10 accepted papers
Robots are essential for tasks that are hazardous or beyond human capabilities. However, the results of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean (SubT) Challenge revealed that despite various techniques for robot autonomy, human input is still required in some complex situa
Human-robot handover is a key capability of service robots, such as those used to perform routine logistical tasks for healthcare workers. Recent algorithms have achieved tremendous advances in object-agnostic end-to-end planar grasping with up to six degrees of freedom (DoF); however, compiling the
This paper presents an easy-to-deploy, virtual reality-based teleoperation system for controlling a robot arm. The proposed system is based on a consumer-grade virtual reality device (Oculus Quest 2) with a low-cost robot arm (a LoCoBot) to allow easy replication and set up. The proposed Work-from-H…
When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. Although most robots are designed to work in the spaces created for humans, many
Recent failures in real-world self-driving tests have suggested a paradigm shift from directly learning in real-world roads to building a high-fidelity driving simulator as an alternative, effective, and safe tool to handle intricate traffic environments in urban areas. To date, traffic simulation c…
The Amazon Picking Challenge and the Amazon Robotics Challenge have shown significant progress in object picking from a cluttered scene, yet object placement remains challenging. It is useful to have pose-aware placement based on human and machine readable pieces on an object. For example, the brand…
Navigation in pedestrian environments is critical to enabling independent mobility for the blind and visually impaired (BVI) in their daily lives. White canes have been commonly used to obtain contact feedback for following walls, curbs, or man-made trails, whereas guide dogs can assist in avoiding…
Urban zoning enables various applications in land use analysis and urban planning. As cities evolve, it is important to constantly update the zoning maps of cities to reflect urban pattern changes. This paper proposes a method for automatic urban zoning using higher-order Markov random fields (HO-MR…
Transferring objects from one place to another place is a common task performed by human in daily life. During this process, it is usually intuitive for humans to choose an object as a proper container and to use an efficient pose to carry objects; yet, it is non-trivial for current computer vision…
The visual perception of object affordances has emerged as a useful ingredient for building powerful computer vision and robotic applications. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to reason about liquid containability - the affordance of containing liquid. Our approach analyzes container obje…