78 accepted papers
Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) offer considerable promise for assisting wearers in complex tasks, yet their adaptability is often constrained by their inherent fixed morphology. While modular reconfigurable designs present a viable solution, applying it to wearable systems introduces critical si
In this paper, we present a low-cost, easy-to-implement sim-to-real framework for biped locomotion that narrows the reality gap using only simulation data, without motion-capture or additional real-world measurements. First, a walking policy for the BRUCE robot is trained in Isaac Gym via reinforcem…
In this paper, we present a low-cost, easy-to-implement sim-to-real framework for biped locomotion that narrows the reality gap using only simulation data, without motion-capture or additional real-world measurements. First, a walking policy for the BRUCE robot is trained in Isaac Gym via reinforcem
Existing polar robots are constrained by limited energy supply, making it difficult to carry out long-term scientific exploration missions, which highlights an urgent demand for energy conservation. An energy-efficient multi-mode motion polar robot is proposed to address this challenge. Both increas…
Trajectory planning plays a pivotal role in robotic motion planning, particularly in achieving time-optimal motion under complex dynamic constraints. Although the Time-Optimal Path Parameterization (TOPP) algorithm effectively addresses trajectory generation under joint torque constraints, classical…
Capturability characterizes a safe region of states for humanoid walking and is most commonly constructed by analyzing the one-dimensional divergent component of motion (DCM) of the center of mass. In this work, by exploiting the mathematical structure of the step-to-step (S2S) dynamics, we characte
The endurance and energy efficiency of drones remain critical challenges in their design and operation. To extend mission duration, numerous studies explored perching mechanisms that enable drones to conserve energy by temporarily suspending flight. This paper presents a new perching drone that util…
Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations. A key challenge is to translate semantic temporal signals into temporally coherent OD patterns while preserving the inherent spa
This letter addresses real-time obstacle avoidance and precision manipulation in on-orbit cable disassembly tasks involving flexible, vibrating cables. We propose a control framework that combines dynamic sphere envelopes with a Steering Force Field enhanced Dynamic Movement Primitive (SFF-DMP) form
Fair dynamic graph embedding is crucial for real-world systems, such as recommendation and social networks. Prior studies impose a single-axis fairness formulation, treating attribute and structural bias as separable artifacts. This overlooks their coupling relationship, under which debiasing along
Current few-shot action recognition methods achieve impressive performance by learning representative prototypes and designing diverse video matching strategies. However, these approaches typically face two critical limitations: i) prototypes learned through implicit sample interactions lack clear s
Existing single object trackers typically treat temporal modeling superficially by passing limited inter-frame information, such as propagated tokens or template updates, without intrinsic temporal supervision learning. To address this limitation, we propose TGTrack, a new unified tracking framework
With growing real-world demands, efficient tracking has received increasing attention. However, most existing methods are limited to RGB inputs and struggle in multi-modal scenarios. Moreover, current multi-modal tracking approaches typically use complex designs, making them too heavy and slow for r
Epilepsy is a widespread neurological disorder characterized by highly patient-specific EEG patterns. Existing EEG-based seizure detection methods either train individualized models for each patient or adapt models pre-trained on known patients to new ones. However, when encountering previously unse
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in the field of video understanding in recent times. Nevertheless, existing video benchmarks predominantly rely on text prompts for evaluation, which often require complex referential language and diminish both the accuracy and effic…
This paper introduces a novel climbing robot for tube-sheet inspection (CRTI) that uses inner wall grippers (IWGs) to grasp tubes, enabling it to hang and crawl beneath the tube-sheet plane. The robot is designed primarily for inspecting steam generators in nuclear power plants. The CRTI based on a
The energy of water surface jumping is easily lost due to the fluidity and splashing of water. As the robot's size and mass increase, its jumping performance is more significantly affected. The key to increasing the robot's takeoff velocity is enhancing the impulse generated by efficient hydrodynami
Next location prediction plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Recently, due to the limitation of existing deep learning methods, attempts have been made to apply large language models (LLMs) to zero-shot next location prediction task. However, they directly generate the final out…
The increasing prevalence of balance disorders presents significant challenges to rehabilitation therapy, prompting the development of rehabilitation robots as effective tools for motion training. To enhance the patient experience and rehabilitation outcomes in human-robot collaborative training, a
Modern visual trackers have achieved robust performance with precisely initialized target bounding boxes. However, providing high-precision initial annotations is a process both labor-intensive and error-prone in real-world scenarios. Interactive initialization (e.g., click-based, scribble-based) pr…
Language models have shown remarkable capabilities in text generation, but precisely controlling their linguistic style remains challenging. Existing methods either lack fine-grained control, require extensive computation, or introduce significant latency. We propose Style Arithmetic (SA), a novel p…
Spherical tensegrity structure has good dynamic stability, support strength and flexibility, and is widely used in the field of mobile robot research. Most of the tensegrity spherical robots deform themselves to make gravity work to realize the motion, but the deformation of both rods and ropes affe
Due to the challenges of processing temporal information, most trackers depend solely on visual discriminability and overlook the unique temporal coherence of video data. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and plug-and-play motion prompt tracking method. It can be easily integrated into existin…
High-quality image captions are essential for improving modality alignment and visual understanding in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, the scarcity of ultra-detailed image caption data limits further advancements. This paper presents a systematic pipeline for generating high-quality,
In Natural Language Processing(NLP), Event Temporal Relation Extraction (ETRE) is to recognize the temporal relations of two events. Prior studies have noted the importance of language models for ETRE. However, the restricted pre-trained knowledge of Small Language Models(SLMs) limits their capabili
Force estimation is the core indicator for evaluating the performance of tactile sensors, and it is also the key technical path to achieving precise force feedback mechanisms. This study proposes a design method for a visual tactile sensor (VBTS) that integrates a magnetic perception mechanism, and
Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs) are wearable robots that serve as extra limbs, assisting wearers in task completion. The strong coupling between SRLs and wearers results in wearer movements influencing SRLs' actions and the forces exerted on mechanisms during operations. The wearer's movements le
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) based on linear aggregation have been widely applied across various domains due to their exceptional performance. To enhance performance, these networks often utilize the graph Laplacian norm to suppress the propagation of information from first-order neighbors.…
Despite the impressive capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in vision-language tasks, they are prone to hallucinations in real-world scenarios. This paper investigates the hallucination phenomenon in MLLMs from the perspective of modality conflict. Unlike existing works focusing…
Compared with traditional in-pipe robots, tensegrity robots have exhibited many advantages such as light-weight, compliant, collapsible, low-cost, and rapidly manufacturable characteristics. However, published tensegrity in-pipe robots still have limited load capacity, because they rely on the stres
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have proven effective in exploring the vast solution spaces typical of graph-structured combinatorial problems. However, traditional encoding schemes, such as binary or numerical representations, often fail to straightforwardly capture the intricate structural propertie…
Trajectory modeling, which includes research on trajectory data pattern mining and future prediction, has widespread applications in areas such as life services, urban transportation, and public administration. Numerous methods have been proposed to address specific problems within trajectory modeli…
Representation learning of urban spatial-temporal data is fundamental and critical, serving a wide range of intelligent applications. Given that road networks and trajectories are inherently interrelated, their joint representation learning can significantly enhance the accuracy and utility of these…
Exoskeleton technology holds significant promise within the human-centric paradigm of Industry 5.0 for mitigating work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). However, existing systems often struggle with mismatched assistive torque and inefficient human-machine collaboration under dynamic loadin
In recent years, significant progress has been made in the prototype design and control methodologies of modular snake robots. However, there is still relatively little research on the potential enabled by the active morphological transformation of robots. This paper presents a novel modular snake r
The early diagnosis of focal liver lesions (FLLs) plays a key role in the successful treatment of liver cancer. To effectively diagnose focal liver lesions, we used contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) to diagnose FLLs. A hybrid CNN and Transformer network is used to extract local and global spatio-t…
Magnetic manipulation of miniature soft or liquid robots capable of deformation has gained increasing attention and is demonstrating great potential in small-scale applications, such as drug delivery, minimal invasive surgery, and manipulation of delicate objects. In this study, we introduce a liqui
Modular self-reconfigurable robots (MSRRs) have significantly progressed in hardware and algorithm development. However, they are generally used in terrestrial environments, leaving broad scenarios to be explored and benefited. This letter presents a novel amphibious self-reconfigurable robot (ASRR)
Previous research has shown that load-bearing with elastic suspension backpacks improves human biomechanics and reduces human energy expenditure. Constant-force suspension backpacks (CFSB) with zero stiffness were developed to minimize the inertial force of loads. However, there is a mismatch betwee
Legal question answering (LQA) aims to bridge the gap between the limited availability of legal professionals and the high demand for legal assistance. Traditional LQA approaches typically either select the optimal answers from an answer set or extract answers from law texts. However, they often str…
Preference-based optimizing methods have shown their advantages and potential in exploring individual, comfortable, and effective control strategies and assistance parameters of exoskeletons during locomotion. Research indicates that compared with naive wearers, knowledgeable wearers with abundant e…
Mechanisms that balance wide range of motion(ROM) with increased stiffness are gradually gaining attention in robotic applications. This letter proposed kinematic methods for the spatial interlocking 3-UU mechanism based on Lie Group, which consists of a fixed base and a moving platform connected by
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of tasks, but this strong performance often comes with the high expense of using paid API services. In this paper, we are motivated to study building an LLM "cascade" to save the cost of using LLMs, particu…
Coverage path planning (CPP) is the problem of finding a path that covers the entire free space of a confined area, with applications ranging from robotic lawn mowing to search-and-rescue. When the environment is unknown, the path needs to be planned online while mapping the environment, which canno…
This study proposes a pose and path planning method based on direction fields, addressing challenges in industrial robot surface machining. These challenges include limited machining accuracy and difficult path planning arising from the robot's low stiffness and high nonlinearity between joint and o
Inimitation learning, it is often assumed the demonstration data are optimal, even though they are imperfect in practice. The imperfect demonstrations result from expert errors, large-scale demonstration data, and the non-convexity of the solution space of the task. In this letter, we propose a new
Text style transfer (TST) aims to vary the style polarity of text while preserving the semantic content. Although recent advancements have demonstrated remarkable progress in short TST, it remains a relatively straightforward task with limited practical applications. The more comprehensive long TST…
Research has indicated that exoskeletons can assist human movement, but due to the influence of additional weight and challenges in control strategy design, only a few exoskeletons effectively reduce the wearers’ metabolic costs during running. This paper proposes an innovative and efficient hip-ass…
Existing in-pipe robots have insufficient adaptability when dealing with accidents in unfamiliar pipe environments. Developing a pipe robot that can be designed and manufactured quickly is one solution. The tensegrity structure is a self-stressing spatial structure formed by the interaction of rigid…
The 4-DOF (3T1R) 4 <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">P</u> Pa-2PaR parallel manipulator is developed for high-speed pick-and-place operations. However, conventional trajectory planning methods in either active-joint space or Cartesia
Water striders slide agilely and quickly on the water surface with the spatial elliptical rowing trajectory, it has attracted the research interest of scholars. But the existing bionic robots did not realize the level of it and generally suffer from slow speed and weak load capacity. Inspired by the
Most current in-pipe robots are usually designed for pipes of a specific size. In this letter, we propose a novel inchworm-like in-pipe robot based on the concept of tensegrity for moving in pipes with varying diameters. Firstly, a tensegrity-based robotic module capable of two kinds of shape change
Soft grippers exhibit impressive grasping performance with great simplicity, compliance, adaptability, and robustness. However, it is a great challenge for them to achieve high-load carrying capacity. Here, we present a soft fabric gripper to achieve high-load carrying capacity. The gripper features
The lever mechanism is widely used in variable stiffness actuators for its advantages of a wide stiffness regulation range and fast response. However, online stiffness estimation for this mechanism has not been fully investigated. The high nonlinearity of joint flexibility and the dynamic coupling b
Since the advent of flying machines, engineers have strived to develop aircraft that can fly as flexibly as birds. From the original traditional control surface to the controllable morphing wing design, they all aim to improve the flight performance of drones, including the load capacity, maneuverab
Charge prediction is to automatically predict the judgemental charges for legal cases. To convict a person/unit of a charge, the case description must contain matching instances of the constitutive elements (CEs) of that charge. This knowledge of CEs is a valuable guide for the judge in making final…
Users expect their queries to be answered by search systems, regardless of the query’s surface form, which include keyword queries and natural questions. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of Search and QA systems may fail to correctly interpret semantically equivalent inputs if this de…
Visual place recognition (VPR) is the process of identifying previously visited places using visual information. It is crucial for a robot to achieve fast and accurate VPR under appearance and viewpoint changes. Inspired by human perception intuition, this letter proposes a lightweight semantic imag
Daily manipulation tasks are characterized by geometric primitives related to actions and object shapes. Such geometric descriptors are poorly represented by only using Cartesian coordinate systems. In this paper, we propose a learning approach to extract the optimal representation from a dictionary…
Manipulation of deformable objects is an essential task in surgery, the textile industry, and household tasks, such as washing, hanging, and folding clothes. However, current studies on fabric manipulation, have rarely considered the scenes in which rigid objects have to be wrapped by fabrics. This
Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRL) are new types of wearable robots used as the third limb to work with humans. The device is designed to provide the wearer with better auxiliary ability. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Series-Parallel-Reconfigurable Tendon-driven Supernumerary
As one of the most challenging and practical segmentation tasks, open-world semantic segmentation requires the model to segment the anomaly regions in the images and incrementally learn to segment out-of-distribution (OOD) objects, especially under a few-shot condition. The current state-of-the-art…
Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging solution in industry settings as it allows using existing si…
Ensuring the motion consistency of human and exoskeletons is the key to the research of wearable exoskeleton robots. However, as the complexity of the coupling of sliding and rolling motion in human joint tissue, it is hard to depict the dynamic states of the joint axis. Exploring the changed human
With the popularity of multi-modal sensors, visible-thermal (RGB-T) object tracking is to achieve robust performance and wider application scenarios with the guidance of objects' temperature information. However, the lack of paired training samples is the main bottleneck for unlocking the power of R…
This article proposed a humanoid obstacle passability strategy (OPS) to enhance human-exoskeleton integrated system to cross over multi-obstacle in sagittal plane. A hybrid bounding box integrated with closeness regression in L-shape section and synchronous convergence in convex hull search (HBB-LC)
Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) are conversational agents whose goal is to help humans perform real-world tasks. CTAs can help in exploring available tasks, answering task-specific questions and guiding users through step-by-step instructions. In this work, we present Wizard of Tasks, the firs…
This paper presents a new variable stiffness actuator based on a second-order lever mechanism which has wide stiffness regulation range. By employing a novel symmetric structure design and improving the load capacity of the stiffness regulation module, the proposed actuator also shows well performan…
In federated learning (FL), fair and accurate measurement of the contribution of each federated participant is of great significance. The level of contribution not only provides a rational metric for distributing financial benefits among federated participants, but also helps to discover malicious p…
Deep learning based visual trackers entail offline pre-training on large volumes of video datasets with accurate bounding box annotations that are labor-expensive to achieve. We present a new framework to facilitate bounding box annotations for video sequences, which investigates a selection-and-ref…
In industry assembly lines, parts feeding machines are widely employed as the prologue of the whole procedure. They play the role of sorting the parts randomly placed in bins to the state with specified pose. With the help of the parts feeding machines, the subsequent assembly processes by robot arm…
Routing newly posted questions (a.k.a cold questions) to potential answerers with suitable expertise in Community Question Answering sites (CQAs) is an important and challenging task. The existing methods either focus only on embedding the graph structural information and are less effective for newl…
The amazing ability of water striders on water surface has attracted many scholars. Especially the flexible driving mechanism enable the driving legs conform to the deformation of the water surface, which effectively improving water striders’ floating ability and stability. However, the current rese…
Aiming at mimicking the jumping locomotion of water striders, a new continuous jumping robot on water is proposed. Compared with the horizontal rowing motion, the jumping capability of water striders is challengeable to imitate, since the impact force on water is easy to cause the sinking of the rob
Pathological tremor is defined as a roughly sinusoidal movement and usually occurs in the upper limb impacting individuals activities of daily livings. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is proposed as a potential alternative for cancelling the pathological tremor. However, the feasibility and
Aiming at mimicking water strider's water-surface locomotion, this study proposes a new miniature surface tension-driven robot. A key feature of this robot is that its actuating legs possess ellipse-like spatial trajectories like water strider by using a cam-link mechanism, and never pierces water s…
The Bio-inspired Behavior-Based Bipedal Locomotion Control (B4LC) system consists of control units encapsulating feed-forward and feedback mechanisms, namely motor patterns and reflexes. To optimize the performance of motor patterns and reflexes in terms of stable locomotion on both even and uneven…