OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Integrated Benchmarking and Design for Reproducible and Accessible Evaluation of Robotic Agents
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

As robotics matures and increases in complexity, it is more necessary than ever that robot autonomy research be reproducible. Compared to other sciences, there are specific challenges to benchmarking autonomy, such as the complexity of the software stacks, the variability of the hardware and the reliance on data-driven techniques, amongst others. In this paper, we describe a new concept for reproducible robotics research that integrates development and benchmarking, so that reproducibility is obtained "by design" from the beginning of the research/development processes. We first provide the overall conceptual objectives to achieve this goal and then a concrete instance that we have built: the DUCKIENet. One of the central components of this setup is the Duckietown Autolab, a remotely accessible standardized setup that is itself also relatively low-cost and reproducible. When evaluating agents, careful definition of interfaces allows users to choose among local versus remote evaluation using simulation, logs, or remote automated hardware setups. We validate the system by analyzing the repeatability of experiments conducted using the infrastructure and show that there is low variance across different robot hardware and across different remote labs.
Indirect Object-to-Robot Pose Estimation from an External Monocular RGB Camera
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

We present a robotic grasping system that uses a single external monocular RGB camera as input. The object-to-robot pose is computed indirectly by combining the output of two neural networks: one that estimates the object-to-camera pose, and another that estimates the robot-to-camera pose. Both networks are trained entirely on synthetic data, relying on domain randomization to bridge the sim-to-real gap. Because the latter network performs online camera calibration, the camera can be moved freely during execution without affecting the quality of the grasp. Experimental results analyze the effect of camera placement, image resolution, and pose refinement in the context of grasping several household objects. We also present results on a new set of 28 textured household toy grocery objects, which have been selected to be accessible to other researchers. To aid reproducibility of the research, we offer 3D scanned textured models, along with pre-trained weights for pose estimation.
Human Preference-Based Learning for High-dimensional Optimization of Exoskeleton Walking Gaits
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Optimizing lower-body exoskeleton walking gaits for user comfort requires understanding users' preferences over a high-dimensional gait parameter space. However, existing preference-based learning methods have only explored low-dimensional domains due to computational limitations. To learn user preferences in high dimensions, this work presents LineCoSpar, a human-in-the-loop preference-based framework that enables optimization over many parameters by iteratively exploring one-dimensional subspaces. Additionally, this work identifies gait attributes that characterize broader preferences across users. In simulations and human trials, we empirically verify that LineCoSpar is a sample-efficient approach for high-dimensional preference optimization. Our analysis of the experimental data reveals a correspondence between human preferences and objective measures of dynamicity, while also highlighting differences in the utility functions underlying individual users' gait preferences. This result has implications for exoskeleton gait synthesis, an active field with applications to clinical use and patient rehabilitation.
ImitationFlow: Learning Deep Stable Stochastic Dynamic Systems by Normalizing Flows
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce ImitationFlow, a novel Deep generative model that allows learning complex globally stable, stochastic, nonlinear dynamics. Our approach extends the Normalizing Flows framework to learn stable Stochastic Differential Equations. We prove the Lyapunov stability for a class of Stochastic Differential Equations and we propose a learning algorithm to learn them from a set of demonstrated trajectories. Our model extends the set of stable dynamical systems that can be represented by state-of-the-art approaches, eliminates the Gaussian assumption on the demonstrations, and outperforms the previous algorithms in terms of representation accuracy. We show the effectiveness of our method with both standard datasets and a real robot experiment.
Crossing the Gap: A Deep Dive into Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer for Dynamics
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of tasks with complex dynamics is a highly challenging and unsolved problem. A number of solutions have been proposed in recent years, but we have found that many works do not present a thorough evaluation in the real world, or underplay the significant engineering effort and task-specific fine tuning that is required to achieve the published results. In this paper, we dive deeper into the sim-to-real transfer challenge, investigate why this is such a difficult problem, and present objective evaluations of a number of transfer methods across a range of real-world tasks. Surprisingly, we found that a method which simply injects random forces into the simulation performs just as well as more complex methods, such as those which randomise the simulator's dynamics parameters, or adapt a policy online using recurrent network architectures.
Optimization-Based Hierarchical Motion Planning for Autonomous Racing
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we propose a hierarchical controller for autonomous racing where the same vehicle model is used in a two level optimization framework for motion planning. The high-level controller computes a trajectory that minimizes the lap time, and the low-level nonlinear model predictive path following controller tracks the computed trajectory online. Following a computed optimal trajectory avoids online planning and enables fast computational times. The efficiency is further enhanced by the coupling of the two levels through a terminal constraint, computed in the high-level controller. Including this constraint in the real-time optimization level ensures that the prediction horizon can be shortened, while safety is guaranteed. This proves crucial for the experimental validation of the approach on a full size driverless race car. The vehicle in question won two international student racing competitions using the proposed framework; moreover, our hierarchical controller achieved an improvement of 20% in the lap time compared to the state of the art result achieved using a very similar car and track.
Multi-Instance Aware Localization for End-to-End Imitation Learning
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Existing architectures for imitation learning using image-to-action policy networks perform poorly when presented with an input image containing multiple instances of the object of interest, especially when the number of expert demonstrations available for training are limited. We show that end-to-end policy networks can be trained in a sample efficient manner by (a) appending the feature map output of the vision layers with an embedding that can indicate instance preference or take advantage of an implicit preference present in the expert demonstrations, and (b) employing an autoregressive action generator network for the control layers. The proposed architecture for localization has improved accuracy and sample efficiency and can generalize to the presence of more instances of objects than seen during training. When used for end-to-end imitation learning to perform reach, push, and pick-and-place tasks on a real robot, training is achieved with as few as 15 expert demonstrations.
HeatNet: Bridging the Day-Night Domain Gap in Semantic Segmentation with Thermal Images
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

The majority of learning-based semantic segmentation methods are optimized for daytime scenarios and favorable lighting conditions. Real-world driving scenarios, however, entail adverse environmental conditions such as nighttime illumination or glare which remain a challenge for existing approaches. In this work, we propose a multimodal semantic segmentation model that can be applied during daytime and nighttime. To this end, besides RGB images, we leverage thermal images, making our network significantly more robust. We avoid the expensive annotation of nighttime images by leveraging an existing daytime RGB-dataset and propose a teacher-student training approach that transfers the dataset's knowledge to the nighttime domain. We further employ a domain adaptation method to align the learned feature spaces across the domains and propose a novel two-stage training scheme. Furthermore, due to a lack of thermal data for autonomous driving, we present a new dataset comprising over 20,000 time-synchronized and aligned RGB-thermal image pairs. In this context, we also present a novel target-less calibration method that allows for automatic robust extrinsic and intrinsic thermal camera calibration. Among others, we employ our new dataset to show state-of-the-art results for nighttime semantic segmentation.
Dynamic Object Tracking and Masking for Visual SLAM
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

In dynamic environments, performance of visual SLAM techniques can be impaired by visual features taken from moving objects. One solution is to identify those objects so that their visual features can be removed for localization and mapping. This paper presents a simple and fast pipeline that uses deep neural networks, extended Kalman filters and visual SLAM to improve both localization and mapping in dynamic environments (around 14 fps on a GTX 1080). Results on the dynamic sequences from the TUM dataset using RTAB-Map as visual SLAM suggest that the approach achieves similar localization performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods, while also providing the position of the tracked dynamic objects, a 3D map free of those dynamic objects, better loop closure detection with the whole pipeline able to run on a robot moving at moderate speed.
Applying Surface Normal Information in Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Detection for Ground Mobile Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

The joint detection of drivable areas and road anomalies is a crucial task for ground mobile robots. In recent years, many impressive semantic segmentation networks, which can be used for pixel-level drivable area and road anomaly detection, have been developed. However, the detection accuracy still needs improvement. Therefore, we develop a novel module named the Normal Inference Module (NIM), which can generate surface normal information from dense depth images with high accuracy and efficiency. Our NIM can be deployed in existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to refine the segmentation performance. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our NIM, we embed it in twelve state-of-the-art CNNs. The experimental results illustrate that our NIM can greatly improve the performance of the CNNs for drivable area and road anomaly detection. Furthermore, our proposed NIM-RTFNet ranks 8th on the KITTI road benchmark and exhibits a real-time inference speed.
Learning hierarchical behavior and motion planning for autonomous driving
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Learning-based driving solution, a new branch for autonomous driving, is expected to simplify the modeling of driving by learning the underlying mechanisms from data. To improve the tactical decision-making for learning-based driving solution, we introduce hierarchical behavior and motion planning (HBMP) to explicitly model the behavior in learning-based solution. Due to the coupled action space of behavior and motion, it is challenging to solve HBMP problem using reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon driving tasks. We transform HBMP problem by integrating a classical sampling-based motion planner, of which the optimal cost is regarded as the rewards for high-level behavior learning. As a result, this formulation reduces action space and diversifies the rewards without losing the optimality of HBMP. In addition, we propose a sharable representation for input sensory data across simulation platforms and real-world environment, so that models trained in a fast event-based simulator, SUMO, can be used to initialize and accelerate the RL training in a dynamics based simulator, CARLA. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. Besides, the model is successfully transferred to the real-world, validating the generalization capability.
Uncertainty-aware Self-supervised 3D Data Association
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

3D object trackers usually require training on large amounts of annotated data that is expensive and time-consuming to collect. Instead, we propose leveraging vast unlabeled datasets by self-supervised metric learning of 3D object trackers, with a focus on data association. Large scale annotations for unlabeled data are cheaply obtained by automatic object detection and association across frames. We show how these self-supervised annotations can be used in a principled manner to learn point-cloud embeddings that are effective for 3D tracking. We estimate and incorporate uncertainty in self-supervised tracking to learn more robust embeddings, without needing any labeled data. We design embeddings to differentiate objects across frames, and learn them using uncertainty-aware self-supervised training. Finally, we demonstrate their ability to perform accurate data association across frames, towards effective and accurate 3D tracking. Project videos and code are at https://jianrenw.github.io/Self-Supervised-3D-Data-Association.
Robot Calligraphy using Pseudospectral Optimal Control in Conjunction with a Novel Dynamic Brush Model
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Chinese calligraphy is a unique art form with great artistic value but difficult to master. In this paper, we formulate the calligraphy writing problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and propose an improved virtual brush model for simulating the real writing process. Our approach is inspired by pseudospectral optimal control in that we parameterize the actuator trajectory for each stroke as a Chebyshev polynomial. The proposed dynamic virtual brush model plays a key role in formulating the objective function to be optimized. Our approach shows excellent performance in drawing aesthetically pleasing characters, and does so much more efficiently than previous work, opening up the possibility to achieve real-time closed-loop control.
Pedestrian Motion Tracking by Using Inertial Sensors on the Smartphone
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) has long been a dream for stable and reliable motion estimation, especially in indoor environments where GPS strength limits. In this paper, we propose a novel method for position and orientation estimation of a moving object only from a sequence of IMU signals collected from the phone. Our main observation is that human motion is monotonous and periodic. We adopt the Extended Kalman Filter and use the learning-based method to dynamically update the measurement noise of the filter. Our pedestrian motion tracking system intends to accurately estimate planar position, velocity, heading direction without restricting the phone's daily use. The method is not only tested on the self-collected signals, but also provides accurate position and velocity estimations on the public RIDI dataset, i.e., the absolute transmit error is 1.28m for a 59-second sequence.
Inferring Spatial Uncertainty in Object Detection
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

The availability of real-world datasets is the prerequisite for developing object detection methods for autonomous driving. While ambiguity exists in object labels due to error-prone annotation process or sensor observation noises, current object detection datasets only provide deterministic annotations without considering their uncertainty. This precludes an in-depth evaluation among different object detection methods, especially for those that explicitly model predictive probability. In this work, we propose a generative model to estimate bounding box label uncertainties from LiDAR point clouds, and define a new representation of the probabilistic bounding box through spatial distribution. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed model represents uncertainties commonly seen in driving scenarios. Based on the spatial distribution, we further propose an extension of IoU, called the Jaccard IoU (JIoU), as a new evaluation metric that incorporates label uncertainty. Experiments on the KITTI and the Waymo Open Datasets show that JIoU is superior to IoU when evaluating probabilistic object detectors.
Motion Prediction in Visual Object Tracking
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Visual object tracking (VOT) is an essential component for many applications, such as autonomous driving or assistive robotics. However, recent works tend to develop accurate systems based on more computationally expensive feature extractors for better instance matching. In contrast, this work addresses the importance of motion prediction in VOT. We use an off-the-shelf object detector to obtain instance bounding boxes. Then, a combination of camera motion decouple and Kalman filter is used for state estimation. Although our baseline system is a straightforward combination of standard methods, we obtain state-of-the-art results. Our method establishes new state-of-the-art performance on VOT (VOT-2016 and VOT-2018). Our proposed method improves the EAO on VOT-2016 from 0.472 of prior art to 0.505, from 0.410 to 0.431 on VOT-2018. To show the generalizability, we also test our method on video object segmentation (VOS: DAVIS-2016 and DAVIS-2017) and observe consistent improvement.
Infusing Reachability-Based Safety into Planning and Control for Multi-agent Interactions
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Within a robot autonomy stack, the planner and controller are typically designed separately, and serve different purposes. As such, there is often a diffusion of responsibilities when it comes to ensuring safety for the robot. We propose that a planner and controller should share the same interpretation of safety but apply this knowledge in a different yet complementary way. To achieve this, we use Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability theory at the planning level to provide the robot planner with the foresight to avoid entering regions with possible inevitable collision. However, this alone does not guarantee safety. In conjunction with this HJ reachability-infused planner, we propose a minimally-interventional multi-agent safety-preserving controller also derived via HJ-reachability theory. The safety controller maintains safety for the robot without unduly impacting planner performance. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposed approach in a multi-agent highway scenario where a robot car is rewarded to navigate through traffic as fast as possible, and we show that our approach provides strong safety assurances yet achieves the highest performance compared to other safety controllers.
An Electrocommunication System Using FSK Modulation and Deep Learning Based Demodulation for Underwater Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Underwater communication is extremely challenging for small underwater robots which typically have stringent power and size constraints. In our previous work, we developed an artificial electrocommunication system which could be an alternative for the communication of small underwater robots. This paper further presents a new electrocommunication system that utilizes Binary Frequency Shift Keying (2FSK) modulation and deep-learning-based demodulation for underwater robots. We first derive an underwater electrocommunication model that covers both the near-field area and a large transition area outside of the near-field area. 2FSK modulation is adopted to improve the anti-interference ability of the electric signal. A deep learning algorithm is used to demodulate the electric signal by the receiver. Simulations and experiments show that with the same testing condition, the new communication system outperforms the previous system in both the communication distance and the data transmitting rate. In specific, the newly developed communication system achieves stable communication within the distance of 10 m at a data transfer rate of 5 Kbps with a power consumption of less than 0.1 W. The substantial increase in communication distance further improves the possibility of electrocommunication in underwater robotics.
Safe and Effective Picking Paths in Clutter given Discrete Distributions of Object Poses
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Picking an item in the presence of other objects can be challenging as it involves occlusions and partial views. Given object models, one approach is to perform object pose estimation and use the most likely candidate pose per object to pick the target without collisions. This approach, however, ignores the uncertainty of the perception process both regarding the target's and the surrounding objects' poses. This work proposes first a perception process for 6D pose estimation, which returns a discrete distribution of object poses in a scene. Then, an open-loop planning pipeline is proposed to return safe and effective solutions for moving a robotic arm to pick, which (a) minimizes the probability of collision with the obstructing objects; and (b) maximizes the probability of reaching the target item. The planning framework models the challenge as a stochastic variant of the Minimum Constraint Removal (MCR) problem. The effectiveness of the methodology is verified given both simulated and real data in different scenarios. The experiments demonstrate the importance of considering the uncertainty of the perception process in terms of safe execution. The results also show that the methodology is more effective than conservative MCR approaches, which avoid all possible object poses regardless of the reported uncertainty.
Maximizing BCI Human Feedback using Active Learning
Venue: Conference IROS 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advancements in \textit{Learning from Human Feedback} present an effective way to train robot agents via inputs from non-expert humans, without a need for a specially designed reward function. However, this approach needs a human to be present and attentive during robot learning to provide evaluative feedback. In addition, the amount of feedback needed grows with the level of task difficulty and the quality of human feedback might decrease over time because of fatigue. To overcome these limitations and enable learning more robot tasks with higher complexities, there is a need to maximize the quality of expensive feedback received and reduce the amount of human cognitive involvement required. In this work, we present an approach that uses active learning to smartly choose queries for the human supervisor based on the uncertainty of the robot and effectively reduces the amount of feedback needed to learn a given task. We also use a novel multiple buffer system to improve robustness to feedback noise and guard against catastrophic forgetting as the robot learning evolves. This makes it possible to learn tasks with more complexity using lesser amounts of human feedback compared to previous methods. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method on a robot arm reaching task where the robot learns to reach a location in 3D without colliding with obstacles. Our approach is able to learn this task faster, with less human feedback and cognitive involvement, compared to previous methods that do not use active learning.