We give a model of how to infer natural language rules by doing experiments.

This paper presents a novel image-based path planning algorithm that was developed using computer vision techniques, as well as its comparative analysis with well-known deterministic and probabilistic algorithms, namely A* and Probabilistic Road Map algorithm (PRM). The terrain depth has a significant impact on the calculated path safety. The craters and hills on the surface cannot be distinguished in a two-dimensional image. The proposed method uses a disparity map of the terrain that is generated by using a UAV. Several computer vision techniques, including edge, line and corner detection methods, as well as the stereo depth reconstruction technique, are applied to the captured images and the found disparity map is used to define candidate way-points of the trajectory. The initial and desired points are detected automatically using ArUco marker pose estimation and circle detection techniques. After presenting the mathematical model and vision techniques, the developed algorithm is compared with well-known algorithms on different virtual scenes created in the V-REP simulation program and a physical setup created in a laboratory environment. Results are promising and demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

We give a model of how to infer natural language rules by doing experiments.

However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multiview predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering. Figure 1: Given sparse RGB images, our self-calibration pipeline efficiently specializes a pre-trained 3D foundation model to a target scene to improve its performance for a variety of 3D vision tasks. 1 These models, typically enabled by large scale Transformer pre-training, can quickly establish crossview correspondences and directly regress 3D scene geometry from sparse RGB images. They generalize to a broad range of data and exhibit a strong zero-shot performance on novel tasks.

Grasping in cluttered scenes remains highly challenging for dexterous hands due to the scarcity of data. To address this problem, we present a large-scale synthetic benchmark, encompassing 1319 objects, 8270 scenes, and 427 million grasps. Beyond benchmarking, we also propose a novel two-stage grasping method that learns efficiently from data by using a diffusion model that conditions on local geometry. Our proposed generative method outperforms all baselines in simulation experiments. Furthermore, with the aid of test-time-depth restoration, our method demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, attaining 90.7% real-world dexterous grasping success rate in cluttered scenes.

Learning a single universal policy that can perform a diverse set of manipulation tasks is a promising new direction in robotics. However, existing techniques are limited to learning policies that can only perform tasks that are encountered during training, and require a large number of demonstrations to learn new tasks. Humans, on the other hand, often can learn a new task from a single unannotated demonstration. In this work, we propose the Invariance-Matching One-shot Policy Learning (IMOP) algorithm. In contrast to the standard practice of learning the end-effector's pose directly, IMOP first learns invariant regions of the state space for a given task, and then computes the end-effector's pose through matching the invariant regions between demonstrations and test scenes. Trained on the 18 RLBench tasks, IMOP achieves a success rate that outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently, by 4.5% on average over the 18 tasks. More importantly, IMOP can learn a novel task from a single unannotated demonstration, and without any fine-tuning, and achieves an average success rate improvement of $11.5\%$ over the state-of-the-art on 22 novel tasks selected across nine categories. IMOP can also generalize to new shapes and learn to manipulate objects that are different from those in the demonstration. Further, IMOP can perform one-shot sim-to-real transfer using a single real-robot demonstration.

While deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has attracted a rapidly growing interest in solving the problem of navigation without global maps, DRL typically leads to a mediocre navigation performance in practice due to the gap between the training scene and the actual test scene. To quantify the transferability of a DRL agent between the training and test scenes, this paper proposes a new transferability metric -- the scene similarity calculated using an improved image template matching algorithm. Specifically, two transferability performance indicators are designed including the global scene similarity that evaluates the overall robustness of a DRL algorithm and the local scene similarity that serves as a safety measure when a DRL agent is deployed without a global map. In addition, this paper proposes the use of a local map that fuses 2D LiDAR data with spatial information of both the agent and the destination as the DRL observation, aiming to improve the transferability of DRL navigation algorithms. With a wheeled robot as the case study platform, both simulation and real-world experiments are conducted in a total of 26 different scenes. The experimental results affirm the robustness of the local map observation design and demonstrate the strong correlation between the scene similarity metric and the success rate of DRL navigation algorithms.

In this paper we tackle the problem of learning Structure-from-Motion (SfM) through the use of graph attention networks. SfM is a classic computer vision problem that is solved though iterative minimization of reprojection errors, referred to as Bundle Adjustment (BA), starting from a good initialization. In order to obtain a good enough initialization to BA, conventional methods rely on a sequence of sub-problems (such as pairwise pose estimation, pose averaging or triangulation) which provides an initial solution that can then be refined using BA. In this work we replace these sub-problems by learning a model that takes as input the 2D keypoints detected across multiple views, and outputs the corresponding camera poses and 3D keypoint coordinates. Our model takes advantage of graph neural networks to learn SfM-specific primitives, and we show that it can be used for fast inference of the reconstruction for new and unseen sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms competing learning-based methods, and challenges COLMAP while having lower runtime.

Recent 3D-based manipulation methods either directly predict the grasp pose using 3D neural networks, or solve the grasp pose using similar objects retrieved from shape databases. However, the former faces generalizability challenges when testing with new robot arms or unseen objects; and the latter assumes that similar objects exist in the databases. We hypothesize that recent 3D modeling methods provides a path towards building digital replica of the evaluation scene that affords physical simulation and supports robust manipulation algorithm learning. We propose to reconstruct high-quality meshes from real-world point clouds using state-of-the-art neural surface reconstruction method (the Real2Sim step). Because most simulators take meshes for fast simulation, the reconstructed meshes enable grasp pose labels generation without human efforts. The generated labels can train grasp network that performs robustly in the real evaluation scene (the Sim2Real step). In synthetic and real experiments, we show that the Real2Sim2Real pipeline performs better than baseline grasp networks trained with a large dataset and a grasp sampling method with retrieval-based reconstruction. The benefit of the Real2Sim2Real pipeline comes from 1) decoupling scene modeling and grasp sampling into sub-problems, and 2) both sub-problems can be solved with sufficiently high quality using recent 3D learning algorithms and mesh-based physical simulation techniques.

Collision avoidance is a crucial task in vision-guided autonomous navigation. Solutions based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has become increasingly popular. In this work, we proposed several novel agent state and reward function designs to tackle two critical issues in DRL-based navigation solutions: 1) smoothness of the trained flight trajectories; and 2) model generalization to handle unseen environments. Formulated under a DRL framework, our model relies on margin reward and smoothness constraints to ensure UAVs fly smoothly while greatly reducing the chance of collision. The proposed smoothness reward minimizes a combination of first-order and second-order derivatives of flight trajectories, which can also drive the points to be evenly distributed, leading to stable flight speed. To enhance the agent's capability of handling new unseen environments, two practical setups are proposed to improve the invariance of both the state and reward function when deploying in different scenes. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our overall design and individual components.