The remote human operator's user interface (UI) is an important link to make the robot an efficient extension of the operator's perception and action. In rescue applications, several studies have investigated ...
The remote human operator's user interface (UI) is an important link to make the robot an efficient extension of the operator's perception and action. In rescue applications, several studies have investigated the design of operator interfaces based on observations during major robotics competitions or field deployments. Based on this research, guidelines for good interface design were empirically identified. The investigations on the UIs of teams participating in competitions are often based on external observations during UI application, which may miss some relevant requirements for UI flexibility. In this work, we present an open-source and flexibly configurable user interface based on established guidelines and its exemplary use for wheeled, tracked, and walking robots. We explain the design decisions and cover the insights we have gained during its highly successful applications in multiple robotics competitions and evaluations. The presented UI can also be adapted for other robots with little effort and is available as open source.
Robots assist humans in various activities, from daily living to collaborative manufacturing. Because they have biased learning sources (e.g., data, demonstrations, human feedback), robots inevitably have discriminato...
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ISBN:
(数字)9798350375022
ISBN:
(纸本)9798350375039
Robots assist humans in various activities, from daily living to collaborative manufacturing. Because they have biased learning sources (e.g., data, demonstrations, human feedback), robots inevitably have discriminatory performance regarding individual differences (e.g., skin color, mobility, appearance); discriminatory performance will undermine robots’ service quality, causes request ignorance and response delay, and even cause emotional offenses. Therefore, mitigating biases is critically important for delivering fair robotic services. In this paper, we design a bias-mitigation method – Fairness-Sensitive Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning (FSPGRL), to help robots self-identify and correct biased behaviors. FSP-GRL identifies bias by examining the abnormal updates along particular gradients and updates the policy network to provide fair decisions. To validate FSPGRL’s effectiveness, we designed a human-centered service scenario: a robot serving people in a restaurant. With a user study involving 24 humans and 1,000 service demonstrations, FSPGRL has proven effective in maintaining fairness during robot services.
In the realm of household robotics, the Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task empowers agents to adeptly traverse unfamiliar environments and locate objects from novel categories without prior explicit training. Thi...
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In the realm of household robotics, the Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task empowers agents to adeptly traverse unfamiliar environments and locate objects from novel categories without prior explicit training. This paper introduces VoroNav, a novel semantic exploration framework that proposes the Reduced Voronoi Graph to extract exploratory paths and planning nodes from a semantic map constructed in real time. By harnessing topological and semantic information, VoroNav designs text-based descriptions of paths and images that are readily interpretable by a large language model (LLM). In particular, our approach presents a synergy of path and farsight descriptions to represent the environmental context, enabling LLM to apply commonsense reasoning to ascertain waypoints for navigation. Extensive evaluation on HM3D and HSSD validates VoroNav surpasses existing benchmarks in both success rate and exploration efficiency (absolute improvement: +2.8% Success and +3.7% SPL on HM3D, +2.6% Success and +3.8% SPL on HSSD). Additionally introduced metrics that evaluate obstacle avoidance proficiency and perceptual efficiency further corroborate the enhancements achieved by our method in ZSON planning. Copyright 2024 by the author(s)
Learning fine-grained movements is a challenging topic in robotics, particularly in the context of robotic hands. One specific instance of this challenge is the acquisition of fingerspelling sign language in robots. I...
Learning fine-grained movements is a challenging topic in robotics, particularly in the context of robotic hands. One specific instance of this challenge is the acquisition of fingerspelling sign language in robots. In this paper, we propose an approach for learning dexterous motor imitation from video examples without additional information. To achieve this, we first build a URDF model of a robotic hand with a single actuator for each joint. We then leverage pre-trained deep vision models to extract the 3D pose of the hand from RGB videos. Next, using state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms for motion imitation (namely, proximal policy optimization and soft actor-critic), we train a policy to reproduce the movement extracted from the demonstrations. We identify the optimal set of hyperparameters for imitation based on a reference motion. Finally, we demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by testing it on six different tasks, corresponding to fingerspelled letters. Our results show that our approach is able to successfully imitate these fine-grained movements without additional information, highlighting its potential for real-world applications in robotics.
The response of a GaN nanopillar based tactile sensor to a shear force is investigated. Two different materials were used to apply the force to understand how the tactile sensor responds to different slipping conditio...
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In this paper, we present a novel visual servoing (VS) approach based on latent Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs), that explores the application of generative models for vision-based navigation of UAVs ...
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In this paper, a novel robotic grasping system is established to automatically pick up objects in cluttered scenes. A composite robotic hand composed of a suction cup and a gripper is designed for grasping the object ...
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Accurate segmentation of surgical instrument tip is an important task for enabling downstream applications in robotic surgery, such as surgical skill assessment, tool-tissue interaction and deformation modeling, as we...
Accurate segmentation of surgical instrument tip is an important task for enabling downstream applications in robotic surgery, such as surgical skill assessment, tool-tissue interaction and deformation modeling, as well as surgical autonomy. However, this task is very challenging due to the small sizes of surgical instrument tips, and significant variance of surgical scenes across different procedures. Although much effort has been made on visual-based methods, existing segmentation models still suffer from low robustness thus not usable in practice. Fortunately, kinematics data from the robotic system can provide reliable prior for instrument location, which is consistent regardless of different surgery types. To make use of such multi-modal information, we propose a novel visual-kinematics graph learning framework to accurately segment the instrument tip given various surgical procedures. Specifically, a graph learning framework is proposed to encode relational features of instrument parts from both image and kinematics. Next, a cross-modal contrastive loss is designed to incorporate robust geometric prior from kinematics to image for tip segmentation. We have conducted experiments on a private paired visual-kinematics dataset including multiple procedures, i.e., prostatectomy, total mesorectal excision, fundoplication and distal gastrectomy on cadaver, and distal gastrectomy on porcine. The leave-one-procedure-out cross validation demon-strated that our proposed multi-modal segmentation method significantly outperformed current image-based state-of-the-art approaches, exceeding averagely 11.2% on Dice.
The challenges inherent in long-horizon tasks in robotics persist due to the typical inefficient exploration and sparse rewards in traditional reinforcement learning approaches. To address these challenges, we have de...
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Various structures of self-organization processes in multivariable dynamic control systems of socio-technical dynamic objects are considered on the example of scientific schools and educational systems. The study of t...
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