With the development of robotics technology, some tactile sensors, such as vision-based sensors, have been applied to contact-rich robotics tasks. However, the durability of vision-based tactile sensors significantly increases the cost of tactile information acquisition. Utilizing simulation to generate tactile data has emerged as a reliable approach to address this issue. While data-driven methods for tactile data generation lack robustness, finite element methods (FEM) based approaches require significant computational costs. To address these issues, we integrated a pinhole camera model into the low computational cost vision-based tactile simulator Tacchi that used the Material Point Method (MPM) as the simulated method, completing the simulation of marker motion images. We upgraded Tacchi and introduced Tacchi 2.0. This simulator can simulate tactile images, marked motion images, and joint images under different motion states like pressing, slipping, and rotating. Experimental results demonstrate the reliability of our method and its robustness across various vision-based tactile sensors.

Surface cracks in infrastructure can lead to significant deterioration and costly maintenance if not efficiently repaired. Manual repair methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and imprecise and thus difficult to scale to large areas. Breakthroughs in robotic perception and manipulation have advanced autonomous crack repair, but proposed methods lack end-to-end testing and adaptability to changing crack size. This paper presents an adaptive, autonomous system for surface crack detection and repair using robotics with advanced sensing technologies. The system uses an RGB-D camera for crack detection, a laser scanner for precise measurement, and an extruder and pump for material deposition. A novel validation procedure with 3D-printed crack specimens simulates real-world cracks and ensures testing repeatability. Our study shows that an adaptive system for crack filling is more efficient and effective than a fixed-speed approach, with experimental results confirming precision and consistency. This research paves the way for versatile, reliable robotic infrastructure maintenance.

Abstract-- This research introduces the Bi-VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model, a novel system designed for bimanual robotic dexterous manipulation that seamlessly integrates vision for scene understanding, language comprehension for translating human instructions into executable code, and physical action generation. We evaluated the system's functionality through a series of household tasks, including the preparation of a desired salad upon human request. Bi-VLA demonstrates the ability to interpret complex human instructions, perceive and understand the visual context of ingredients, and execute precise bimanual actions to prepare the requested salad. We assessed the system's performance in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability to different salad recipes and human preferences through a series of experiments. Our results show a 100% success rate in generating the correct executable code by the Language Module, a 96.06% success rate in detecting specific ingredients by the Vision Module, and an overall success rate of 83.4% in However, despite their potential, the application of language models Recent advancements in language models have significantly to synthesize the bimanual skills of robots has not received impacted Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), enabling significant attention.

Abstract-- In this paper we propose a novel approach aimed at recovering the 3D position of an UUV from UAV imagery in shallow-water environments. Through combination of UAV and UUV measurements, we show that our method can be utilized as an accurate and cost-effective alternative when compared to acoustic sensing methods, typically required to obtain ground truth information in underwater localization problems. Furthermore, our approach allows for a seamless conversion to geo-referenced coordinates which can be utilized for navigation purposes. To validate our method, we present the results with data collected through a simulation environment and field experiments, demonstrating the ability to successfully recover the UUV position with sub-meter accuracy. Unavailability of Global Positioning System (GPS) information underwater makes the task of Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) localization a difficult problem that requires deployment of expensive acoustic sensors such as Doppler Velocity Log (DVL), Long BaseLine (LBL) and Ultra-Short BaseLine (USBL), typically fused with Inertial Measurements Units (IMUs).

Taking advantage of an event-based camera, the issues of motion blur, low dynamic range and low time sampling of standard cameras can all be addressed. However, there is a lack of event-based datasets dedicated to the benchmarking of segmentation algorithms, especially those that provide depth information which is critical for segmentation in occluded scenes. This paper proposes a new Event-based Segmentation Dataset (ESD), a high-quality 3D spatial and temporal dataset for object segmentation in an indoor cluttered environment. Our proposed dataset ESD comprises 145 sequences with 14,166 RGB frames that are manually annotated with instance masks. Overall 21.88 million and 20.80 million events from two event-based cameras in a stereo-graphic configuration are collected, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this densely annotated and 3D spatial-temporal event-based segmentation benchmark of tabletop objects is the first of its kind. By releasing ESD, we expect to provide the community with a challenging segmentation benchmark with high quality. Please note: Abbreviations should be introduced at the first mention in the main text - no abbreviations lists or tables should be included. The structure of the main text is provided below.

Lidars and cameras are two essential sensors for perception and scene understanding. They build an environment in tandem and provide a means for detection and localisation of other objects, giving robots rich semantic information required for safe navigation. Many researchers have started exploring multi-modal deep learning model for precise 3D object detection. An interesting example would be an algorithm developed by Aptiv, PointPainting[1] Camera outperforms LIDAR when it comes to capturing denser and richer representation. From fig 2, looking at the sparse point cloud alone, it is relatively difficult to correctly identify the black box as a pedestrian.