20 accepted papers
We introduce Select2Plan (S2P), a novel training-free framework for high-level robot planning that leverages off-the-shelf Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for autonomous navigation. Unlike most learning-based approaches that require extensive task- specific training and large-scale data collection, S2…
Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge…
Referring Image Segmentation, the task of finding and segmenting objects in an image conditioned on a natural language description, is crucial for human-robot collaboration. However, current RIS methods often implement visual-text alignment relying on computationally intensive Transformer-based self
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) relies on natural language expressions to segment an object in a video clip. Existing methods restrict reasoning either to independent short clips, losing global context, or process the entire video offline, impairing their application in a streaming fashio…
Few-shot segmentation aims to segment unseen categories from just a handful of annotated examples. This requires mechanisms to identify semantically related objects across images and accurately produce masks. We note that Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), with its prompt-and-propagate mechanism, provides s…
We introduce Select2Plan (S2P), a novel training-free framework for high-level robot planning that leverages off-the-shelf VLMs for autonomous navigation. Unlike most learning-based approaches that require extensive task-specific training and large-scale data collection, S2P overcomes the need for f
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown remarkable performance and scalability across various computer vision tasks. To apply single-scale ViTs to image segmentation, existing methods adopt a convolutional adapter to generate multi-scale features, a pixel decoder to fuse these features, and a Transfor…
Human comprehension of a video stream is naturally broad: in a few instants we are able to understand what is happening the relevance and relationship of objects and forecast what will follow in the near future everything all at once. We believe that - to effectively transfer such an holistic percep…
"Egocentric videos provide a unique perspective into individuals’ daily experiences, yet their unstructured nature presents challenges for perception. In this paper, we introduce , a novel approach aimed at enhancing the comprehension of very-long egocentric videos. Inspired by the human’s ability t…
Recent transformer-based architectures have shown impressive results in the field of image segmentation. Thanks to their flexibility they obtain outstanding performance in multiple segmentation tasks such as semantic and panoptic under a single unified framework. To achieve such impressive performan…
To enable a safe and effective human-robot cooperation, it is crucial to develop models for the identification of human activities. Egocentric vision seems to be a viable solution to solve this problem, and therefore many works provide deep learning solutions to infer human actions from first person
Soft robots are gaining popularity thanks to their intrinsic safety to contacts and adaptability. However, the potentially infinite number of Degrees of Freedom makes their modeling a daunting task, and in many cases only an approximated description is available. This challenge makes reinforcement l…
Data-driven approaches and human inspiration are fundamental to endow robotic manipulators with advanced autonomous grasping capabilities. However, to capitalize upon these two pillars, several aspects need to be considered, which include the number of human examples used for training; the need for
In recent years, the spread of data-driven approaches for robotic grasp synthesis has come with the increasing need for reliable datasets, which can be built e.g. through video labelling. To this goal, it is important to define suitable rules to characterize the main human grasp types, for easily id
The need for users' safety and technology accept-ability has incredibly increased with the deployment of co-bots physically interacting with humans in industrial settings, and for people assistance. A well-studied approach to meet these requirements is to ensure human-like robot motions. Classic sol…
Soft hands are robotic systems that embed compliant elements in their mechanical design. This enables an effective adaptation with the items and the environment, and ultimately, an increase in their grasping performance. These hands come with clear advantages in terms of ease-to-use and robustness i
Recently, the method of choice to exploit robot dynamics for efficient walking is numerical optimization (NO). The main drawback in NO is the computational complexity, which strongly affects the time demand of the solution. Several strategies can be used to make the optimization more treatable and t
Postural hand synergies or eigenpostures are joint angle covariation patterns observed in common grasping tasks. A typical definition associates the geometry of synergy vectors and their hierarchy (relative statistical weight) with the principal component analysis of an experimental covariance matri
Recently, the avenue of adaptable, soft robotic hands has opened simplified opportunities to grasp different items; however, the potential of soft end effectors (SEEs) is still largely unexplored, especially in human-robot interaction. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a simple touch-ba…
An effective robotic wrist represents a key enabling element in robotic manipulation, especially in prosthetics. In this paper, we propose an under-actuated wrist system, which is also adaptable and allows to implement different under-actuation schemes. Our approach leverages upon the idea of soft s…