42 accepted papers
This paper addresses the challenge of developing a realistic urban-driving simulator to accurately model agent behaviors, a crucial component for self-driving car development. Most previous simulators focus on the plausibility of sensor data synthesis, whereas the plausibility of driving behaviors i…
Granular materials (GMs) are formed by a collection of particles. Even if their visual representation is straightforward, it can be seriously affected in the visually constrained environment. Based on frequency features observed in force signals, this paper proposes a non-visual classifier, <bold xm
Granular materials (GMs) are ubiquitous in daily life. Understanding their properties is also important, especially in agriculture and industry. However, existing works require dedicated measurement equipment and also need large human efforts to handle a large number of particles. In this paper, we
"Temporal dependencies are essential in 3D human pose estimation to mitigate depth ambiguity. Previous methods typically use a fixed-length sliding window to capture these dependencies. However, they treat past and future frames equally, ignoring the fact that relying on too many future frames incre…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental task in robotics, driving numerous applications such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. Recent progress on neural implicit SLAM has shown encouraging and impressive results. However, the robustness of neural SLAM, particularly in…
"The rapid growth of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized neural rendering, enabling real-time production of high-quality renderings. However, the previous 3DGS-based methods have limitations in urban scenes due to reliance on initial Structure-from-Motion (SfM) points and difficulties in…
Over the past few years, there has been remarkable progress in research on 3D point clouds and their use in autonomous driving scenarios has become widespread. However, deep learning methods heavily rely on annotated data and often face domain generalization issues. Unlike 2D images whose domains us…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its capability in solving various tasks but is notorious for its low sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose RLingua, a framework that can leverage the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to reduce the sample complexity of RL in roboti
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable reasoning capabilities, making them influential across various fields. However, in robotics, their use has primarily been limited to manipulation planning tasks due to their inherent textual output. This paper addresses…
Despite significant progress in robotic systems for operation within human-centric environments, existing models still heavily rely on explicit human commands to identify and manipulate specific objects. This limits their effectiveness in environments where understanding and acting on implicit human…
Generating safety-critical scenarios is essential for testing and verifying the safety of autonomous vehicles. Traditional optimization techniques suffer from the curse of dimensionality and limit the search space to fixed parameter spaces. To address these challenges, we propose a deep reinforcemen…
In this work, we introduce the Virtual In-Hand Eye Transformer (VIHE), a novel method designed to enhance 3D manipulation capabilities through action-aware view rendering. VIHE autoregressively refines actions in multiple stages by conditioning on rendered views posed from action predictions in the…
Interactive reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning complex robotic tasks. However, the process can be human-intensive due to the requirement of a large amount of interactive feedback. This paper presents a new method that uses scores provided by humans instead of pairwise preferences t…
Given a building floorplan, humans can localize themselves by matching the observation of the environment with the floorplan using geometric, semantic, and topological clues. Inspired by this insight, this paper proposes a learning- based topometric robot localization method FloorplanNet, which impl…
In this work, we first formulate the problem of robotic water scooping using goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. This task is particularly challenging due to the complex dynamics of fluid and the need to achieve multi-modal goals. The policy is required to successfully reach both position goals…
Learning-based approaches to autonomous vehicle planners have the potential to scale to many complicated real-world driving scenarios by leveraging huge amounts of driver demonstrations. However, prior work only learns to estimate a single planning trajectory, while there may be multiple acceptable…
Remarkable progress has been achieved by current depth completion approaches, which produce dense depth maps from sparse depth maps and corresponding color images. However, the performances of these approaches are limited due to the insufficient feature extractions and fusions. In this work, we prop
Simulating camera sensors is a crucial task in autonomous driving. Although neural radiance fields are exceptional at synthesizing photorealistic views in driving simulations, they still fail to generate extrapolated views. This paper proposes to incorporate map priors into neural radiance fields to…
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have become a widely-applied scene representation technique in recent years, showing advantages for robot navigation and manipulation tasks. To further advance the utility of NeRFs for robotics, we propose a transformer-based framework, <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www
We present a visual and inertial-based terrain classification network (VINet) for robotic navigation over different traversable surfaces. We use a novel navigation-based labeling scheme for terrain classification and generalization on unknown surfaces. Our proposed perception method and adaptive sch…
In this letter, we introduce a generalized continuous collision detection (CCD) framework for the mobile robot along the polynomial trajectory in cluttered environments including various static obstacle models. Specifically, we find that the collision conditions between robots and obstacles could be
Excavation of irregular rigid objects in clutter, such as fragmented rocks and wood blocks, is very challenging due to their complex interaction dynamics and highly variable geometries. In this paper, we adopt reinforcement learning (RL) to tackle this challenge and learn policies to plan for a sequ
This paper presents a multi-modal model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approach to the excavation of fragmented rocks, which are very challenging to model due to their highly variable sizes and geometries, and visual occlusions. A multi-modal recurrent neural network (RNN) learns the dynamics o…
Automated excavation is promising to improve the safety and efficiency of excavators, and trajectory planning is one of the most important techniques. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method that integrates data-driven imitation learning and model-based trajectory optimization to generate optim…
"Existing deep learning based stereo matching methods either focus on achieving optimal performances on the target dataset while with poor generalization for other datasets or focus on handling the cross-domain generalization by suppressing the domain sensitive features which results in a significan…
"Existing approaches for unsupervised point cloud pre-training are constrained to either scene-level or point/voxel-level instance discrimination. Scene-level methods tend to lose local details that are crucial for recognizing the road objects, while point/voxel-level methods inherently suffer from…
"Dominated point cloud-based 3D object detectors in autonomous driving scenarios rely heavily on the huge amount of accurately labeled samples, however, 3D annotation in the point cloud is extremely tedious, expensive and time-consuming. To reduce the dependence on large supervision, semi-supervised…
We present a terrain traversability mapping and navigation system (TNS) for autonomous excavator applications in an unstructured environment. We use an efficient approach to extract terrain features from RGB images and 3D point clouds and incorporate them into a global map for planning and navigatio…
With the advance of deep learning technology, automatic video generation from audio or text has become an emerging and promising research topic. In this paper, we present a novel approach to synthesize video from the text. The method builds a phoneme-pose dictionary and trains a generative adversari…
Existing deep learning-based approaches for monocular 3D object detection in autonomous driving often model the object as a rotated 3D cuboid while the object's geometric shape has been ignored. In this work, we propose an approach for incorporating the shape-aware 2D/3D constraints into the 3D dete…
Autonomous excavation for hard or compact materials, especially irregular rigid objects, is challenging due to high variance of geometric and physical properties of objects, and large resistive force during excavation. In this letter, we propose a novel learning-based excavation planning method for
Depth completion aims to recover a dense depth map from a sparse depth map with the corresponding color image as input. Recent approaches mainly formulate the depth completion as a one-stage end-to-end learning task, which outputs dense depth maps directly. However, the feature extraction and superv…
Annotating the LiDAR point cloud is crucial for deep learning-based 3D object detection tasks. Due to expensive labeling costs, data augmentation has been taken as a necessary module and plays an important role in training the neural network. "Copy" and "paste" (i.e., GT-Aug) is the most commonly us…
Vision-based 3D object detection is a research focus in the field of autonomous driving system. While recently proposed pseudo-LiDAR is a promising solution, its performance is severely restricted by the image-based depth estimator, leading to a considerable performance gap against the LiDAR-based c…
3D object detection is a key perception component in autonomous driving. Most recent approaches are based on LiDAR sensors only or fused with cameras. Maps (e.g., High Definition Maps), a basic infrastructure for intelligent vehicles, however, have not been well exploited for boosting object detecti…
In thisletter, we present a novel optimization-based framework for autonomous excavator trajectory generation under task-specific constraints. Traditional excavation trajectory generators over-simplify the geometric trajectory parameterization thereby limiting the space for optimization. To expand t
We present a novel approach to robustly detect and perceive vehicles in different camera views as part of a cooperative vehicle-infrastructure system (CVIS). Our formulation is designed for arbitrary camera views and makes no assumptions about intrinsic or extrinsic parameters. First, to deal with m…
Remarkable results have been achieved by DCNN based self-supervised depth estimation approaches. However, most of these approaches can only handle either day-time or night-time images, while their performance degrades for all-day images due to large domain shift and the variation of illumination bet…
We present a novel task planner - TaskNet for an autonomous excavator based on a data-driven method, which plans feasible task-level sequence by learning from demonstration data. Given a high-level excavation objective, our TaskNet planner can decompose it into sub-tasks, each of which can be furthe…
Holistically understanding an object with its 3D movable parts is essential for visual models of a robot to interact with the world. For example, only by understanding many possible part dynamics of other vehicles (e.g., door or trunk opening, taillight blinking for changing lane), a self-driving ve…
In this paper, we propose a novel compact reachability map representation for excavator motion planning. The constructed reachability map can concisely encode the bucket’s reachable pose and the translation capability limited by excavator’s kinematic structure. By explicitly exploiting the property…