Quantifying Uncertainty in Motion Prediction with Variational Bayesian Mixture

Safety and robustness are crucial factors in developing trustworthy autonomous vehicles. One essential aspect of addressing these factors is to equip vehicles with the capability to predict future trajectories for all moving objects in the surroundings and quantify prediction uncertainties. In this paper, we propose the Sequential Neural Variational Agent (SeNeVA), a generative model that describes the distribution of future trajectories for a single moving object. Our approach can distinguish Out-of-Distribution data while quantifying uncertainty and achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse 2 and INTERACTION datasets. Specifically, a 0.446 meters minimum Final Displacement Error, a 0.203 meters minimum Average Displacement Error, and a 5.35% Miss Rate are achieved on the INTERACTION test set. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis is also provided to evaluate the proposed model. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/seneva.

Beyond Text: Improving LLM's Decision Making for Robot Navigation via Vocal Cues

This work highlights a critical shortcoming in text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) used for human-robot interaction, demonstrating that text alone as a conversation modality falls short in such applications. While LLMs excel in processing text in these human conversations, they struggle with the nuances of verbal instructions in scenarios like social navigation, where ambiguity and uncertainty can erode trust in robotic and other AI systems. We can address this shortcoming by moving beyond text and additionally focusing on the paralinguistic features of these audio responses. These features are the aspects of spoken communication that do not involve the literal wording (lexical content) but convey meaning and nuance through how something is said. We present "Beyond Text"; an approach that improves LLM decision-making by integrating audio transcription along with a subsection of these features, which focus on the affect and more relevant in human-robot conversations. This approach not only achieves a 70.26% winning rate, outperforming existing LLMs by 48.30%, but also enhances robustness against token manipulation adversarial attacks, highlighted by a 22.44% less decrease ratio than the text-only language model in winning rate. "Beyond Text" marks an advancement in social robot navigation and broader Human-Robot interactions, seamlessly integrating text-based guidance with human-audio-informed language models.

DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision

We have witnessed significant progress in deep learning-based 3D vision, ranging from neural radiance field (NeRF) based 3D representation learning to applications in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing scene-level datasets for deep learning-based 3D vision, limited to either synthetic environments or a narrow selection of real-world scenes, are quite insufficient. This insufficiency not only hinders a comprehensive benchmark of existing methods but also caps what could be explored in deep learning-based 3D analysis. To address this critical gap, we present DL3DV-10K, a large-scale scene dataset, featuring 51.2 million frames from 10,510 videos captured from 65 types of point-of-interest (POI) locations, covering both bounded and unbounded scenes, with different levels of reflection, transparency, and lighting. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark of recent NVS methods on DL3DV-10K, which revealed valuable insights for future research in NVS. In addition, we have obtained encouraging results in a pilot study to learn generalizable NeRF from DL3DV-10K, which manifests the necessity of a large-scale scene-level dataset to forge a path toward a foundation model for learning 3D representation. Our DL3DV-10K dataset, benchmark results, and models will be publicly accessible at https://dl3dv-10k.github.io/DL3DV-10K/.

RL Dreams: Policy Gradient Optimization for Score Distillation based 3D Generation

3D generation has rapidly accelerated in the past decade owing to the progress in the field of generative modeling. Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) based rendering has improved 3D asset generation to a great extent. Further, the recent work of Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO) demonstrates that the diffusion process is compatible with policy gradient methods and has been demonstrated to improve the 2D diffusion models using an aesthetic scoring function. We first show that this aesthetic scorer acts as a strong guide for a variety of SDS-based methods and demonstrates its effectiveness in text-to-3D synthesis. Further, we leverage the DDPO approach to improve the quality of the 3D rendering obtained from 2D diffusion models. Our approach, DDPO3D, employs the policy gradient method in tandem with aesthetic scoring. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that extends policy gradient methods to 3D score-based rendering and shows improvement across SDS-based methods such as DreamGaussian, which are currently driving research in text-to-3D synthesis. Our approach is compatible with score distillation-based methods, which would facilitate the integration of diverse reward functions into the generative process. Our project page can be accessed via https://ddpo3d.github.io.

LaMPilot: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Language Model Programs

We present LaMPilot, a novel framework for planning in the field of autonomous driving, rethinking the task as a code-generation process that leverages established behavioral primitives. This approach aims to address the challenge of interpreting and executing spontaneous user instructions such as "overtake the car ahead," which have typically posed difficulties for existing frameworks. We introduce the LaMPilot benchmark specifically designed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in translating human directives into actionable driving policies. We then evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art code generation language models on tasks from the LaMPilot Benchmark. The results of the experiments showed that GPT-4, with human feedback, achieved an impressive task completion rate of 92.7% and a minimal collision rate of 0.9%. To encourage further investigation in this area, our code and dataset will be made available.

MIRACLE: Inverse Reinforcement and Curriculum Learning Model for Human-inspired Mobile Robot Navigation

In emergency scenarios, mobile robots must navigate like humans, interpreting stimuli to locate potential victims rapidly without interfering with first responders. Existing socially-aware navigation algorithms face computational and adaptability challenges. To overcome these, we propose a solution, MIRACLE -- an inverse reinforcement and curriculum learning model, that employs gamified learning to gather stimuli-driven human navigational data. This data is then used to train a Deep Inverse Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning model, reducing reliance on demonstrator abilities. Testing reveals a low loss of 2.7717 within a 400-sized environment, signifying human-like response replication. Current databases lack comprehensive stimuli-driven data, necessitating our approach. By doing so, we enable robots to navigate emergency situations with human-like perception, enhancing their life-saving capabilities.

DREAM: Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems

Resource-constrained robots often suffer from energy inefficiencies, underutilized computational abilities due to inadequate task allocation, and a lack of robustness in dynamic environments, all of which strongly affect their performance. This paper introduces DREAM - Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems, a comprehensive framework that optimizes the allocation of resources for efficient exploration. It advances beyond conventional heuristic-based task planning as observed conventionally. The framework incorporates Operational Range Estimation using Reinforcement Learning to perform exploration and obstacle avoidance in unfamiliar terrains. DREAM further introduces an Energy Consumption Model for goal allocation, thereby ensuring mission completion under constrained resources using a Graph Neural Network. This approach also ensures that the entire Multi-Robot System can survive for an extended period of time for further missions compared to the conventional approach of randomly allocating goals, which compromises one or more agents. Our approach adapts to prioritizing agents in real-time, showcasing remarkable resilience against dynamic environments. This robust solution was evaluated in various simulated environments, demonstrating adaptability and applicability across diverse scenarios. We observed a substantial improvement of about 25% over the baseline method, leading the way for future research in resource-constrained robotics.

HEROES: Unreal Engine-based Human and Emergency Robot Operation Education System

Training and preparing first responders and humanitarian robots for Mass Casualty Incidents (MCIs) often poses a challenge owing to the lack of realistic and easily accessible test facilities. While such facilities can offer realistic scenarios post an MCI that can serve training and educational purposes for first responders and humanitarian robots, they are often hard to access owing to logistical constraints. To overcome this challenge, we present HEROES- a versatile Unreal Engine simulator for designing novel training simulations for humans and emergency robots for such urban search and rescue operations. The proposed HEROES simulator is capable of generating synthetic datasets for machine learning pipelines that are used for training robot navigation. This work addresses the necessity for a comprehensive training platform in the robotics community, ensuring pragmatic and efficient preparation for real-world emergency scenarios. The strengths of our simulator lie in its adaptability, scalability, and ability to facilitate collaboration between robot developers and first responders, fostering synergy in developing effective strategies for search and rescue operations in MCIs. We conducted a preliminary user study with an 81% positive response supporting the ability of HEROES to generate sufficiently varied environments, and a 78% positive response affirming the usefulness of the simulation environment of HEROES.

Crowd-Aware Multi-Agent Pathfinding With Boosted Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in crowded environments presents a challenging problem in motion planning, aiming to find collision-free paths for all agents in the system. MAPF finds a wide range of applications in various domains, including aerial swarms, autonomous warehouse robotics, and self-driving vehicles. The current approaches for MAPF can be broadly categorized into two main categories: centralized and decentralized planning. Centralized planning suffers from the curse of dimensionality and thus does not scale well in large and complex environments. On the other hand, decentralized planning enables agents to engage in real-time path planning within a partially observable environment, demonstrating implicit coordination. However, they suffer from slow convergence and performance degradation in dense environments. In this paper, we introduce CRAMP, a crowd-aware decentralized approach to address this problem by leveraging reinforcement learning guided by a boosted curriculum-based training strategy. We test CRAMP on simulated environments and demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized methods for MAPF on various metrics. CRAMP improves the solution quality up to 58% measured in makespan and collision count, and up to 5% in success rate in comparison to previous methods.

Trajectory Prediction for Robot Navigation using Flow-Guided Markov Neural Operator

Predicting pedestrian movements remains a complex and persistent challenge in robot navigation research. We must evaluate several factors to achieve accurate predictions, such as pedestrian interactions, the environment, crowd density, and social and cultural norms. Accurate prediction of pedestrian paths is vital for ensuring safe human-robot interaction, especially in robot navigation. Furthermore, this research has potential applications in autonomous vehicles, pedestrian tracking, and human-robot collaboration. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce FlowMNO, an Optical Flow-Integrated Markov Neural Operator designed to capture pedestrian behavior across diverse scenarios. Our paper models trajectory prediction as a Markovian process, where future pedestrian coordinates depend solely on the current state. This problem formulation eliminates the need to store previous states. We conducted experiments using standard benchmark datasets like ETH, HOTEL, ZARA1, ZARA2, UCY, and RGB-D pedestrian datasets. Our study demonstrates that FlowMNO outperforms some of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods like LSTM, GAN, and CNN-based approaches, by approximately 86.46% when predicting pedestrian trajectories. Thus, we show that FlowMNO can seamlessly integrate into robot navigation systems, enhancing their ability to navigate crowded areas smoothly.