Robotics (cs.RO)

Abstract: Modern autonomous systems require extensive testing to ensure reliability and build trust in ground vehicles. However, testing these systems in the real-world is challenging due to the lack of large and diverse datasets, especially in edge cases. Therefore, simulations are necessary for their development and evaluation. However, existing open-source simulators often exhibit a significant gap between synthetic and real-world domains, leading to deteriorated mobility performance and reduced platform reliability when using simulation data. To address this issue, our Scoping Autonomous Vehicle Simulation (SAVeS) platform benchmarks the performance of simulated environments for autonomous ground vehicle testing between synthetic and real-world domains. Our platform aims to quantify the domain gap and enable researchers to develop and test autonomous systems in a controlled environment. Additionally, we propose using domain adaptation technologies to address the domain gap between synthetic and real-world data with our SAVeS$^+$ extension. Our results demonstrate that SAVeS$^+$ is effective in helping to close the gap between synthetic and real-world domains and yields comparable performance for models trained with processed synthetic datasets to those trained on real-world datasets of same scale. This paper highlights our efforts to quantify and address the domain gap between synthetic and real-world data for autonomy simulation. By enabling researchers to develop and test autonomous systems in a controlled environment, we hope to bring autonomy simulation one step closer to realization.

Abstract: As robots enter everyday spaces like offices, the sounds they create affect how they are perceived. We present "Music Mode", a novel mapping between a robot's joint motions and sounds, programmed by artists and engineers to make the robot generate music as it moves. Two experiments were designed to characterize the effect of this musical augmentation on human users. In the first experiment, a robot performed three tasks while playing three different sound mappings. Results showed that participants observing the robot perceived it as more safe, animate, intelligent, anthropomorphic, and likable when playing the Music Mode Orchestral software. To test whether the results of the first experiment were due to the Music Mode algorithm, rather than music alone, we conducted a second experiment. Here the robot performed the same three tasks, while a participant observed via video, but the Orchestral music was either linked to its movement or random. Participants rated the robots as more intelligent when the music was linked to the movement. Robots using Music Mode logged approximately two hundred hours of operation while navigating, wiping tables, and sorting trash, and bystander comments made during this operating time served as an embedded case study. The contributions are: (1) an interdisciplinary choreographic, musical, and coding design process to develop a real-world robot sound feature, (2) a technical implementation for movement-based sound generation, and (3) two experiments and an embedded case study of robots running this feature during daily work activities that resulted in increased likeability and perceived intelligence of the robot.

Abstract: 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 smooth, stable, and efficient traversal motions. To achieve this, we develop a planar robot-terrain interaction model and partition the robot's motion into hybrid modes of driving and traversing. By using a generalized coordinate description, the configuration space dimension is reduced, which provides real-time planning capability. The hybrid trajectory optimization is transcribed into a nonlinear programming problem and solved in a receding-horizon planning fashion. Mode switching is facilitated by associating optimized motion durations with a predefined traversal sequence. A multi-objective cost function is formulated to further improve the traversal performance. Additionally, map sampling, terrain simplification, and tracking controller modules are integrated into the autonomous terrain traversal system. Our approach is validated in simulation and real-world experiments with the Searcher robotic platform, effectively achieving smooth and stable motion with high time and energy efficiency compared to expert operator control.

Abstract: Loneliness is a distressing personal experience and a growing social issue. Social robots could alleviate the pain of loneliness, particularly for those who lack in-person interaction. This paper investigated how the effect of loneliness on anthropomorphizing social robots differs by robot appearances, and how it leads to the purchase intention of social robots. Participants viewed a video of one of the three robots(machine-like, animal-like, and human-like) moving and interacting with a human counterpart. The results revealed that when individuals were lonelier, the tendency to anthropomorphize human-like robots increased more than that of animal-like robots. The moderating effect remained significant after covariates were included. The increase in anthropomorphic tendency predicted the heightened purchase intent. The findings imply that human-like robots induce lonely individuals' desire to replenish the sense of connectedness from robots more than animal-like robots, and that anthropomorphic tendency reveals the potential of social robots as real-life companions of lonely individuals.

Abstract: Firefighting is a complex, yet low automated task. To mitigate ergonomic and safety related risks on the human operators, robots could be deployed in a collaborative approach. To allow human-robot teams in firefighting, important basics are missing. Amongst other aspects, the robot must predict the human motion as occlusion is ever-present. In this work, we propose a novel motion prediction pipeline for firefighters' squads in indoor search and rescue. The squad paths are generated with an optimal graph-based planning approach representing firefighters' tactics. Paths are generated per room which allows to dynamically adapt the path locally without global re-planning. The motion of singular agents is simulated using a modification of the headed social force model. We evaluate the pipeline for feasibility with a novel data set generated from real footage and show the computational efficiency.

Abstract: Aging societies, labor shortages and increasing wage costs call for assistance robots capable of autonomously performing a wide array of real-world tasks. Such open-ended robotic manipulation requires not only powerful knowledge representations and reasoning (KR&R) algorithms, but also methods for humans to instruct robots what tasks to perform and how to perform them. In this paper, we present a system for automatically generating executable robot control programs from human task demonstrations in virtual reality (VR). We leverage common-sense knowledge and game engine-based physics to semantically interpret human VR demonstrations, as well as an expressive and general task representation and automatic path planning and code generation, embedded into a state-of-the-art cognitive architecture. We demonstrate our approach in the context of force-sensitive fetch-and-place for a robotic shopping assistant. The source code is available at https://github.com/ease-crc/vr-program-synthesis.

Abstract: To achieve high-accuracy manipulation in the presence of unknown dynamics and external disturbance, we propose an efficient and robust motion controller (named TvUDE) for robotic manipulators. The controller incorporates a disturbance estimation mechanism that utilizes reformulated robot dynamics and filtering operations to obtain uncertainty and disturbance without requiring measurement of acceleration. Furthermore, we design a time-varying control input gain to enhance the control system's robustness. Finally, we analyze the boundness of the control signal and the stability of the closed-loop system, and conduct a set of experiments on a six-DOF robotic manipulator. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of TvUDE in handling internal uncertainty and external static or transient disturbance.

Abstract: Indoor navigation is a challenging activity for persons with disabilities, particularly, for those with low vision and visual impairment. Researchers have explored numerous solutions to resolve these challenges; however, several issues remain unsolved, particularly around providing dynamic and contextual information about potential obstacles in indoor environments. In this paper, we developed Robot Patrol, an integrated system that employs a combination of crowdsourcing, computer vision, and robotic frameworks to provide contextual information to the visually impaired to empower them to navigate indoor spaces safely. In particular, the system is designed to provide information to the visually impaired about 1) potential obstacles on the route to their indoor destination, 2) information about indoor events on their route which they may wish to avoid or attend, and 3) any other contextual information that might support them to navigate to their indoor destinations safely and effectively. Findings from the Wizard of Oz experiment of our demo system provide insights into the benefits and limitations of the system. We provide a concise discussion on the implications of our findings.

Abstract: Onboard sensors, such as cameras and thermal sensors, have emerged as effective alternatives to Global Positioning System (GPS) for geo-localization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Since GPS can suffer from signal loss and spoofing problems, researchers have explored camera-based techniques such as Visual Geo-localization (VG) using satellite imagery. Additionally, thermal geo-localization (TG) has become crucial for long-range UAV flights in low-illumination environments. This paper proposes a novel thermal geo-localization framework using satellite imagery, which includes multiple domain adaptation methods to address the limited availability of paired thermal and satellite images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving reliable thermal geo-localization performance, even in thermal images with indistinct self-similar features. We evaluate our approach on real data collected onboard a UAV. We also release the code and \textit{Boson-nighttime}, a dataset of paired satellite-thermal and unpaired satellite images for thermal geo-localization with satellite imagery. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose a thermal geo-localization method using satellite imagery in long-range flights.

Abstract: We present MotionDiffuser, a diffusion based representation for the joint distribution of future trajectories over multiple agents. Such representation has several key advantages: first, our model learns a highly multimodal distribution that captures diverse future outcomes. Second, the simple predictor design requires only a single L2 loss training objective, and does not depend on trajectory anchors. Third, our model is capable of learning the joint distribution for the motion of multiple agents in a permutation-invariant manner. Furthermore, we utilize a compressed trajectory representation via PCA, which improves model performance and allows for efficient computation of the exact sample log probability. Subsequently, we propose a general constrained sampling framework that enables controlled trajectory sampling based on differentiable cost functions. This strategy enables a host of applications such as enforcing rules and physical priors, or creating tailored simulation scenarios. MotionDiffuser can be combined with existing backbone architectures to achieve top motion forecasting results. We obtain state-of-the-art results for multi-agent motion prediction on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset.