A Modular Bio-inspired Robotic Hand with High Sensitivity

While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to handle various daily manipulation and grasping tasks. Dexterity usually requires more actuators but also leads to a more sophisticated mechanism design and is more expensive to fabricate and maintain. Soft materials are able to provide compliance and safety when interacting with the physical world but are hard to model. This work presents a hybrid bio-inspired robotic hand that combines soft matters and rigid elements. Sensing is integrated into the rigid bodies resulting in a simple way for pose estimation with high sensitivity. The proposed hand is in a modular structure allowing for rapid fabrication and programming. The fabrication process is carefully designed so that a full hand can be made with low-cost materials and assembled in an efficient manner. We demonstrate the dexterity of the hand by successfully performing human grasp types.

Safe Neural Control for Non-Affine Control Systems with Differentiable Control Barrier Functions

This paper addresses the problem of safety-critical control for non-affine control systems. It has been shown that optimizing quadratic costs subject to state and control constraints can be sub-optimally reduced to a sequence of quadratic programs (QPs) by using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Our recently proposed High Order CBFs (HOCBFs) can accommodate constraints of arbitrary relative degree. The main challenges in this approach are that it requires affine control dynamics and the solution of the CBF-based QP is sub-optimal since it is solved point-wise. To address these challenges, we incorporate higher-order CBFs into neural ordinary differential equation-based learning models as differentiable CBFs to guarantee safety for non-affine control systems. The differentiable CBFs are trainable in terms of their parameters, and thus, they can address the conservativeness of CBFs such that the system state will not stay unnecessarily far away from safe set boundaries. Moreover, the imitation learning model is capable of learning complex and optimal control policies that are usually intractable online. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on LiDAR-based autonomous driving and compare it with existing methods.

Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

Capsa: A Unified Framework for Quantifying Risk in Deep Neural Networks

The modern pervasiveness of large-scale deep neural networks (NNs) is driven by their extraordinary performance on complex problems but is also plagued by their sudden, unexpected, and often catastrophic failures, particularly on challenging scenarios. Existing algorithms that provide risk-awareness to NNs are complex and ad-hoc. Specifically, these methods require significant engineering changes, are often developed only for particular settings, and are not easily composable. Here we present capsa, a framework for extending models with risk-awareness. Capsa provides a methodology for quantifying multiple forms of risk and composing different algorithms together to quantify different risk metrics in parallel. We validate capsa by implementing state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation algorithms within the capsa framework and benchmarking them on complex perception datasets. We demonstrate capsa's ability to easily compose aleatoric uncertainty, epistemic uncertainty, and bias estimation together in a single procedure, and show how this approach provides a comprehensive awareness of NN risk.

Efficient automatic design of robots

Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually determined by a human designer after several months or years of iterative ideation, prototyping, and testing. Inspired by evolutionary design in nature, the automated design of robots using evolutionary algorithms has been attempted for two decades, but it too remains inefficient: days of supercomputing are required to design robots in simulation that, when manufactured, exhibit desired behavior. Here we show for the first time de-novo optimization of a robot's structure to exhibit a desired behavior, within seconds on a single consumer-grade computer, and the manufactured robot's retention of that behavior. Unlike other gradient-based robot design methods, this algorithm does not presuppose any particular anatomical form; starting instead from a randomly-generated apodous body plan, it consistently discovers legged locomotion, the most efficient known form of terrestrial movement. If combined with automated fabrication and scaled up to more challenging tasks, this advance promises near instantaneous design, manufacture, and deployment of unique and useful machines for medical, environmental, vehicular, and space-based tasks.

SafeDiffuser: Safe Planning with Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Diffusion model-based approaches have shown promise in data-driven planning, but there are no safety guarantees, thus making it hard to be applied for safety-critical applications. To address these challenges, we propose a new method, called SafeDiffuser, to ensure diffusion probabilistic models satisfy specifications by using a class of control barrier functions. The key idea of our approach is to embed the proposed finite-time diffusion invariance into the denoising diffusion procedure, which enables trustworthy diffusion data generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that our finite-time diffusion invariance method through generative models not only maintains generalization performance but also creates robustness in safe data generation. We test our method on a series of safe planning tasks, including maze path generation, legged robot locomotion, and 3D space manipulation, with results showing the advantages of robustness and guarantees over vanilla diffusion models.

Multi-Abstractive Neural Controller: An Efficient Hierarchical Control Architecture for Interactive Driving

As learning-based methods make their way from perception systems to planning/control stacks, robot control systems have started to enjoy the benefits that data-driven methods provide. Because control systems directly affect the motion of the robot, data-driven methods, especially black box approaches, need to be used with caution considering aspects such as stability and interpretability. In this paper, we describe a differentiable and hierarchical control architecture. The proposed representation, called \textit{multi-abstractive neural controller}, uses the input image to control the transitions within a novel discrete behavior planner (referred to as the visual automaton generative network, or \textit{vAGN}). The output of a vAGN controls the parameters of a set of dynamic movement primitives which provides the system controls. We train this neural controller with real-world driving data via behavior cloning and show improved explainability, sample efficiency, and similarity to human driving.

On the Size and Approximation Error of Distilled Sets

Dataset Distillation is the task of synthesizing small datasets from large ones while still retaining comparable predictive accuracy to the original uncompressed dataset. Despite significant empirical progress in recent years, there is little understanding of the theoretical limitations/guarantees of dataset distillation, specifically, what excess risk is achieved by distillation compared to the original dataset, and how large are distilled datasets? In this work, we take a theoretical view on kernel ridge regression (KRR) based methods of dataset distillation such as Kernel Inducing Points. By transforming ridge regression in random Fourier features (RFF) space, we provide the first proof of the existence of small (size) distilled datasets and their corresponding excess risk for shift-invariant kernels. We prove that a small set of instances exists in the original input space such that its solution in the RFF space coincides with the solution of the original data. We further show that a KRR solution can be generated using this distilled set of instances which gives an approximation towards the KRR solution optimized on the full input data. The size of this set is linear in the dimension of the RFF space of the input set or alternatively near linear in the number of effective degrees of freedom, which is a function of the kernel, number of datapoints, and the regularization parameter $\lambda$. The error bound of this distilled set is also a function of $\lambda$. We verify our bounds analytically and empirically.

AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework

A coreset is a tiny weighted subset of an input set, that closely resembles the loss function, with respect to a certain set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. While coreset research is an active research area, unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is usually suggested, a process that may take time or may be hard for new researchers in the field. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a ``plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. Full open source code can be found at \href{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}{\text{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}}. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.

Studying the Impact of Semi-Cooperative Drivers on Overall Highway Flow

Semi-cooperative behaviors are intrinsic properties of human drivers and should be considered for autonomous driving. In addition, new autonomous planners can consider the social value orientation (SVO) of human drivers to generate socially-compliant trajectories. Yet the overall impact on traffic flow for this new class of planners remain to be understood. In this work, we present study of implicit semi-cooperative driving where agents deploy a game-theoretic version of iterative best response assuming knowledge of the SVOs of other agents. We simulate nominal traffic flow and investigate whether the proportion of prosocial agents on the road impact individual or system-wide driving performance. Experiments show that the proportion of prosocial agents has a minor impact on overall traffic flow and that benefits of semi-cooperation disproportionally affect egoistic and high-speed drivers.