The problem of image-based visual servoing (IBVS) of an aerial robot using deep-learning-based keypoint detection is addressed in this article. A monocular RGB camera mounted on the platform is utilized to collect the visual data. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is then employed to extract the features serving as the visual data for the servoing task. This paper contributes to the field by circumventing not only the challenge stemming from the need for man-made marker detection in conventional visual servoing techniques, but also enhancing the robustness against undesirable factors including occlusion, varying illumination, clutter, and background changes, thereby broadening the applicability of perception-guided motion control tasks in aerial robots. Additionally, extensive physics-based ROS Gazebo simulations are conducted to assess the effectiveness of this method, in contrast to many existing studies that rely solely on physics-less simulations. A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/Dd2Her8Ly-E.

Given the large-scale multi-modal training of recent vision-based models and their generalization capabilities, understanding the extent of their robustness is critical for their real-world deployment. In this work, we evaluate the resilience of current vision-based models against diverse object-to-background context variations. The majority of robustness evaluation methods have introduced synthetic datasets to induce changes to object characteristics (viewpoints, scale, color) or utilized image transformation techniques (adversarial changes, common corruptions) on real images to simulate shifts in distributions. Recent works have explored leveraging large language models and diffusion models to generate changes in the background. However, these methods either lack in offering control over the changes to be made or distort the object semantics, making them unsuitable for the task. Our method, on the other hand, can induce diverse object-to-background changes while preserving the original semantics and appearance of the object. To achieve this goal, we harness the generative capabilities of text-to-image, image-to-text, and image-to-segment models to automatically generate a broad spectrum of object-to-background changes. We induce both natural and adversarial background changes by either modifying the textual prompts or optimizing the latents and textual embedding of text-to-image models. We produce various versions of standard vision datasets (ImageNet, COCO), incorporating either diverse and realistic backgrounds into the images or introducing color, texture, and adversarial changes in the background. We conduct extensive experiment to analyze the robustness of vision-based models against object-to-background context variations across diverse tasks. Code https://github.com/Muhammad-Huzaifaa/ObjectCompose.git

We introduce GROOT, an imitation learning method for learning robust policies with object-centric and 3D priors. GROOT builds policies that generalize beyond their initial training conditions for vision-based manipulation. It constructs object-centric 3D representations that are robust toward background changes and camera views and reason over these representations using a transformer-based policy. Furthermore, we introduce a segmentation correspondence model that allows policies to generalize to new objects at test time. Through comprehensive experiments, we validate the robustness of GROOT policies against perceptual variations in simulated and real-world environments. GROOT's performance excels in generalization over background changes, camera viewpoint shifts, and the presence of new object instances, whereas both state-of-the-art end-to-end learning methods and object proposal-based approaches fall short. We also extensively evaluate GROOT policies on real robots, where we demonstrate the efficacy under very wild changes in setup. More videos and model details can be found in the appendix and the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/GROOT .