The accurate estimation of six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) object poses is essential for many applications in robotics and augmented reality. However, existing methods for 6DoF pose estimation often depend on CAD templates or dense support views, restricting their usefulness in realworld situations. In this study, we present a new cascade framework named Cas6D for few-shot 6DoF pose estimation that is generalizable and uses only RGB images. To address the false positives of target object detection in the extreme few-shot setting, our framework utilizes a selfsupervised pre-trained ViT to learn robust feature representations. Then, we initialize the nearest top-K pose candidates based on similarity score and refine the initial poses using feature pyramids to formulate and update the cascade warped feature volume, which encodes context at increasingly finer scales. By discretizing the pose search range using multiple pose bins and progressively narrowing the pose search range in each stage using predictions from the previous stage, Cas6D can overcome the large gap between pose candidates and ground truth poses, which is a common failure mode in sparse-view scenarios. Experimental results on the LINEMOD and GenMOP datasets demonstrate that Cas6D outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 9.2% and 3.8% accuracy (Proj-5) under the 32-shot setting compared to OnePose++ and Gen6D.
Biomimetic, dexterous robotic hands have the potential to replicate much of the tasks that a human can do, and to achieve status as a general manipulation platform. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks have achieved remarkable performance in quadrupedal locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks. Combined with GPU-based highly parallelized simulations capable of simulating thousands of robots in parallel, RL-based controllers have become more scalable and approachable. However, in order to bring RL-trained policies to the real world, we require training frameworks that output policies that can work with physical actuators and sensors as well as a hardware platform that can be manufactured with accessible materials yet is robust enough to run interactive policies. This work introduces the biomimetic tendon-driven Faive Hand and its system architecture, which uses tendon-driven rolling contact joints to achieve a 3D printable, robust high-DoF hand design. We model each element of the hand and integrate it into a GPU simulation environment to train a policy with RL, and achieve zero-shot transfer of a dexterous in-hand sphere rotation skill to the physical robot hand.
Movable antennas (MAs) are a promising paradigm to enhance the spatial degrees of freedom of conventional multi-antenna systems by flexibly adapting the positions of the antenna elements within a given transmit area. In this paper, we model the motion of the MA elements as discrete movements and study the corresponding resource allocation problem for MA-enabled multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication systems. Specifically, we jointly optimize the beamforming and the MA positions at the base station (BS) for the minimization of the total transmit power while guaranteeing the minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of each individual user. To obtain the globally optimal solution to the formulated resource allocation problem, we develop an iterative algorithm capitalizing on the generalized Bender's decomposition with guaranteed convergence. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MA-enabled communication system can significantly reduce the BS transmit power and the number of antenna elements needed to achieve a desired performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, such as antenna selection. Furthermore, we observe that refining the step size of the MA motion driver improves performance at the expense of a higher computational complexity.
Line detection is widely used in many robotic tasks such as scene recognition, 3D reconstruction, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Compared to points, lines can provide both low-level and high-level geometrical information for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel learnable edge-based line detection algorithm, AirLine, which can be applied to various tasks. In contrast to existing learnable endpoint-based methods, which are sensitive to the geometrical condition of environments, AirLine can extract line segments directly from edges, resulting in a better generalization ability for unseen environments. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a region-grow algorithm and a local edge voting scheme for line parameterization. To the best of our knowledge, AirLine is one of the first learnable edge-based line detection methods. Our extensive experiments have shown that it retains state-of-the-art-level precision, yet with a 3 to 80 times runtime acceleration compared to other learning-based methods, which is critical for low-power robots.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a slowly progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative disease which causes motor symptoms including gait dysfunction. Motor fluctuations are alterations between periods with a positive response to levodopa therapy ("on") and periods marked by re-emergency of PD symptoms ("off") as the response to medication wears off. These fluctuations often affect gait speed and they increase in their disabling impact as PD progresses. To improve the effectiveness of current indoor localisation methods, a transformer-based approach utilising dual modalities which provide complementary views of movement, Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and accelerometer data from wearable devices, is proposed. A sub-objective aims to evaluate whether indoor localisation, including its in-home gait speed features (i.e. the time taken to walk between rooms), could be used to evaluate motor fluctuations by detecting whether the person with PD is taking levodopa medications or withholding them. To properly evaluate our proposed method, we use a free-living dataset where the movements and mobility are greatly varied and unstructured as expected in real-world conditions. 24 participants lived in pairs (consisting of one person with PD, one control) for five days in a smart home with various sensors. Our evaluation on the resulting dataset demonstrates that our proposed network outperforms other methods for indoor localisation. The sub-objective evaluation shows that precise room-level localisation predictions, transformed into in-home gait speed features, produce accurate predictions on whether the PD participant is taking or withholding their medications.
Trust has been identified as a central factor for effective human-robot teaming. Existing literature on trust modeling predominantly focuses on dyadic human-autonomy teams where one human agent interacts with one robot. There is little, if not no, research on trust modeling in teams consisting of multiple human agents and multiple robotic agents. To fill this research gap, we present the trust inference and propagation (TIP) model for trust modeling in multi-human multi-robot teams. In a multi-human multi-robot team, we postulate that there exist two types of experiences that a human agent has with a robot: direct and indirect experiences. The TIP model presents a novel mathematical framework that explicitly accounts for both types of experiences. To evaluate the model, we conducted a human-subject experiment with 15 pairs of participants (${N=30}$). Each pair performed a search and detection task with two drones. Results show that our TIP model successfully captured the underlying trust dynamics and significantly outperformed a baseline model. To the best of our knowledge, the TIP model is the first mathematical framework for computational trust modeling in multi-human multi-robot teams.
Current motion planning approaches for autonomous mobile robots often assume that the low level controller of the system is able to track the planned motion with very high accuracy. In practice, however, tracking error can be affected by many factors, and could lead to potential collisions when the robot must traverse a cluttered environment. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel receding-horizon motion planning approach based on Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control theory -- a flexible sampling-based control technique that requires minimal assumptions on vehicle dynamics and cost functions. This flexibility is leveraged to propose a motion planning framework that also considers a data-informed risk function. Using the MPPI algorithm as a motion planner also reduces the number of samples required by the algorithm, relaxing the hardware requirements for implementation. The proposed approach is validated through trajectory generation for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), where fast motion increases trajectory tracking error and can lead to collisions with nearby obstacles. Simulations and hardware experiments demonstrate that the MPPI motion planner proactively adapts to the obstacles that the UAV must negotiate, slowing down when near obstacles and moving quickly when away from obstacles, resulting in a complete reduction of collisions while still producing lively motion.
The Polkadot ecosystem is a disruptive and highly complex multi-chain architecture that poses challenges in terms of data analysis and communicability. Currently, there is a lack of standardized and holistic approaches to retrieve and analyze data across parachains and applications, making it difficult for general users and developers to access ecosystem data consistently. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that includes a domain ontology called POnto (a Polkadot Ontology) to address these challenges. POnto provides a structured representation of the ecosystem's concepts and relationships, enabling a formal understanding of the platform. The proposed knowledge-oriented approach enhances integration and communicability, enabling a wider range of users to participate in the ecosystem and facilitating the development of AI-based applications. The paper presents a case study methodology to validate the proposed framework, which includes expert feedback and insights from the Polkadot community. The POnto ontology and the roadmap for a query engine based on a Controlled Natural Language using the ontology, provide valuable contributions to the growth and adoption of the Polkadot ecosystem in heterogeneous socio-technical environments.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs) are a popular form of graphical model that, for certain classes of games, have been shown to offer key complexity and explainability advantages over traditional extensive form game (EFG) representations. In this paper, we extend previous work on MAIDs by introducing the concept of a MAID subgame, as well as subgame perfect and trembling hand perfect equilibrium refinements. We then prove several equivalence results between MAIDs and EFGs. Finally, we describe an open source implementation for reasoning about MAIDs and computing their equilibria.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.