36 accepted papers
Tactile and proximity sensing is fundamental for achieving autonomous robotic manipulation and safe human-robot interaction. However, traditional dual-mode sensors often face challenges such as environmental interference and the perception gap between far-field vision and near-field contact. This st…
In this work, we present CollabVLA, a self-reflective vision-language-action framework that transforms a standard visuomotor policy into a collaborative assistant. CollabVLA tackles key limitations of prior VLAs, including domain overfitting, non-interpretable reasoning, and the high latency of auxi…
The competition among a swarm often brings about astonishing potential beyond the ordinary. This paper proposes an approach for enhancing autonomous obstacle avoidance in aerial robots through competitive training. By constructing a multi-agent environment, we introduce competition between individua
Operating household appliances by reading and understanding user manuals remains a fundamental and challenging problem in robotics. Recent works leverage large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to interpret manuals, improving appliance operation success. However, these approac…
Terrain classification is crucial for robotic navigation especially in unknown environment. Existing terrain classification methods usually have high requirements for environment conditions and robot motions, making them challenging to apply to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we develop a novel
Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a contactless and non-invasive imaging technique, which visualizes the internal permittivity distribution around a region utilizing boundary capacitance measurements. It has been widely used in the fields of object classification, tactile sensing and multip
Current service robots suffer from limited natural language communication abilities, heavy reliance on predefined commands, ongoing human intervention, and, most notably, a lack of proactive collaboration awareness in human-populated environments. This results in narrow applicability and low utility
In real-world scenarios, many robotic manipulation tasks are hindered by occlusions and limited fields of view, posing significant challenges for passive observation-based models that rely on fixed or wrist-mounted cameras. In this letter, we investigate the problem of robotic manipulation under lim
Tactile sensing plays a critical role in enabling robots to interact safely with target objects in dynamic and unstructured environments. While various tactile sensors based on different sensing principles or different sensitive materials have been proposed, the development of flexible large-area ta…
Training an agent to adapt to specific tasks through co-optimization of morphology and control has widely attracted attention. However, whether there exists an optimal configuration and tactics for agents in a multiagent competition scenario is still an issue that is challenging to definitively conc…
Multi-agent embodied tasks have been studied in indoor visual environments, but most of the existing research focuses on homogeneous multi-agent tasks. Heterogeneous multi-agent tasks are common in real-world scenarios, and the collaboration strategy among heterogeneous agents with different capabil
Compared with the widely investigated homogeneous multi-robot collaboration, heterogeneous robots with different capabilities can provide a more efficient and flexible collaboration for more complex tasks. In this paper, we consider a more challenging heterogeneous ad hoc teamwork collaboration prob…
It is common for us to feel pressure in a competition environment, which arises from the desire to obtain success comparing with other individuals or opponents. Although we might get anxious under the pressure, it could also be a drive for us to stimulate our potentials to the best in order to keep…
It is critical to perceive physical contact for intelligent robots to safely interact in dynamic, unstructured environments. As physical contacts can occur at any location, a well-performing tactile sensing system should be able to deploy a large area on robotic surface. Some researchers have implem…
It has always been expected that the robot can understand the natural language instruction and thus a more natural human-robot interaction is achieved. Currently, the robot usually interprets the instruction by visually grounding the textual information to its surroundings, while it may be not enoug…
Referring expressions are commonly used when referring to a specific target in people's daily dialogue. In this paper, we develop a novel task of audio-visual grounding referring expression for robotic manipulation. The robot leverages both the audio and visual information to understand the referrin…
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has been an important task in the field of Robotics and Computer Vision. However, most existing vision-and-language navigation models only use features extracted from RGB observation as input, while robots can utilize depth sensors in the real world. Existing res…
In human-robots collaboration scenarios, a human would give robots an instruction that is intuitive for the human himself to accomplish. However, the instruction given to robots is likely ambiguous for them to understand as some information is implicit in the instruction. Therefore, it is necessary…
In visual semantic navigation, the robot navigates to a target object with egocentric visual observations and the class label of the target is given. It is a meaningful task inspiring a surge of relevant research. However, most of the existing models are only effective for single-agent navigation, a
Ithas always been a great challenge for the robot to navigate in the visual world following natural language instructions. Recently, several tasks such as the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) and Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments (REVERIE) are proposed tryin
Deep reinforcement learning has made significant progress in robotic manipulation tasks and it works well in the ideal disturbance-free environment. However, in a real-world environment, both internal and external disturbances are inevitable, thus the performance of the trained policy will dramatica…
Semantic scene graph provides an effective way for intelligent agents to better understand the environment and it has been extensively used in many robotic applications. Existing work mainly focuses on generating the scene graph from the sensory information collected from a pre-defined path, while t…
Robots are usually equipped with cameras to explore the indoor scene and it is expected that the robot can well describe the scene with natural language. Although some great success has been achieved in image and video captioning technology, especially on many public datasets, the caption generated…
We investigate a new AI task --- Multi-Agent Interactive Question Answering --- where several agents explore the scene jointly in interactive environments to answer a question. To cooperate efficiently and answer accurately, agents must be well-organized to have balanced work division and share know…
The sound source separation problem has many useful applications in the field of robotics, such as human-robot interaction, scene understanding, etc. However, it remains a very challenging problem. In this paper, we utilize both visual and audio information of videos to perform the sound source sepa…
Embodiment is an important characteristic for all intelligent agents (creatures and robots), while existing scene description tasks mainly focus on analyzing images passively and the semantic understanding of the scenario is separated from the interaction between the agent and the environment. In th…
Unsupervised learning methods based on contrastive learning have drawn increasing attention and achieved promising results. Most of them aim to learn representations invariant to instance-level variations, which are provided by different views of the same instance. In this paper, we propose Invarian…
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 stably. The suction cup is used for lifting the object from the clutter first and t…
Robots are usually equipped with microphones and cameras to perceive and understand the physical world. Though visual object detection technology has achieved great success, the detection in other modalities remains unsolved. In this paper, we establish a novel robotic sound-indicated visual object…
Humans' fingertips can perceive not only the magnitude and the direction of force but also the texture of object. When we grasp an object, the surface texture sensing of the fingertip helps us recognize the object and the force feeling that is parallel to the skin helps us grasp stably. Focusing on…
The robotic grasp detection is a great challenge in the area of robotics. Previous work mainly employs the visual approaches to solve this problem. In this paper, a hybrid deep architecture combining the visual and tactile sensing for robotic grasp detection is proposed. We have demonstrated that th…
In this paper, we exploit the intrinsic relation between different adjective labels and develop a novel multilabel dictionary learning and sparse coding method which is improved by introducing the structured output association information. Such a method makes use of the label correlation information…
Grasp an object from a stack of objects in real-time is still a challenge in robotics. This requires the robot to have the ability of both fast object discovery and grasp detection: a target object should be picked out from the stack first and then a proper grasp configuration is applied to grasp th
Compressed sensing has shown great potential in reducing data acquisition time in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Recently, a spread spectrum compressed sensing MRI method modulates an image with a quadratic phase. It performs better than the conventional compressed sensing MRI with variable densi…
Automatic discovery of topical objects from a set of image collections provides more strong cognitive capability of robot to understand the unstructured environment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on dictionary learning for such a task. Different from existing work which utilizes…
Robotic grasping has been hindered by the inability of robots to perceive unstructured environments. Because these environments can be complex or dynamic, it is important to obtain additional and precise sensing information just before grasping. This paper expands upon the pretouch modality by intro…