UniTeam: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge

This report introduces our UniTeam agent - an improved baseline for the "HomeRobot: Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation" challenge. The challenge poses problems of navigation in unfamiliar environments, manipulation of novel objects, and recognition of open-vocabulary object classes. This challenge aims to facilitate cross-cutting research in embodied AI using recent advances in machine learning, computer vision, natural language, and robotics. In this work, we conducted an exhaustive evaluation of the provided baseline agent; identified deficiencies in perception, navigation, and manipulation skills; and improved the baseline agent's performance. Notably, enhancements were made in perception - minimizing misclassifications; navigation - preventing infinite loop commitments; picking - addressing failures due to changing object visibility; and placing - ensuring accurate positioning for successful object placement.

Development of Human Motion Prediction Strategy using Inception Residual Block

Human Motion Prediction is a crucial task in computer vision and robotics. It has versatile application potentials such as in the area of human-robot interactions, human action tracking for airport security systems, autonomous car navigation, computer gaming to name a few. However, predicting human motion based on past actions is an extremely challenging task due to the difficulties in detecting spatial and temporal features correctly. To detect temporal features in human poses, we propose an Inception Residual Block(IRB), due to its inherent capability of processing multiple kernels to capture salient features. Here, we propose to use multiple 1-D Convolution Neural Network (CNN) with different kernel sizes and input sequence lengths and concatenate them to get proper embedding. As kernels strides over different receptive fields, they detect smaller and bigger salient features at multiple temporal scales. Our main contribution is to propose a residual connection between input and the output of the inception block to have a continuity between the previously observed pose and the next predicted pose. With this proposed architecture, it learns prior knowledge much better about human poses and we achieve much higher prediction accuracy as detailed in the paper. Subsequently, we further propose to feed the output of the inception residual block as an input to the Graph Convolution Neural Network (GCN) due to its better spatial feature learning capability. We perform a parametric analysis for better designing of our model and subsequently, we evaluate our approach on the Human 3.6M dataset and compare our short-term as well as long-term predictions with the state of the art papers, where our model outperforms most of the pose results, the detailed reasons of which have been elaborated in the paper.