Table tennis ball spin estimation with an event camera

Spin plays a pivotal role in ball-based sports. Estimating spin becomes a key skill due to its impact on the ball's trajectory and bouncing behavior. Spin cannot be observed directly, making it inherently challenging to estimate. In table tennis, the combination of high velocity and spin renders traditional low frame rate cameras inadequate for quickly and accurately observing the ball's logo to estimate the spin due to the motion blur. Event cameras do not suffer as much from motion blur, thanks to their high temporal resolution. Moreover, the sparse nature of the event stream solves communication bandwidth limitations many frame cameras face. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first method for table tennis spin estimation using an event camera. We use ordinal time surfaces to track the ball and then isolate the events generated by the logo on the ball. Optical flow is then estimated from the extracted events to infer the ball's spin. We achieved a spin magnitude mean error of $10.7 \pm 17.3$ rps and a spin axis mean error of $32.9 \pm 38.2\deg$ in real time for a flying ball.

Can Vehicle Motion Planning Generalize to Realistic Long-tail Scenarios?

Real-world autonomous driving systems must make safe decisions in the face of rare and diverse traffic scenarios. Current state-of-the-art planners are mostly evaluated on real-world datasets like nuScenes (open-loop) or nuPlan (closed-loop). In particular, nuPlan seems to be an expressive evaluation method since it is based on real-world data and closed-loop, yet it mostly covers basic driving scenarios. This makes it difficult to judge a planner's capabilities to generalize to rarely-seen situations. Therefore, we propose a novel closed-loop benchmark interPlan containing several edge cases and challenging driving scenarios. We assess existing state-of-the-art planners on our benchmark and show that neither rule-based nor learning-based planners can safely navigate the interPlan scenarios. A recently evolving direction is the usage of foundation models like large language models (LLM) to handle generalization. We evaluate an LLM-only planner and introduce a novel hybrid planner that combines an LLM-based behavior planner with a rule-based motion planner that achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark.

UAV-Assisted Maritime Search and Rescue: A Holistic Approach

In this paper, we explore the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in maritime search and rescue (mSAR) missions, focusing on medium-sized fixed-wing drones and quadcopters. We address the challenges and limitations inherent in operating some of the different classes of UAVs, particularly in search operations. Our research includes the development of a comprehensive software framework designed to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of SAR operations. This framework combines preliminary detection onboard UAVs with advanced object detection at ground stations, aiming to reduce visual strain and improve decision-making for operators. It will be made publicly available upon publication. We conduct experiments to evaluate various Region of Interest (RoI) proposal methods, especially by imposing simulated limited bandwidth on them, an important consideration when flying remote or offshore operations. This forces the algorithm to prioritize some predictions over others.

Spiking Neural Networks for Fast-Moving Object Detection on Neuromorphic Hardware Devices Using an Event-Based Camera

Table tennis is a fast-paced and exhilarating sport that demands agility, precision, and fast reflexes. In recent years, robotic table tennis has become a popular research challenge for robot perception algorithms. Fast and accurate ball detection is crucial for enabling a robotic arm to rally the ball back successfully. Previous approaches have employed conventional frame-based cameras with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or traditional computer vision methods. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that combines an event-based camera with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for ball detection. We use multiple state-of-the-art SNN frameworks and develop a SNN architecture for each of them, complying with their corresponding constraints. Additionally, we implement the SNN solution across multiple neuromorphic edge devices, conducting comparisons of their accuracies and run-times. This furnishes robotics researchers with a benchmark illustrating the capabilities achievable with each SNN framework and a corresponding neuromorphic edge device. Next to this comparison of SNN solutions for robots, we also show that an SNN on a neuromorphic edge device is able to run in real-time in a closed loop robotic system, a table tennis robot in our use case.

Evaluating UAV Path Planning Algorithms for Realistic Maritime Search and Rescue Missions

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as very important tools in search and rescue (SAR) missions at sea, enabling swift and efficient deployment for locating individuals or vessels in distress. The successful execution of these critical missions heavily relies on effective path planning algorithms that navigate UAVs through complex maritime environments while considering dynamic factors such as water currents and wind flow. Furthermore, they need to account for the uncertainty in search target locations. However, existing path planning methods often fail to address the inherent uncertainty associated with the precise location of search targets and the uncertainty of oceanic forces. In this paper, we develop a framework to develop and investigate trajectory planning algorithms for maritime SAR scenarios employing UAVs. We adopt it to compare multiple planning strategies, some of them used in practical applications by the United States Coast Guard. Furthermore, we propose a novel planner that aims at bridging the gap between computation heavy, precise algorithms and lightweight strategies applicable to real-world scenarios.

Conditional Unscented Autoencoders for Trajectory Prediction

The \ac{CVAE} is one of the most widely-used models in trajectory prediction for \ac{AD}. It captures the interplay between a driving context and its ground-truth future into a probabilistic latent space and uses it to produce predictions. In this paper, we challenge key components of the CVAE. We leverage recent advances in the space of the VAE, the foundation of the CVAE, which show that a simple change in the sampling procedure can greatly benefit performance. We find that unscented sampling, which draws samples from any learned distribution in a deterministic manner, can naturally be better suited to trajectory prediction than potentially dangerous random sampling. We go further and offer additional improvements, including a more structured mixture latent space, as well as a novel, potentially more expressive way to do inference with CVAEs. We show wide applicability of our models by evaluating them on the INTERACTION prediction dataset, outperforming the state of the art, as well as at the task of image modeling on the CelebA dataset, outperforming the baseline vanilla CVAE. Code is available at https://github.com/boschresearch/cuae-prediction.

A multi-modal table tennis robot system

In recent years, robotic table tennis has become a popular research challenge for perception and robot control. Here, we present an improved table tennis robot system with high accuracy vision detection and fast robot reaction. Based on previous work, our system contains a KUKA robot arm with 6 DOF, with four frame-based cameras and two additional event-based cameras. We developed a novel calibration approach to calibrate this multimodal perception system. For table tennis, spin estimation is crucial. Therefore, we introduced a novel, and more accurate spin estimation approach. Finally, we show how combining the output of an event-based camera and a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) can be used for accurate ball detection.

eWand: A calibration framework for wide baseline frame-based and event-based camera systems

Accurate calibration is crucial for using multiple cameras to triangulate the position of objects precisely. However, it is also a time-consuming process that needs to be repeated for every displacement of the cameras. The standard approach is to use a printed pattern with known geometry to estimate the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the cameras. The same idea can be applied to event-based cameras, though it requires extra work. By using frame reconstruction from events, a printed pattern can be detected. A blinking pattern can also be displayed on a screen. Then, the pattern can be directly detected from the events. Such calibration methods can provide accurate intrinsic calibration for both frame- and event-based cameras. However, using 2D patterns has several limitations for multi-camera extrinsic calibration, with cameras possessing highly different points of view and a wide baseline. The 2D pattern can only be detected from one direction and needs to be of significant size to compensate for its distance to the camera. This makes the extrinsic calibration time-consuming and cumbersome. To overcome these limitations, we propose eWand, a new method that uses blinking LEDs inside opaque spheres instead of a printed or displayed pattern. Our method provides a faster, easier-to-use extrinsic calibration approach that maintains high accuracy for both event- and frame-based cameras.

Hyperspectral Benchmark: Bridging the Gap between HSI Applications through Comprehensive Dataset and Pretraining

Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) serves as a non-destructive spatial spectroscopy technique with a multitude of potential applications. However, a recurring challenge lies in the limited size of the target datasets, impeding exhaustive architecture search. Consequently, when venturing into novel applications, reliance on established methodologies becomes commonplace, in the hope that they exhibit favorable generalization characteristics. Regrettably, this optimism is often unfounded due to the fine-tuned nature of models tailored to specific HSI contexts. To address this predicament, this study introduces an innovative benchmark dataset encompassing three markedly distinct HSI applications: food inspection, remote sensing, and recycling. This comprehensive dataset affords a finer assessment of hyperspectral model capabilities. Moreover, this benchmark facilitates an incisive examination of prevailing state-of-the-art techniques, consequently fostering the evolution of superior methodologies. Furthermore, the enhanced diversity inherent in the benchmark dataset underpins the establishment of a pretraining pipeline for HSI. This pretraining regimen serves to enhance the stability of training processes for larger models. Additionally, a procedural framework is delineated, offering insights into the handling of applications afflicted by limited target dataset sizes.

Stable Yaw Estimation of Boats from the Viewpoint of UAVs and USVs

Yaw estimation of boats from the viewpoint of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) or boats is a crucial task in various applications such as 3D scene rendering, trajectory prediction, and navigation. However, the lack of literature on yaw estimation of objects from the viewpoint of UAVs has motivated us to address this domain. In this paper, we propose a method based on HyperPosePDF for predicting the orientation of boats in the 6D space. For that, we use existing datasets, such as PASCAL3D+ and our own datasets, SeaDronesSee-3D and BOArienT, which we annotated manually. We extend HyperPosePDF to work in video-based scenarios, such that it yields robust orientation predictions across time. Naively applying HyperPosePDF on video data yields single-point predictions, resulting in far-off predictions and often incorrect symmetric orientations due to unseen or visually different data. To alleviate this issue, we propose aggregating the probability distributions of pose predictions, resulting in significantly improved performance, as shown in our experimental evaluation. Our proposed method could significantly benefit downstream tasks in marine robotics.