pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generalizable Reinforcement Learning with Biologically Inspired Hyperdimensional Occupancy Grid Maps for Exploration and Goal-Directed Path Planning
Authors: Shay Snyder, Ryan Shea, Andrew Capodieci, David Gorsich, Maryam Parsa
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Real-time autonomous systems utilize multi-layer computational frameworks to perform critical tasks such as perception, goal finding, and path planning. Traditional methods implement perception using occupancy grid mapping (OGM), segmenting the environment into discretized cells with probabilistic information. This classical approach is well-established and provides a structured input for downstream processes like goal finding and path planning algorithms. Recent approaches leverage a biologically inspired mathematical framework known as vector symbolic architectures (VSA), commonly known as hyperdimensional computing, to perform probabilistic OGM in hyperdimensional space. This approach, VSA-OGM, provides native compatibility with spiking neural networks, positioning VSA-OGM as a potential neuromorphic alternative to conventional OGM. However, for large-scale integration, it is essential to assess the performance implications of VSA-OGM on downstream tasks compared to established OGM methods. This study examines the efficacy of VSA-OGM against a traditional OGM approach, Bayesian Hilbert Maps (BHM), within reinforcement learning based goal finding and path planning frameworks, across a controlled exploration environment and an autonomous driving scenario inspired by the F1-Tenth challenge. Our results demonstrate that VSA-OGM maintains comparable learning performance across single and multi-scenario training configurations while improving performance on unseen environments by approximately 47%. These findings highlight the increased generalizability of policy networks trained with VSA-OGM over BHM, reinforcing its potential for real-world deployment in diverse environments.
S$^2$-Diffusion: Generalizing from Instance-level to Category-level Skills in Robot Manipulation
Authors: Quantao Yang, Michael C. Welle, Danica Kragic, Olov Andersson
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Robot Manipulation

Recent advances in skill learning has propelled robot manipulation to new heights by enabling it to learn complex manipulation tasks from a practical number of demonstrations. However, these skills are often limited to the particular action, object, and environment \textit{instances} that are shown in the training data, and have trouble transferring to other instances of the same category. In this work we present an open-vocabulary Spatial-Semantic Diffusion policy (S$^2$-Diffusion) which enables generalization from instance-level training data to category-level, enabling skills to be transferable between instances of the same category. We show that functional aspects of skills can be captured via a promptable semantic module combined with a spatial representation. We further propose leveraging depth estimation networks to allow the use of only a single RGB camera. Our approach is evaluated and compared on a diverse number of robot manipulation tasks, both in simulation and in the real world. Our results show that S$^2$-Diffusion is invariant to changes in category-irrelevant factors as well as enables satisfying performance on other instances within the same category, even if it was not trained on that specific instance. Full videos of all real-world experiments are available in the supplementary material.
TRIFFID: Autonomous Robotic Aid For Increasing First Responders Efficiency
Authors: Jorgen Cani, Panagiotis Koletsis, Konstantinos Foteinos, Ioannis Kefaloukos, Lampros Argyriou, Manolis Falelakis, Iván Del Pino, Angel Santamaria-Navarro, Martin Čech, Ondřej Severa, Alessandro Umbrico, Francesca Fracasso, Andrea Orlandini, Dimitrios Drakoulis, Evangelos Markakis, Iraklis Varlamis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Disaster Response, Knowledge Graphs, Navigate

The increasing complexity of natural disaster incidents demands innovative technological solutions to support first responders in their efforts. This paper introduces the TRIFFID system, a comprehensive technical framework that integrates unmanned ground and aerial vehicles with advanced artificial intelligence functionalities to enhance disaster response capabilities across wildfires, urban floods, and post-earthquake search and rescue missions. By leveraging state-of-the-art autonomous navigation, semantic perception, and human-robot interaction technologies, TRIFFID provides a sophisticated system composed of the following key components: hybrid robotic platform, centralized ground station, custom communication infrastructure, and smartphone application. The defined research and development activities demonstrate how deep neural networks, knowledge graphs, and multimodal information fusion can enable robots to autonomously navigate and analyze disaster environments, reducing personnel risks and accelerating response times. The proposed system enhances emergency response teams by providing advanced mission planning, safety monitoring, and adaptive task execution capabilities. Moreover, it ensures real-time situational awareness and operational support in complex and risky situations, facilitating rapid and precise information collection and coordinated actions.
A Deep Inverse-Mapping Model for a Flapping Robotic Wing
Authors: Hadar Sharvit, Raz Karl, Tsevi Beatus
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00

In systems control, the dynamics of a system are governed by modulating its inputs to achieve a desired outcome. For example, to control the thrust of a quad-copter propeller the controller modulates its rotation rate, relying on a straightforward mapping between the input rotation rate and the resulting thrust. This mapping can be inverted to determine the rotation rate needed to generate a desired thrust. However, in complex systems, such as flapping-wing robots where intricate fluid motions are involved, mapping inputs (wing kinematics) to outcomes (aerodynamic forces) is nontrivial and inverting this mapping for real-time control is computationally impractical. Here, we report a machine-learning solution for the inverse mapping of a flapping-wing system based on data from an experimental system we have developed. Our model learns the input wing motion required to generate a desired aerodynamic force outcome. We used a sequence-to-sequence model tailored for time-series data and augmented it with a novel adaptive-spectrum layer that implements representation learning in the frequency domain. To train our model, we developed a flapping wing system that simultaneously measures the wing's aerodynamic force and its 3D motion using high-speed cameras. We demonstrate the performance of our system on an additional open-source dataset of a flapping wing in a different flow regime. Results show superior performance compared with more complex state-of-the-art transformer-based models, with 11% improvement on the test datasets median loss. Moreover, our model shows superior inference time, making it practical for onboard robotic control. Our open-source data and framework may improve modeling and real-time control of systems governed by complex dynamics, from biomimetic robots to biomedical devices.
GEVRM: Goal-Expressive Video Generation Model For Robust Visual Manipulation
Authors: Hongyin Zhang, Pengxiang Ding, Shangke Lyu, Ying Peng, Donglin Wang
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Video Generation, Vision-Language-Action

With the rapid development of embodied artificial intelligence, significant progress has been made in vision-language-action (VLA) models for general robot decision-making. However, the majority of existing VLAs fail to account for the inevitable external perturbations encountered during deployment. These perturbations introduce unforeseen state information to the VLA, resulting in inaccurate actions and consequently, a significant decline in generalization performance. The classic internal model control (IMC) principle demonstrates that a closed-loop system with an internal model that includes external input signals can accurately track the reference input and effectively offset the disturbance. We propose a novel closed-loop VLA method GEVRM that integrates the IMC principle to enhance the robustness of robot visual manipulation. The text-guided video generation model in GEVRM can generate highly expressive future visual planning goals. Simultaneously, we evaluate perturbations by simulating responses, which are called internal embeddings and optimized through prototype contrastive learning. This allows the model to implicitly infer and distinguish perturbations from the external environment. The proposed GEVRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both standard and perturbed CALVIN benchmarks and shows significant improvements in realistic robot tasks.
Federated Data-Driven Kalman Filtering for State Estimation
Authors: Nikos Piperigkos, Alexandros Gkillas, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Aris S. Lalos
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Federated Learning, Sensor Fusion, State Estimation

This paper proposes a novel localization framework based on collaborative training or federated learning paradigm, for highly accurate localization of autonomous vehicles. More specifically, we build on the standard approach of KalmanNet, a recurrent neural network aiming to estimate the underlying system uncertainty of traditional Extended Kalman Filtering, and reformulate it by the adapt-then-combine concept to FedKalmanNet. The latter is trained in a distributed manner by a group of vehicles (or clients), with local training datasets consisting of vehicular location and velocity measurements, through a global server aggregation operation. The FedKalmanNet is then used by each vehicle to localize itself, by estimating the associated system uncertainty matrices (i.e, Kalman gain). Our aim is to actually demonstrate the benefits of collaborative training for state estimation in autonomous driving, over collaborative decision-making which requires rich V2X communication resources for measurement exchange and sensor fusion under real-time constraints. An extensive experimental and evaluation study conducted in CARLA autonomous driving simulator highlights the superior performance of FedKalmanNet over state-of-the-art collaborative decision-making approaches, in localizing vehicles without the need of real-time V2X communication.
3D-Grounded Vision-Language Framework for Robotic Task Planning: Automated Prompt Synthesis and Supervised Reasoning
Authors: Guoqin Tang, Qingxuan Jia, Zeyuan Huang, Gang Chen, Ning Ji, Zhipeng Yao
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Scene Understanding, Small Language Model, Task Planning

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in scene understanding and perception tasks, enabling robots to plan and execute actions adaptively in dynamic environments. However, most multimodal large language models lack robust 3D scene localization capabilities, limiting their effectiveness in fine-grained robotic operations. Additionally, challenges such as low recognition accuracy, inefficiency, poor transferability, and reliability hinder their use in precision tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that integrates a 2D prompt synthesis module by mapping 2D images to point clouds, and incorporates a small language model (SLM) for supervising VLM outputs. The 2D prompt synthesis module enables VLMs, trained on 2D images and text, to autonomously extract precise 3D spatial information without manual intervention, significantly enhancing 3D scene understanding. Meanwhile, the SLM supervises VLM outputs, mitigating hallucinations and ensuring reliable, executable robotic control code generation. Our framework eliminates the need for retraining in new environments, thereby improving cost efficiency and operational robustness. Experimental results that the proposed framework achieved a 96.0\% Task Success Rate (TSR), outperforming other methods. Ablation studies demonstrated the critical role of both the 2D prompt synthesis module and the output supervision module (which, when removed, caused a 67\% TSR drop). These findings validate the framework's effectiveness in improving 3D recognition, task planning, and robotic task execution.
Acoustic Wave Manipulation Through Sparse Robotic Actuation
Authors: Tristan Shah, Noam Smilovich, Feruza Amirkulova, Samer Gerges, Stas Tiomkin
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00

Recent advancements in robotics, control, and machine learning have facilitated progress in the challenging area of object manipulation. These advancements include, among others, the use of deep neural networks to represent dynamics that are partially observed by robot sensors, as well as effective control using sparse control signals. In this work, we explore a more general problem: the manipulation of acoustic waves, which are partially observed by a robot capable of influencing the waves through spatially sparse actuators. This problem holds great potential for the design of new artificial materials, ultrasonic cutting tools, energy harvesting, and other applications. We develop an efficient data-driven method for robot learning that is applicable to either focusing scattered acoustic energy in a designated region or suppressing it, depending on the desired task. The proposed method is better in terms of a solution quality and computational complexity as compared to a state-of-the-art learning based method for manipulation of dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations. Furthermore our proposed method is competitive with a classical semi-analytical method in acoustics research on the demonstrated tasks. We have made the project code publicly available, along with a web page featuring video demonstrations: https://gladisor.github.io/waves/.
A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Approach to Robotic Manipulation with VLM-Generated Iterative Keypoint Rewards
Authors: Shivansh Patel, Xinchen Yin, Wenlong Huang, Shubham Garg, Hooshang Nayyeri, Li Fei-Fei, Svetlana Lazebnik, Yunzhu Li
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Task specification for robotic manipulation in open-world environments is challenging, requiring flexible and adaptive objectives that align with human intentions and can evolve through iterative feedback. We introduce Iterative Keypoint Reward (IKER), a visually grounded, Python-based reward function that serves as a dynamic task specification. Our framework leverages VLMs to generate and refine these reward functions for multi-step manipulation tasks. Given RGB-D observations and free-form language instructions, we sample keypoints in the scene and generate a reward function conditioned on these keypoints. IKER operates on the spatial relationships between keypoints, leveraging commonsense priors about the desired behaviors, and enabling precise SE(3) control. We reconstruct real-world scenes in simulation and use the generated rewards to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies, which are then deployed into the real world-forming a real-to-sim-to-real loop. Our approach demonstrates notable capabilities across diverse scenarios, including both prehensile and non-prehensile tasks, showcasing multi-step task execution, spontaneous error recovery, and on-the-fly strategy adjustments. The results highlight IKER's effectiveness in enabling robots to perform multi-step tasks in dynamic environments through iterative reward shaping.
CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World
Authors: Yankai Fu, Qiuxuan Feng, Ning Chen, Zichen Zhou, Mengzhen Liu, Mingdong Wu, Tianxing Chen, Shanyu Rong, Jiaming Liu, Hao Dong, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Imitation Learning, Pose Estimation

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots is a key objective in the field of robotic manipulation. Recent advancements in 3D-based imitation learning have shown promising results, providing an effective pathway to achieve this goal. However, obtaining high-quality 3D representations presents two key problems: (1) the quality of point clouds captured by a single-view camera is significantly affected by factors such as camera resolution, positioning, and occlusions caused by the dexterous hand; (2) the global point clouds lack crucial contact information and spatial correspondences, which are necessary for fine-grained dexterous manipulation tasks. To eliminate these limitations, we propose CordViP, a novel framework that constructs and learns correspondences by leveraging the robust 6D pose estimation of objects and robot proprioception. Specifically, we first introduce the interaction-aware point clouds, which establish correspondences between the object and the hand. These point clouds are then used for our pre-training policy, where we also incorporate object-centric contact maps and hand-arm coordination information, effectively capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance in six real-world tasks, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness of CordViP to different objects, viewpoints, and scenarios. Code and videos are available on https://aureleopku.github.io/CordViP.
Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control across Diverse Postures
Authors: Tao Huang, Junli Ren, Huayi Wang, ZiRui Wang, Qingwei Ben, Muning Wen, Xiao Chen, Jianan Li, Jiangmiao Pang
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00

Standing-up control is crucial for humanoid robots, with the potential for integration into current locomotion and loco-manipulation systems, such as fall recovery. Existing approaches are either limited to simulations that overlook hardware constraints or rely on predefined ground-specific motion trajectories, failing to enable standing up across postures in real-world scenes. To bridge this gap, we present HoST (Humanoid Standing-up Control), a reinforcement learning framework that learns standing-up control from scratch, enabling robust sim-to-real transfer across diverse postures. HoST effectively learns posture-adaptive motions by leveraging a multi-critic architecture and curriculum-based training on diverse simulated terrains. To ensure successful real-world deployment, we constrain the motion with smoothness regularization and implicit motion speed bound to alleviate oscillatory and violent motions on physical hardware, respectively. After simulation-based training, the learned control policies are directly deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our experimental results demonstrate that the controllers achieve smooth, stable, and robust standing-up motions across a wide range of laboratory and outdoor environments. Videos are available at https://taohuang13.github.io/humanoid-standingup.github.io/.
LIR-LIVO: A Lightweight,Robust LiDAR/Vision/Inertial Odometry with Illumination-Resilient Deep Features
Authors: Shujie Zhou, ZiHao Wang, Xinye Dai, Weiwei Song, Shengfeng Gu
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry

In this paper, we propose LIR-LIVO, a lightweight and robust LiDAR-inertial-visual odometry system designed for challenging illumination and degraded environments. The proposed method leverages deep learning-based illumination-resilient features and LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry (LIVO). By incorporating advanced techniques such as uniform depth distribution of features enabled by depth association with LiDAR point clouds and adaptive feature matching utilizing Superpoint and LightGlue, LIR-LIVO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy and robustness with low computational cost. Experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets, including NTU-VIRAL, Hilti'22, and R3LIVE-Dataset. The corresponding results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other SOTA methods on both standard and challenging datasets. Particularly, the proposed method demonstrates robust pose estimation under poor ambient lighting conditions in the Hilti'22 dataset. The code of this work is publicly accessible on GitHub to facilitate advancements in the robotics community.
Generative AI-Enhanced Cooperative MEC of UAVs and Ground Stations for Unmanned Surface Vehicles
Authors: Jiahao You, Ziye Jia, Chao Dong, Qihui Wu, Zhu Han
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

The increasing deployment of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) require computational support and coverage in applications such as maritime search and rescue. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can offer low-cost, flexible aerial services, and ground stations (GSs) can provide powerful supports, which can cooperate to help the USVs in complex scenarios. However, the collaboration between UAVs and GSs for USVs faces challenges of task uncertainties, USVs trajectory uncertainties, heterogeneities, and limited computational resources. To address these issues, we propose a cooperative UAV and GS based robust multi-access edge computing framework to assist USVs in completing computational tasks. Specifically, we formulate the optimization problem of joint task offloading and UAV trajectory to minimize the total execution time, which is in the form of mixed integer nonlinear programming and NP-hard to tackle. Therefore, we propose the algorithm of generative artificial intelligence-enhanced heterogeneous agent proximal policy optimization (GAI-HAPPO). The proposed algorithm integrates GAI models to enhance the actor network ability to model complex environments and extract high-level features, thereby allowing the algorithm to predict uncertainties and adapt to dynamic conditions. Additionally, GAI stabilizes the critic network, addressing the instability of multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing benchmark methods, thus highlighting the potentials in tackling intricate, cross-domain issues in the considered scenarios.
COMBO-Grasp: Learning Constraint-Based Manipulation for Bimanual Occluded Grasping
Authors: Jun Yamada, Alexander L. Mitchell, Jack Collins, Ingmar Posner
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Manipulation

This paper addresses the challenge of occluded robot grasping, i.e. grasping in situations where the desired grasp poses are kinematically infeasible due to environmental constraints such as surface collisions. Traditional robot manipulation approaches struggle with the complexity of non-prehensile or bimanual strategies commonly used by humans in these circumstances. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) methods are unsuitable due to the inherent complexity of the task. In contrast, learning from demonstration requires collecting a significant number of expert demonstrations, which is often infeasible. Instead, inspired by human bimanual manipulation strategies, where two hands coordinate to stabilise and reorient objects, we focus on a bimanual robotic setup to tackle this challenge. In particular, we introduce Constraint-based Manipulation for Bimanual Occluded Grasping (COMBO-Grasp), a learning-based approach which leverages two coordinated policies: a constraint policy trained using self-supervised datasets to generate stabilising poses and a grasping policy trained using RL that reorients and grasps the target object. A key contribution lies in value function-guided policy coordination. Specifically, during RL training for the grasping policy, the constraint policy's output is refined through gradients from a jointly trained value function, improving bimanual coordination and task performance. Lastly, COMBO-Grasp employs teacher-student policy distillation to effectively deploy point cloud-based policies in real-world environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that COMBO-Grasp significantly improves task success rates compared to competitive baseline approaches, with successful generalisation to unseen objects in both simulated and real-world environments.