Aware Affordances for Closed-Loop Interaction with Articulated Objects
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Interactions with articulated objects are a challenging but important task for mobile robots. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel closed-loop control pipeline, which integrates manipulation priors from affordance estimation with sampling-based whole-body control. We introduce the concept of agent-aware affordances which fully reflect the agent's capabilities and embodiment and we show that they outperform their state-of-the-art counterparts which are only conditioned on the end-effector geometry. Additionally, closed-loop affordance inference is found to allow the agent to divide a task into multiple non-continuous motions and recover from failure and unexpected states. Finally, the pipeline is able to perform long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks, i.e. opening and closing an oven, in the real world with high success rates (opening: 71%, closing: 72%).
Exploring Navigation Maps for Learning-Based Motion Prediction
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

The prediction of surrounding agents' motion is a key for safe autonomous driving. In this paper, we explore navigation maps as an alternative to the predominant High Definition (HD) maps for learning-based motion prediction. Navigation maps provide topological and geometrical information on road-level, HD maps additionally have centimeter-accurate lane-level information. As a result, HD maps are costly and time-consuming to obtain, while navigation maps with near-global coverage are freely available. We describe an approach to integrate navigation maps into learning-based motion prediction models. To exploit locally available HD maps during training, we additionally propose a model-agnostic method for knowledge distillation. In experiments on the publicly available Argoverse dataset with navigation maps obtained from OpenStreetMap, our approach shows a significant improvement over not using a map at all. Combined with our method for knowledge distillation, we achieve results that are close to the original HD map-reliant models. Our publicly available navigation map API for Argoverse enables researchers to develop and evaluate their own approaches using navigation maps.
Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Modern 3D semantic instance segmentation approaches predominantly rely on specialized voting mechanisms followed by carefully designed geometric clustering techniques. Building on the successes of recent Transformer-based methods for object detection and image segmentation, we propose the first Transformer-based approach for 3D semantic instance segmentation. We show that we can leverage generic Transformer building blocks to directly predict instance masks from 3D point clouds. In our model called Mask3D each object instance is represented as an instance query. Using Transformer decoders, the instance queries are learned by iteratively attending to point cloud features at multiple scales. Combined with point features, the instance queries directly yield all instance masks in parallel. Mask3D has several advantages over current state-of-the-art approaches, since it neither relies on (1) voting schemes which require hand-selected geometric properties (such as centers) nor (2) geometric grouping mechanisms requiring manually-tuned hyper-parameters (e.g. radii) and (3) enables a loss that directly optimizes instance masks. Mask3D sets a new state-of-the-art on ScanNet test (+6.2 mAP), S3DIS 6-fold (+10.1 mAP), STPLS3D (+11.2 mAP) and ScanNet200 test (+12.4 mAP).
SCARP: 3D Shape Completion in ARbitrary Poses for Improved Grasping
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Recovering full 3D shapes from partial observations is a challenging task that has been extensively addressed in the computer vision community. Many deep learning methods tackle this problem by training 3D shape generation networks to learn a prior over the full 3D shapes. In this training regime, the methods expect the inputs to be in a fixed canonical form, without which they fail to learn a valid prior over the 3D shapes. We propose SCARP, a model that performs Shape Completion in ARbitrary Poses. Given a partial pointcloud of an object, SCARP learns a disentangled feature representation of pose and shape by relying on rotationally equivariant pose features and geometric shape features trained using a multi-tasking objective. Unlike existing methods that depend on an external canonicalization, SCARP performs canonicalization, pose estimation, and shape completion in a single network, improving the performance by 45% over the existing baselines. In this work, we use SCARP for improving grasp proposals on tabletop objects. By completing partial tabletop objects directly in their observed poses, SCARP enables a SOTA grasp proposal network improve their proposals by 71.2% on partial shapes. Project page: https://bipashasen.github.io/scarp
SceneCalib: Automatic Targetless Calibration of Cameras and Lidars in Autonomous Driving
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate camera-to-lidar calibration is a requirement for sensor data fusion in many 3D perception tasks. In this paper, we present SceneCalib, a novel method for simultaneous self-calibration of extrinsic and intrinsic parameters in a system containing multiple cameras and a lidar sensor. Existing methods typically require specially designed calibration targets and human operators, or they only attempt to solve for a subset of calibration parameters. We resolve these issues with a fully automatic method that requires no explicit correspondences between camera images and lidar point clouds, allowing for robustness to many outdoor environments. Furthermore, the full system is jointly calibrated with explicit cross-camera constraints to ensure that camera-to-camera and camera-to-lidar extrinsic parameters are consistent.
Learning to Walk by Steering: Perceptive Quadrupedal Locomotion in Dynamic Environments
Venue: Conference ICRA 2023
Year: 2023

We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a hierarchical learning framework, named PRELUDE, which decomposes the problem of perceptive locomotion into high-level decision-making to predict navigation commands and low-level gait generation to realize the target commands. In this framework, we train the high-level navigation controller with imitation learning on human demonstrations collected on a steerable cart and the low-level gait controller with reinforcement learning (RL). Therefore, our method can acquire complex navigation behaviors from human supervision and discover versatile gaits from trial and error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in simulation and with hardware experiments. Videos and code can be found at the project page: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/PRELUDE.