69 accepted papers
Autonomous language-guided navigation in large-scale outdoor environments remains a key challenge in mobile robotics, due to difficulties in semantic reasoning, dynamic conditions, and long-term stability. We propose CausalNav, the first scene graph-based semantic navigation framework tailored for d
Cable-driven serial manipulator (CDSM) has advantages of lightweight structure, high flexibility, and inherent safety, making it suitable for operations in constrained spaces. However, interaction with the environment is inevitable. To address this limitation, we propose CableSense, a novel force-se…
In highly interactive urban driving, decision making is often naturally multi-stage, and decisions at different stages can lead to different reactions from surrounding vehicles. This calls for stage-wise evaluation and selection. Tree-based planning naturally supports multi-stage search and evaluati
With the increasing presence of service robots and autonomous vehicles in human environments, navigation systems need to evolve beyond simple destination reach to incorporate social awareness. This paper introduces GSON, a novel group-based social navigation framework that leverages Large Multimodal…
Real-world robotic tasks are long-horizon and often span multiple floors, demanding rich spatial reasoning. However, existing embodied benchmarks are largely confined to single-floor in-house environments, failing to reflect the complexity of real-world tasks. We introduce MANSION, the first languag
Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive …
Pan-sharpening is a commonly employed strategy to obtain high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images. Existing deep unfolding networks for pan-sharpening suffer from ineffectively establishing the relationship between panchromatic (PAN) images and generated noisy HRMS (GN-HRMS) images in PAN-guided…
Vision-based teleoperation systems are widely used due to their cost-effectiveness and intuitive operation. However, these systems often suffer from challenges such as hand occlusions, environmental variability, and the lack of tactile feedback, limiting their precision and applicability in complex
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful tool for controlling cable-driven continuum space robots (CDCSRs), offering a solution that bypasses complex system modeling. However, DRL based on dense reward functions (DRLDR) requires meticulous tuning of the reward structure, whereas D
Cable transmission enables motors of robotic arm to operate lightweight and low-inertia joints remotely in various environments, but it also creates issues with motion coupling and cable routing that can reduce arm's control precision and performance. In this paper, we present a novel motion decoupl
The success of artificial neural networks (ANNs) hinges greatly on the judicious selection of an activation function, introducing non-linearity into network and enabling them to model sophisticated relationships in data. However, the search of activation functions has largely relied on empirical kno…
Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios safely. In this paper, we aim to improve safety during the d…
With the increasing presence of service robots and autonomous vehicles in human environments, navigation systems need to evolve beyond simple destination reach to incorporate social awareness. This paper introduces <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/199
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently expanded its successful application from aligning large language models (LLMs) to aligning text-to-image models with human preferences, which has generated considerable interest within the community. However, we have observed that these approaches re…
Implicit reward mechanism of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has facilitated its recent applications beyond large language models (LLMs), notably in aligning text-to-image models with human preferences. While promising results have been achieved with algorithms such as Diffusion-DPO, their reli…
Multi-step cloth manipulation is a challenging problem for robots due to the high-dimensional state spaces and the dynamics of cloth. Despite recent significant advances in end-to-end imitation learning for multi-step cloth manipulation skills, these methods fail to generalize to unseen tasks. Our i
LLMs have made impressive progress, but their growing capabilities also expose them to highly flexible jailbreaking attacks designed to bypass safety alignment. While many existing defenses focus on known types of attacks, it is more critical to prepare LLMs for *unseen* attacks that may arise durin…
Despite recent advancements in offline multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) have harnessed the powerful capabilities of the Transformer architecture, most approaches focus on a limited number of tasks, with scaling to extremely massive tasks remaining a formidable challenge. In this paper, we f…
The number of motors directly influences the dexterity, size, and cost of a robotic hand. In this paper, we present MuxHand, a robotic hand that utilizes a time-division multiplexing motor (TDMM) mechanism. This system enables independent control of 9 cables with just 4 motors, significantly reducin
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently expanded its successful application beyond aligning large language models (LLMs), further targeting the alignment of text-to-image models with human preferences. However, traditional DPO approach would inadvertently result in a simultaneous reduction…
The cable-driven serial manipulator (CDSM) combines the flexibility of continuum robots with the high load-bearing capacity of rigid robotic arms. To ensure safe interaction with the surrounding environment and humans while enabling dexterous operations, tactile perception plays a crucial role as a
Reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention in text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, most existing RL approaches are tailored to either diffusion models or autoregressive models, overlooking an important alternative: masked generative models. In this work, we propose Mask-GRPO,…
Pretraining a policy on offline data followed by fine-tuning through online interactions, known as Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL), has emerged as a promising paradigm for real-world RL deployment. However, both offline datasets and online interactions in practical environments are…
Training safe LLMs remains a critical challenge. The most widely used method, Refusal Training (RT), struggles to generalize against various Out-of-Distribution (OOD) jailbreaking attacks. Although various advanced methods have been proposed to address this issue, we instead question whether OOD att…
This study addresses the challenge of multi-robot cooperative exploration under limited local observations in environments with dynamic robot populations. To achieve efficient area coverage within constrained timeframes, we propose the Multi-Robot Informative Planner (MIP), a novel reinforcement lea
Ultrasound is an important diagnostic modality in medicine, offering real-time imaging, no radiation and low cost. However, ultrasound is currently highly dependent on the operator's experience and technical skills. Robotic autonomous ultrasound scanning (RAUS) is a sequential decision-making proble
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) is proposed to find the greatest personalized models for each client. To avoid the central failure and communication bottleneck in the server-based FL we concentrate on the Decentralized Personalized Federated Learning (DPFL) that performs distributed model trai…
Autonomous terrain traversal of articulated tracked robots can reduce operator cognitive load to enhance task efficiency and facilitate extensive deployment. We present a novel hybrid trajectory optimization method aimed at generating efficient, stable, and smooth traversal motions. To achieve this,
Multi-task learning of deformable object manipulation is a challenging problem in robot manipulation. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way and adapt goal images to specify different tasks, which limits the multi-task learning performance and can not generalize to new ta…
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) aims at solving goal-reaching tasks with sparse rewards from an offline dataset. While prior work has demonstrated various approaches for agents to learn near-optimal policies, these methods encounter limitations when dealing with diverse constr…
Wheeled robot navigation has been widely used in urban environments, but navigation in wild vegetation is still challenging. External sensors (LiDAR, camera etc.) are often used to construct point cloud map of the surrounding environment, however, the supporting rigid ground used for travelling cann
Mobile robots navigating in outdoor environments frequently encounter the issue of undesired traces left by dynamic objects and manifested as obstacles on map, impeding robots from achieving accurate localization and effective navigation. To tackle the problem, a novel map construction framework bas
Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to evolve with new data, is crucial for high-performance and sample-efficient visual reinforcement learning (VRL). Although methods like resetting and regularization can potentially mitigate plasticity loss, the influences of various components within the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools, such as weather and calculator APIs. However, real-world industrial systems present prevalent challenges in task planning and tool usage: nu…
Co-design of morphology and control of a Voxel-based Soft Robot (VSR) is challenging due to the notorious bi-level optimization. In this paper, we present a Curriculum-based Co-design (CuCo) method for learning to design and control VSRs through an easy-to-difficult process. Specifically, we expand…
This paper presents an efficient and safe method to avoid static and dynamic obstacles based on LiDAR. First, point cloud is used to generate a real-time local grid map for obstacle detection. Then, obstacles are clustered by DBSCAN algorithm and enclosed with minimum bounding ellipses (MBEs). In ad…
Safety comes first in many real-world applications involving autonomous agents. Despite a large number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods focusing on safety-critical tasks, there is still a lack of high-quality evaluation of those algorithms that adheres to safety constraints at each decision st…
Sequential multi-step cloth manipulation is a challenging problem in robotic manipulation, requiring a robot to perceive the cloth state and plan a sequence of chained actions leading to the desired state. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way, and goal observation must
To mitigate the privacy leakages and communication burdens of Federated Learning (FL), decentralized FL (DFL) discards the central server and each client only communicates with its neighbors in a decentralized communication network. However, existing DFL suffers from high inconsistency among local c…
Data augmentation (DA) is a crucial technique for enhancing the sample efficiency of visual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Notably, employing simple observation transformations alone can yield outstanding performance without extra auxiliary representation tasks or pre-trained encoders. Howe…
This letter focuses on the shape control manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLO) with a dual-arm robotic system. One significant challenge of DLO shape control is the underactuated control system, which means that finite robotic manipulators can not fully control DLO's shape due to the lack
To defend the inference attacks and mitigate the sensitive information leakages in Federated Learning (FL), client-level Differentially Private FL (DPFL) is the de-facto standard for privacy protection by clipping local updates and adding random noise. However, existing DPFL methods tend to make a s…
Brain-body co-design, which involves the collaborative design of control strategies and morphologies, has emerged as a promising approach to enhance a robot's adaptability to its environment. However, the conventional co-design process often starts from scratch, lacking the utilization of prior know…
Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost. Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the human response behavior and comfort, treating the human as an appendage drag…
The geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) has been widely investigated to describe the target scattering behaviors with the low-frequency ultra-wideband (LFW) radar. In this paper, we propose a new model-based deep learning method for GTD parameter estimation. The proposed method is designed by un…
This paper presents a learning-based method for transparent surface estimation from a single view polarization image. Existing shape from polarization(SfP) methods have the difficulty in estimating transparent shape since the inherent transmission interference heavily reduces the reliability of phys…
Can a robot manipulate intra-category unseen objects in arbitrary poses with the help of a mere demonstration of grasping pose on a single object instance? In this paper, we try to address this intriguing challenge by using USEEK, an unsupervised SE(3)-equivariant keypoints method that enjoys alignm…
Manual oropharyngeal (OP) swab sampling is an intensive and risky task. In this article, a novel OP swab sampling device of low cost and high compliance is designed by combining the visuotactile sensor and the pneumatic actuator-based gripper. Here, a concave visuotactile sensor called CoTac is firs…
Volumetric 3D reconstruction methods have shown great performance in reconstructing indoor scenarios from monocular videos. However, as such approaches utilize discrete feature voxels to encode the observed scenes, the global feature interaction within and across different voxels is ignored, leading…
Object rearranging is one of the most common deformable manipulation tasks, where the robot needs to rearrange a deformable object into a goal configuration. Previous studies focus on designing an expert system for each specific task by model-based or data-driven approaches and the application scena…
One of the key challenges in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is to learn policies that can generalize to unseen environments. Recently, data augmentation techniques aiming at enhancing data diversity have demonstrated proven performance in improving the generalization ability of learned policies.…
Continuum robots are typically slender and flexible with infinite freedoms in theory, which poses a challenge for their control and application. The shape reconstruction of continuum robots is vital to realize closed-loop control. This paper proposes a novel general real-time shape reconstruction fr…
Autonomous navigation of ground robots has been widely used in indoor structured 2D environments, but there are still many challenges in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, especially in rough, uneven terrains. This paper proposed a plane-fitting based uneven terrain navigation framework (PUTN) to…
Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint satisfaction. In this paper, we propose Penalized Proximal Pol…
Learning generalizable policies that can adapt to unseen environments remains challenging in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL). Existing approaches try to acquire a robust representation via diversifying the appearances of in-domain observations for better generalization. Limited by the specific ob…
Learning a risk-aware policy is essential but rather challenging in unstructured robotic tasks. Safe reinforcement learning methods open up new possibilities to tackle this problem. However, the conservative policy updates make it intractable to achieve sufficient exploration and desirable performan…
Large-area and high-precision tactile sensing information can not only improve the stability of robot grasping but also compensate for the lack of visual information in specific environments such as turbid underwater, dimness, and smoke. In this paper, we devise a universal jamming gripper with high…
The soft robotic manipulators attract extensive interest of researchers due to its conformity to the unstructured environment, safe-interaction with human and fragile objects. The movement of the soft manipulator often include elongation, contraction, 2-DOF rotations due to the parallelly arranged f
Continuum hyper-redundant manipulators (CHRMs) have been widely applied in aerospace, medical or other fields to complete tasks in narrow and multi-obstacles environments with its unique structural advantages. Due to the redundancy, the inverse kinematics of CHRMs is rather complex and the trajector
To date, soft robots have been increasingly designed and analyzed, especially, Soft Continuum Manipulators (SCMs). Due to dexterous deformability, their Inverse Kinematics (IK) is still difficult to solve. Cyclic Coordinate Descent (CCD) algorithm is one of the classical optimization algorithms to s…
Cable-Constrained Synchronous Rotating Mechanism (CCSRM) has an important application prospect in the field of cable-driven robots, which can greatly reduce the number of driving motors while ensuring the light and slender body. However, there are obvious cable friction effect and elastic deformatio
This paper proposes a multi-task control strategy for a quadruped robot named THU-QUAD II. The mechanical design of the robot ensures a wide range of motion for all joints, which allows it to stand and walk like a mammal as well as sprawl to the ground and crawl like a reptile. Five basic leg config…
Continuum robots composed of elastic backbones have a broad application prospect in the narrow and restricted environment because they overcome the disadvantages of traditional articulated robots, such as being bulky and inflexible. Statics plays an important role in the planning and control of the…