21 accepted papers
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from th…
Cutaneous tactile feedback is essential for robotic manipulation, particularly when interacting with deformable objects with limited visual sensing. Learning-based approaches are increasingly adopted but rely on large volumes of tactile data. To meet this demand, Sim-to-Real strategies are widely us
Continuum robots, with their slender, flexible structures, are increasingly utilized for navigating confined spaces via follow-the-leader (FTL) motion to minimize trauma. However, traditional FTL algorithms fail to adjust the entire robot configuration, including the tail, and struggle with navigati
Self-reflection helps de-hallucinate Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of self-reflection remains insufficiently validated in the context of Small Language Models (SLMs), which exhibit limited semantic capacities. In particular, we demonstrate that the conventional self-reflec…
High-dynamic tactile sensing and tactile servo control present challenges in robustness and real-time performance. This paper proposes a closed-loop tactile servo control strategy for robotic nail hammering, by allowing controlled hammer slide within a rigid robotic 2-finger gripper. The proposed ap
Ultrasound-guided therapeutic procedures rely heavily on operator skill, leading to variability and high training costs. The shortage of trained ultra-sonographers further exacerbates the issue, increasing workloads and associated health risks. Robotic technology has the potential to effectively tac
Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has emerged as the new trend of generative diffusion models on image generation. In view of extremely slow convergence in typical DiT recent breakthroughs have been driven by mask strategy that significantly improves the training efficiency of DiT with additional intra-im…
With recent advancements in CV (computer vision) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, pointing gesture is becoming an emerging trend for human-robot interaction. Its intuitive and deictic nature makes it an ideal way for giving commands, especially referring spatial information to the robo…
The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF)
Tip force sensing for cable-driven continuum robots are vital to provide the force information for safe and reliable human-robot interaction. However, traditional triaxial force sensors usually have a complicated structure occupying its inner lumen, without enough space for additional instrumental t…
Scene recognition is a fundamental task in robotic perception. For human beings, scene recognition is reasonable because they have abundant object knowledge of the real world. The idea of transferring prior object knowledge from humans to scene recognition is significant but still less exploited. In…
Brain-computer interface (BCI)-based robotic telepresence provides an opportunity for people with disabilities to control robots remotely without any actual physical movement. However, traditional BCI systems usually require the user to select the navigation direction from visual stimuli in a fixed…
Contrastive learning, which aims at minimizing the distance between positive pairs while maximizing that of negative ones, has been widely and successfully applied in unsupervised feature learning, where the design of positive and negative (pos/neg) pairs is one of its keys. In this paper, we attemp…
Hand gesture recognition plays an essential role in the human-robot interaction (HRI) field. Most previous research only studies hand gesture recognition in a short distance, which cannot be applied for interaction with mobile robots like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at a longer and safer distanc…
Ultrasound scanning plays an important role in modern clinical examinations. Thanks to its small footprint, low cost, and popularity, it has been widely used in annual physical examinations and many other diagnosis and intervention procedures. However, the scanning results depend heavily on the clin
Traditional solar trackers often adopt motors to automatically adjust the attitude of the solar panels towards the sun for maximum power efficiency. In this paper, a novel design of solar tracker for the ocean environment is introduced. Utilizing the fluctuations due to the waves, electromagnetic br…
Automatic latching for charging in a disturbed environment for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USVs) is always a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a two-stage automatic latching system for USVs charging in berth. In Stage I, a vision-guided algorithm is developed to calculate an optimal latch…
This paper presents a novel Cable Climbing Robot CCRobot-III, which is the third version designed for bridge cable inspection tasks, aiming at surpassing previous versions in terms of climbing speed and payload capacity. Benefiting from Split-type Wire-driven design, CCRobot-III can climb along a 90…
Unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from unlabelled monocular videos has recently drawn great attention, which avoids the use of expensive ground truth in the supervised one. It achieves this by using the photometric errors between the target view and the synthesized views from its adjacen…
Towards long range and high endurance sailing, energy is of utmost importance. Moreover, benefiting from the dominance of the sailboat itself, it is energy-saving and environment-friendly. Thus, the sailboat with energy planning problem is meaningful. However, until now, the sailboat energy optimiza…
This paper investigates dynamic and compliant control based on joint output torque estimation for electrically actuated quadruped robots with large-reduction-ratio harmonic gear. Compared with position control, force control exhibits better performance of dynamics and compliance for the robot's inte…