44 accepted papers
Reliable navigation in complex urban environments is challenging due to frequent GNSS signal outages and multipath interference. A practical mitigation is to incorporate LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) to bound drift during GNSS gaps and maintain local accuracy. However, commonly adopted scan-to-map c
We introduce RMP-YOLO, a unified framework designed to provide robust motion predictions even with incomplete input data. Our key insight stems from the observation that complete and reliable historical trajectory data plays a pivotal role in ensuring accurate motion prediction. Therefore, we propos
This paper presents a novel control framework that integrates reservoir computing (RC) with Tube model predictive control (Tube-MPC) for robust path following in quadrotor autonomous underwater vehicles (QAUVs) under sudden fault conditions. The proposed RC-Tube-MPC leverages the dynamic modeling ca
Robotic compliance control is critical for delicate tasks such as electronic connector assembly, where precise force regulation and adaptability are paramount. However, traditional methods often struggle with modeling inaccuracies and sensor noise. Inspired by human adaptability in complex assembly
Imitation learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training visuo-motor policies in robotic manipulation. In real-world scenarios, visuo-motor policies are required to be effective, sample-efficient, and capable of adapting to dynamic environments. A key factor influencing these capabilitie
This paper presents a novel approach for affordance-informed robotic manipulation by introducing 3D keypoints to enhance the understanding of object parts’ functionality. The proposed approach provides direct information about what the potential use of objects is, as well as guidance on where and ho…
For humans, dense bin packing heavily relies on force perception. However, current robotic packing studies only focus on the visual input or adopt auxiliary push-to-place actions to eliminate gaps, suffering from high time expenditure and poor robustness. To address such limitations, we first introd…
Realistic and diverse traffic scenarios in large quantities are crucial for the development and validation of autonomous driving systems. However, owing to numerous difficulties in the data collection process and the reliance on intensive annotations, real-world datasets lack sufficient quantity and
Robotic manipulation is a grand domain that primarily involves the use of robotic arms to interact with objects in the environment. While proposed methods have achieved advancements in grasping objects, they rely heavily on extensive training data that presents a significant challenge due to the lab…
In the realm of robotic grasping, achieving accurate and reliable interactions with the environment is a pivotal challenge. Traditional methods of grasp planning methods utilizing partial point clouds derived from depth image often suffer from reduced scene understanding due to occlusion, ultimately…
Category-level object pose estimation involves estimating the 6D pose and the 3D metric size of objects from predetermined categories. While recent approaches take categorical shape prior information as reference to improve pose estimation accuracy, the single-stage network design and training manne…
This letter investigates the multi-robot patrolling (MuRP) problem in a discrete environment with the objective of achieving uniform node coverage probability distribution by the robot team. Existing MuRP solutions for uniform node coverage either involve high computational complexity for the global
Trajectory planning plays a crucial role in autonomous driving systems, as it is tasked to generate feasible trajectories under highly dynamic scenarios within the time constraint. This paper proposes a novel two-stage coarse-to-fine framework for efficient sampling-based trajectory planning. The pr…
Hot-NetVLAD implements a hot-spot detector on a learned local key-patch descriptor algorithm for Visual Place Recognition (VPR), thereby greatly cutting down the size of features extracted. The hot-spots pinpoint which regions are crucial for comparison when performing VPR. As hot-spots land on only
Autonomous driving in rain remains challenging. Rain causes sensor performance degradation that can affect sensor measurement quality. During the rain, lasers may suffer from energy loss due to raindrop absorption. As a result, some laser measurements reflected from obstacles may not be recognized b…
Sensor degradation is one of the major challenges for autonomous driving. During the rain, the interference from raindrops can negatively influence LiDAR measurements. For example, valid measurements could be reduced during the rain, and some measurements may become noisy. Unreliable measurements ca…
Autonomous driving in the rain remains a challenge. One main problem is performance degradation caused by rain. This work introduces a new dataset to study this problem. Our dataset is collected from a full-scale vehicle equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor and multiple forward-facing cameras under vario…
Adverse weather has raised a big challenge for autonomous vehicles. Unreliable measurements due to sensor degradation could seriously affect the performance of autonomous driving tasks, such as perception and localization. In this work, we study sensor degradation in rainy weather and present a nove…
Trajectory planning is a critical component in autonomous vehicles directly responsible for driving safety and efficiency during deployment. The ability to find the optimal trajectory in real-time is critical for autonomous driving. This paper presents a novel general framework using the Fast Iterat
Autonomous vehicles on city roads and especially in pedestrian environments require agility to navigate narrow passages and turn in tight spaces, leading to the need for a real-time, robust and adaptable controller. In this paper, we present orientation and context aware controllers for autonomous v…
Autonomous driving in rainy conditions remains a big challenge. One of the issues is sensor degradation. LiDAR is commonly used in autonomous driving systems to perceive and understand surrounding environments. However, LiDAR performance can be degraded by rain, thereby influencing other system perf…
Motions are reflected in videos as the movement of pixels, and actions are essentially patterns of inconsistent motions between the foreground and the background. To well distinguish the actions, especially those with complicated spatio-temporal interactions, correctly locating the prominent motion…
Deep learning technique has yielded significant improvements in point cloud completion with the aim of completing missing object shapes from partial inputs. However, most existing methods fail to recover realistic structures due to over-smoothing of fine-grained details. In this paper, we develop a…
Many indoor spaces have constantly changing layouts and may not be mapped by an autonomous vehicle, yet maps such as floor plans or evacuation maps of these places are common. We propose a method for an autonomous robot to localize itself on such maps with inconsistent scale using Stochastic Gradien…
In view of the difficulty in reconstructing object details in point cloud completion, we propose a shape prior learning method for object completion. The shape priors include geometric information in both complete and the partial point clouds. We design a feature alignment strategy to learn the shap…
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is fundamental to robotic manipulation and grasping. Previous methods follow a local optimization approach which minimizes the distance between closest point pairs to handle the rotation ambiguity of symmetric objects. In this work, we propose a novel discrete- con…
In recent years, self-supervised methods for monocular depth estimation has rapidly become an significant branch of depth estimation task, especially for autonomous driving applications. Despite the high overall precision achieved, current methods still suffer from a) imprecise object-level depth in…
Large-scale point cloud generated from 3D sensors is more accurate than its image-based counterpart. However, it is seldom used in visual pose estimation due to the difficulty in obtaining 2D-3D image to point cloud correspondences. In this paper, we propose the 2D3D-MatchNet - an end-to-end deep ne…
In this paper, we focus on a rain removal task from a single image of the urban street scene for autonomous driving in rain. We develop a Convolutional Neural Network which takes a rainy image as input, and directly recovers a clean image in the presence of rain streaks, atmospheric veiling effect (…
We focus on the task of amodal 3D object detection, which is to predict object locations, dimensions, poses and categories in the real world. We introduce a 3D Convolutional Neural Network that takes a volumetric representation of an indoor scene as input and predicts 3D object bounding boxes, objec…
Autonomous driving requires 3D perception of vehicles and other objects in the in environment. Much of the current methods support 2D vehicle detection. This paper proposes a flexible pipeline to adopt any 2D detection network and fuse it with a 3D point cloud to generate 3D information with minimum…
In this paper, we consider the problem of data association in feature cloud matching. While Joint Compatibility (JC) test is a widely adopted technique for searching the global optimal data association, it becomes less restrictive as more features are well matched. The early well-matched features co…
This paper introduces a map-based localization method aiming to increase robustness in rainy conditions. This method utilizes two types of features: ground reflectivity features and vertical features extracted from 3D LIDAR scans and builds vehicle pose belief with two filters: a histogram filter an…
Environment understanding, object detection and recognition are crucial skills for robots operating in the real world. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network with multi-task objectives: object detection and scene classification in one unified architecture. The proposed network reas…
We present a real-time vehicle detection and tracking system to accomplish the complex task of driving behavior analysis in urban environments. We propose a robust fusion system that combines a monocular camera and a 2D Lidar. This system takes advantage of three key components: robust vehicle detec…
Technologies in autonomous vehicles have seen dramatic advances in recent years; however, it still lacks of robust perception systems for car detection. With the recent development in deep learning research, in this paper, we propose a LIDAR and vision fusion system for car detection through the dee…
Silicone-based soft pneumatic actuator (SPA) is one of the key interests in soft robotic research. Currently, most of the SPAs bear a similar one-dimensional rod-like shape, regardless of their design and fabrication. There are few prototypes of SPAs with two-dimensional initial shapes, however, the…
This paper introduces a new concept of building soft pneumatic structures by assembling modular units of fabric-based rotary actuators (FRAs) and beams. Upon pressurization, the inner folds of FRA would expand, which causes the FRA module to unfold, generating angular displacement. Hence, FRAs would…
We present the design and implementation of a flexible force-vision-based interface; allowing local operators to visually specify a path constraint to a remote robot manipulator in an on-line fashion during the teleoperation. Using bilateral and unilateral configurations, we compare our system to di…
Silicone-based bending soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) have been very popular, since they provide solutions to many applications that require comfort and safety. However, their further utilization seems to be thwarted due to their limited force output. Force output can be the most important property
This paper presents a new method for motion planning under differential constraints by incorporating a numerically solved discretized representation of reachable state space for faster state sampling and nearest neighbor searching. The reachable state space is solved for offline and stored into a “r
In this work, we address the problem of robust data association for feature cloud matching. For matching two feature clouds observed at two different poses, we discover that the covariance matrix of the measurement prediction error can be written as the sum of a low rank matrix and a block diagonal…
We detail the design of autonomous golf cars which were used in public trials in Singapore's Chinese and Japanese Gardens, for the purpose of raising public awareness and gaining user acceptance of autonomous vehicles. The golf cars were designed to be robust, reliable, and safe, while operating und…
As autonomous vehicles operating on the urban roads, being conscious of the road context is a crucial prerequisite to safely negotiate with the other vehicles. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to infer the road context from the vehicle behaviors. Specifically, the consistencies of the ra…