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 robotic and automation



A High-Resolution Dataset for Instance Detection with Multi-View Instance Capture

Neural Information Processing Systems

One major reason is that current InsDet datasets are too small in scale by today's standards. For example, the popular InsDet dataset GMU (published in 2016) has only 23 instances, far less than COCO (80 classes), a well-known object detection dataset published in 2014.







High-Performance Dual-Arm Task and Motion Planning for Tabletop Rearrangement

Zhang, Duo, Huang, Junshan, Yu, Jingjin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- We propose Synchronous Dual-Arm Rearrangement Planner (SDAR), a task and motion planning (T AMP) framework for tabletop rearrangement, where two robot arms equipped with 2-finger grippers must work together in close proximity to rearrange objects whose start and goal configurations are strongly entangled. T o tackle such challenges, SDAR tightly knit together its dependency-driven task planner (SDAR-T) and synchronous dual-arm motion planner (SDAR-M), to intelligently sift through a large number of possible task and motion plans. Specifically, SDAR-T applies a simple yet effective strategy to decompose the global object dependency graph induced by the rearrangement task, to produce more optimal dual-arm task plans than solutions derived from optimal task plans for a single arm. Leveraging state-of-the-art GPU SIMD-based motion planning tools, SDAR-M employs a layered motion planning strategy to sift through many task plans for the best synchronous dual-arm motion plan while ensuring high levels of success rate. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SDAR delivers a 100% success rate in solving complex, non-monotone, long-horizon tabletop rearrangement tasks with solution quality far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art. Experiments on two UR-5e arms further confirm SDAR directly and reliably transfers to robot hardware. Task and motion planning (T AMP) [1] represents a fundamental computation challenge in robotics, in which a robot system, e.g., one or more robot arms, must break down a given, potentially long-horizon task into suitable "bite-sized" sub-tasks that can be executed through short-horizon robot motions.


Incremental Generalized Hybrid A*

Talia, Sidharth, Salzman, Oren, Srinivasa, Siddhartha

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We address the problem of efficiently organizing search over very large trees, which arises in many applications ranging from autonomous driving to aerial vehicles. Here, we are motivated by off-road autonomy, where real-time planning is essential. Classical approaches use graphs of motion primitives and exploit dominance to mitigate the curse of dimensionality and prune expansions efficiently. However, for complex dynamics, repeatedly solving two-point boundary-value problems makes graph construction too slow for fast kinodynamic planning. Hybrid A* (HA*) addressed this challenge by searching over a tree of motion primitives and introducing approximate pruning using a grid-based dominance check. However, choosing the grid resolution is difficult: too coarse risks failure, while too fine leads to excessive expansions and slow planning. We propose Incremental Generalized Hybrid A* (IGHA*), an anytime tree-search framework that dynamically organizes vertex expansions without rigid pruning. IGHA* provably matches or outperforms HA*. For both on-road kinematic and off-road kinodynamic planning queries for a car-like robot, variants of IGHA* use 6x fewer expansions to the best solution compared to an optimized version of HA* (HA*M, an internal baseline). In simulated off-road experiments in a high-fidelity simulator, IGHA* outperforms HA*M when both are used in the loop with a model predictive controller. We demonstrate real-time performance both in simulation and on a small-scale off-road vehicle, enabling fast, robust planning under complex dynamics. Website: https://personalrobotics.github.io/IGHAStar/


MagicSkin: Balancing Marker and Markerless Modes in Vision-Based Tactile Sensors with a Translucent Skin

Tijani, Oluwatimilehin, Chen, Zhuo, Deng, Jiankang, Luo, Shan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTS) face a fundamental trade-off in marker and markerless design on the tactile skin: opaque ink markers enable measurement of force and tangential displacement but completely occlude geometric features necessary for object and texture classification, while markerless skin preserves surface details but struggles in measuring tangential displacements effectively. Current practice to solve the above problem via UV lighting or virtual transfer using learning-based models introduces hardware complexity or computing burdens. This paper introduces MagicSkin, a novel tactile skin with translucent, tinted markers balancing the modes of marker and markerless for VBTS. It enables simultaneous tangential displacement tracking, force prediction, and surface detail preservation. This skin is easy to plug into GelSight-family sensors without requiring additional hardware or software tools. We comprehensively evaluate MagicSkin in downstream tasks. The translucent markers impressively enhance rather than degrade sensing performance compared with traditional markerless and inked marker design: it achieves best performance in object classification (99.17\%), texture classification (93.51\%), tangential displacement tracking (97\% point retention) and force prediction (66\% improvement in total force error). These experimental results demonstrate that translucent skin eliminates the traditional performance trade-off in marker or markerless modes, paving the way for multimodal tactile sensing essential in tactile robotics. See videos at this \href{https://zhuochenn.github.io/MagicSkin_project/}{link}.