Manipulating objects without grasping them is an essential component of human dexterity, referred to as non-prehensile manipulation. Non-prehensile manipulation may enable more complex interactions with the objects, but also presents challenges in reasoning about the interactions. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Actor-Critic Maps for Manipulation (HACMan), a reinforcement learning approach for 6D non-prehensile manipulation of objects using point cloud observations. HACMan proposes a temporally-abstracted and spatially-grounded object-centric action representation that consists of selecting a contact location from the object point cloud and a set of motion parameters describing how the robot will move after making contact. We modify an existing off-policy RL algorithm to learn in this hybrid discrete-continuous action representation. We evaluate HACMan on a 6D object pose alignment task in both simulation and in the real world. On the hardest version of our task, with randomized initial pose, randomized 6D goals, and diverse object categories, our policy demonstrates strong generalization to unseen object categories without a performance drop, achieving a 79% success rate on non-flat objects. Compared to alternative action representations, HACMan achieves a success rate more than three times higher than the best baseline. With zero-shot sim2real transfer, our policy can successfully manipulate unseen objects in the real world for challenging non-planar goals, using dynamic and contact-rich non-prehensile skills. Videos can be found on the project website: //hacman-2023.github.io .
Collecting and leveraging data with good coverage properties plays a crucial role in different aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), including reward-free exploration and offline learning. However, the notion of "good coverage" really depends on the application at hand, as data suitable for one context may not be so for another. In this paper, we formalize the problem of active coverage in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to interact with the environment so as to fulfill given sampling requirements. This framework is sufficiently flexible to specify any desired coverage property, making it applicable to any problem that involves online exploration. Our main contribution is an instance-dependent lower bound on the sample complexity of active coverage and a simple game-theoretic algorithm, CovGame, that nearly matches it. We then show that CovGame can be used as a building block to solve different PAC RL tasks. In particular, we obtain a simple algorithm for PAC reward-free exploration with an instance-dependent sample complexity that, in certain MDPs which are "easy to explore", is lower than the minimax one. By further coupling this exploration algorithm with a new technique to do implicit eliminations in policy space, we obtain a computationally-efficient algorithm for best-policy identification whose instance-dependent sample complexity scales with gaps between policy values.
Among the existing modalities for 3D action recognition, 3D flow has been poorly examined, although conveying rich motion information cues for human actions. Presumably, its susceptibility to noise renders it intractable, thus challenging the learning process within deep models. This work demonstrates the use of 3D flow sequence by a deep spatiotemporal model and further proposes an incremental two-level spatial attention mechanism, guided from skeleton domain, for emphasizing motion features close to the body joint areas and according to their informativeness. Towards this end, an extended deep skeleton model is also introduced to learn the most discriminant action motion dynamics, so as to estimate an informativeness score for each joint. Subsequently, a late fusion scheme is adopted between the two models for learning the high level cross-modal correlations. Experimental results on the currently largest and most challenging dataset NTU RGB+D, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Most recent 6D object pose methods use 2D optical flow to refine their results. However, the general optical flow methods typically do not consider the target's 3D shape information during matching, making them less effective in 6D object pose estimation. In this work, we propose a shape-constraint recurrent matching framework for 6D object pose estimation. We first compute a pose-induced flow based on the displacement of 2D reprojection between the initial pose and the currently estimated pose, which embeds the target's 3D shape implicitly. Then we use this pose-induced flow to construct the correlation map for the following matching iterations, which reduces the matching space significantly and is much easier to learn. Furthermore, we use networks to learn the object pose based on the current estimated flow, which facilitates the computation of the pose-induced flow for the next iteration and yields an end-to-end system for object pose. Finally, we optimize the optical flow and object pose simultaneously in a recurrent manner. We evaluate our method on three challenging 6D object pose datasets and show that it outperforms the state of the art significantly in both accuracy and efficiency.
This paper proposes a novel Self-Supervised Intrusion Detection (SSID) framework, which enables a fully online Machine Learning (ML) based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that requires no human intervention or prior off-line learning. The proposed framework analyzes and labels incoming traffic packets based only on the decisions of the IDS itself using an Auto-Associative Deep Random Neural Network, and on an online estimate of its statistically measured trustworthiness. The SSID framework enables IDS to adapt rapidly to time-varying characteristics of the network traffic, and eliminates the need for offline data collection. This approach avoids human errors in data labeling, and human labor and computational costs of model training and data collection. The approach is experimentally evaluated on public datasets and compared with well-known ML models, showing that this SSID framework is very useful and advantageous as an accurate and online learning ML-based IDS for IoT systems.
Understanding and manipulating articulated objects, such as doors and drawers, is crucial for robots operating in human environments. We wish to develop a system that can learn to articulate novel objects with no prior interaction, after training on other articulated objects. Previous approaches for articulated object manipulation rely on either modular methods which are brittle or end-to-end methods, which lack generalizability. This paper presents FlowBot++, a deep 3D vision-based robotic system that predicts dense per-point motion and dense articulation parameters of articulated objects to assist in downstream manipulation tasks. FlowBot++ introduces a novel per-point representation of the articulated motion and articulation parameters that are combined to produce a more accurate estimate than either method on their own. Simulated experiments on the PartNet-Mobility dataset validate the performance of our system in articulating a wide range of objects, while real-world experiments on real objects' point clouds and a Sawyer robot demonstrate the generalizability and feasibility of our system in real-world scenarios.
Robot-assisted dressing could benefit the lives of many people such as older adults and individuals with disabilities. Despite such potential, robot-assisted dressing remains a challenging task for robotics as it involves complex manipulation of deformable cloth in 3D space. Many prior works aim to solve the robot-assisted dressing task, but they make certain assumptions such as a fixed garment and a fixed arm pose that limit their ability to generalize. In this work, we develop a robot-assisted dressing system that is able to dress different garments on people with diverse poses from partial point cloud observations, based on a learned policy. We show that with proper design of the policy architecture and Q function, reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn effective policies with partial point cloud observations that work well for dressing diverse garments. We further leverage policy distillation to combine multiple policies trained on different ranges of human arm poses into a single policy that works over a wide range of different arm poses. We conduct comprehensive real-world evaluations of our system with 510 dressing trials in a human study with 17 participants with different arm poses and dressed garments. Our system is able to dress 86% of the length of the participants' arms on average. Videos can be found on our project webpage: //sites.google.com/view/one-policy-dress.
We present a novel technique to estimate the 6D pose of objects from single images where the 3D geometry of the object is only given approximately and not as a precise 3D model. To achieve this, we employ a dense 2D-to-3D correspondence predictor that regresses 3D model coordinates for every pixel. In addition to the 3D coordinates, our model also estimates the pixel-wise coordinate error to discard correspondences that are likely wrong. This allows us to generate multiple 6D pose hypotheses of the object, which we then refine iteratively using a highly efficient region-based approach. We also introduce a novel pixel-wise posterior formulation by which we can estimate the probability for each hypothesis and select the most likely one. As we show in experiments, our approach is capable of dealing with extreme visual conditions including overexposure, high contrast, or low signal-to-noise ratio. This makes it a powerful technique for the particularly challenging task of estimating the pose of tumbling satellites for in-orbit robotic applications. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SPEED+ dataset and has won the SPEC2021 post-mortem competition.
Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusions. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 240 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. We also provide a regularly updated project page on: \url{//github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE}
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Sliding-window object detectors that generate bounding-box object predictions over a dense, regular grid have advanced rapidly and proven popular. In contrast, modern instance segmentation approaches are dominated by methods that first detect object bounding boxes, and then crop and segment these regions, as popularized by Mask R-CNN. In this work, we investigate the paradigm of dense sliding-window instance segmentation, which is surprisingly under-explored. Our core observation is that this task is fundamentally different than other dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation or bounding-box object detection, as the output at every spatial location is itself a geometric structure with its own spatial dimensions. To formalize this, we treat dense instance segmentation as a prediction task over 4D tensors and present a general framework called TensorMask that explicitly captures this geometry and enables novel operators on 4D tensors. We demonstrate that the tensor view leads to large gains over baselines that ignore this structure, and leads to results comparable to Mask R-CNN. These promising results suggest that TensorMask can serve as a foundation for novel advances in dense mask prediction and a more complete understanding of the task. Code will be made available.