Robotics (cs.RO)

Abstract: Accurate estimation of the relative pose between an object and a robot hand is critical for many manipulation tasks. However, most of the existing object-in-hand pose datasets use two-finger grippers and also assume that the object remains fixed in the hand without any relative movements, which is not representative of real-world scenarios. To address this issue, a 6D object-in-hand pose dataset is proposed using a teleoperation method with an anthropomorphic Shadow Dexterous hand. Our dataset comprises RGB-D images, proprioception and tactile data, covering diverse grasping poses, finger contact states, and object occlusions. To overcome the significant hand occlusion and limited tactile sensor contact in real-world scenarios, we propose PoseFusion, a hybrid multi-modal fusion approach that integrates the information from visual and tactile perception channels. PoseFusion generates three candidate object poses from three estimators (tactile only, visual only, and visuo-tactile fusion), which are then filtered by a SelectLSTM network to select the optimal pose, avoiding inferior fusion poses resulting from modality collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and advantages of our framework. All data and codes are available on the project website: https://elevenjiang1.github.io/ObjectInHand-Dataset/

Abstract: Generating human-like behavior on robots is a great challenge especially in dexterous manipulation tasks with robotic hands. Even in simulation with no sample constraints, scripting controllers is intractable due to high degrees of freedom, and manual reward engineering can also be hard and lead to non-realistic motions. Leveraging the recent progress on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), we propose a framework to learn a universal human prior using direct human preference feedback over videos, for efficiently tuning the RL policy on 20 dual-hand robot manipulation tasks in simulation, without a single human demonstration. One task-agnostic reward model is trained through iteratively generating diverse polices and collecting human preference over the trajectories; it is then applied for regularizing the behavior of polices in the fine-tuning stage. Our method empirically demonstrates more human-like behaviors on robot hands in diverse tasks including even unseen tasks, indicating its generalization capability.

Abstract: LiDAR Mapping has been a long-standing problem in robotics. Recent progress in neural implicit representation has brought new opportunities to robotic mapping. In this paper, we propose the multi-volume neural feature fields, called NF-Atlas, which bridge the neural feature volumes with pose graph optimization. By regarding the neural feature volume as pose graph nodes and the relative pose between volumes as pose graph edges, the entire neural feature field becomes both locally rigid and globally elastic. Locally, the neural feature volume employs a sparse feature Octree and a small MLP to encode the submap SDF with an option of semantics. Learning the map using this structure allows for end-to-end solving of maximum a posteriori (MAP) based probabilistic mapping. Globally, the map is built volume by volume independently, avoiding catastrophic forgetting when mapping incrementally. Furthermore, when a loop closure occurs, with the elastic pose graph based representation, only updating the origin of neural volumes is required without remapping. Finally, these functionalities of NF-Atlas are validated. Thanks to the sparsity and the optimization based formulation, NF-Atlas shows competitive performance in terms of accuracy, efficiency and memory usage on both simulation and real-world datasets.