Embodied Neuromorphic Artificial Intelligence for Robotics: Perspectives, Challenges, and Research Development Stack

Robotic technologies have been an indispensable part for improving human productivity since they have been helping humans in completing diverse, complex, and intensive tasks in a fast yet accurate and efficient way. Therefore, robotic technologies have been deployed in a wide range of applications, ranging from personal to industrial use-cases. However, current robotic technologies and their computing paradigm still lack embodied intelligence to efficiently interact with operational environments, respond with correct/expected actions, and adapt to changes in the environments. Toward this, recent advances in neuromorphic computing with Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have demonstrated the potential to enable the embodied intelligence for robotics through bio-plausible computing paradigm that mimics how the biological brain works, known as "neuromorphic artificial intelligence (AI)". However, the field of neuromorphic AI-based robotics is still at an early stage, therefore its development and deployment for solving real-world problems expose new challenges in different design aspects, such as accuracy, adaptability, efficiency, reliability, and security. To address these challenges, this paper will discuss how we can enable embodied neuromorphic AI for robotic systems through our perspectives: (P1) Embodied intelligence based on effective learning rule, training mechanism, and adaptability; (P2) Cross-layer optimizations for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing; (P3) Representative and fair benchmarks; (P4) Low-cost reliability and safety enhancements; (P5) Security and privacy for neuromorphic computing; and (P6) A synergistic development for energy-efficient and robust neuromorphic-based robotics. Furthermore, this paper identifies research challenges and opportunities, as well as elaborates our vision for future research development toward embodied neuromorphic AI for robotics.

3D tomatoes' localisation with monocular cameras using histogram filters

Performing tasks in agriculture, such as fruit monitoring or harvesting, requires perceiving the objects' spatial position. RGB-D cameras are limited under open-field environments due to lightning interferences. Therefore, in this study, we approach the use of Histogram Filters (Bayesian Discrete Filters) to estimate the position of tomatoes in the tomato plant. Two kernel filters were studied: the square kernel and the Gaussian kernel. The implemented algorithm was essayed in simulation, with and without Gaussian noise and random noise, and in a testbed at laboratory conditions. The algorithm reported a mean absolute error lower than 10 mm in simulation and 20 mm in the testbed at laboratory conditions with an assessing distance of about 0.5 m. So, the results are viable for real environments and should be improved at closer distances.

Towards Autonomous and Safe Last-mile Deliveries with AI-augmented Self-driving Delivery Robots

In addition to its crucial impact on customer satisfaction, last-mile delivery (LMD) is notorious for being the most time-consuming and costly stage of the shipping process. Pressing environmental concerns combined with the recent surge of e-commerce sales have sparked renewed interest in automation and electrification of last-mile logistics. To address the hurdles faced by existing robotic couriers, this paper introduces a customer-centric and safety-conscious LMD system for small urban communities based on AI-assisted autonomous delivery robots. The presented framework enables end-to-end automation and optimization of the logistic process while catering for real-world imposed operational uncertainties, clients' preferred time schedules, and safety of pedestrians. To this end, the integrated optimization component is modeled as a robust variant of the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, where routes are constructed under uncertain travel times with an objective to minimize the total latency of deliveries (i.e., the overall waiting time of customers, which can negatively affect their satisfaction). We demonstrate the proposed LMD system's utility through real-world trials in a university campus with a single robotic courier. Implementation aspects as well as the findings and practical insights gained from the deployment are discussed in detail. Lastly, we round up the contributions with numerical simulations to investigate the scalability of the developed mathematical formulation with respect to the number of robotic vehicles and customers.

DFR-FastMOT: Detection Failure Resistant Tracker for Fast Multi-Object Tracking Based on Sensor Fusion

Persistent multi-object tracking (MOT) allows autonomous vehicles to navigate safely in highly dynamic environments. One of the well-known challenges in MOT is object occlusion when an object becomes unobservant for subsequent frames. The current MOT methods store objects information, like objects' trajectory, in internal memory to recover the objects after occlusions. However, they retain short-term memory to save computational time and avoid slowing down the MOT method. As a result, they lose track of objects in some occlusion scenarios, particularly long ones. In this paper, we propose DFR-FastMOT, a light MOT method that uses data from a camera and LiDAR sensors and relies on an algebraic formulation for object association and fusion. The formulation boosts the computational time and permits long-term memory that tackles more occlusion scenarios. Our method shows outstanding tracking performance over recent learning and non-learning benchmarks with about 3% and 4% margin in MOTA, respectively. Also, we conduct extensive experiments that simulate occlusion phenomena by employing detectors with various distortion levels. The proposed solution enables superior performance under various distortion levels in detection over current state-of-art methods. Our framework processes about 7,763 frames in 1.48 seconds, which is seven times faster than recent benchmarks. The framework will be available at https://github.com/MohamedNagyMostafa/DFR-FastMOT.

Building Resilience to Out-of-Distribution Visual Data via Input Optimization and Model Finetuning

A major challenge in machine learning is resilience to out-of-distribution data, that is data that exists outside of the distribution of a model's training data. Training is often performed using limited, carefully curated datasets and so when a model is deployed there is often a significant distribution shift as edge cases and anomalies not included in the training data are encountered. To address this, we propose the Input Optimisation Network, an image preprocessing model that learns to optimise input data for a specific target vision model. In this work we investigate several out-of-distribution scenarios in the context of semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles, comparing an Input Optimisation based solution to existing approaches of finetuning the target model with augmented training data and an adversarially trained preprocessing model. We demonstrate that our approach can enable performance on such data comparable to that of a finetuned model, and subsequently that a combined approach, whereby an input optimization network is optimised to target a finetuned model, delivers superior performance to either method in isolation. Finally, we propose a joint optimisation approach, in which input optimization network and target model are trained simultaneously, which we demonstrate achieves significant further performance gains, particularly in challenging edge-case scenarios. We also demonstrate that our architecture can be reduced to a relatively compact size without a significant performance impact, potentially facilitating real time embedded applications.

Benchmarking Edge Computing Devices for Grape Bunches and Trunks Detection using Accelerated Object Detection Single Shot MultiBox Deep Learning Models

Purpose: Visual perception enables robots to perceive the environment. Visual data is processed using computer vision algorithms that are usually time-expensive and require powerful devices to process the visual data in real-time, which is unfeasible for open-field robots with limited energy. This work benchmarks the performance of different heterogeneous platforms for object detection in real-time. This research benchmarks three architectures: embedded GPU -- Graphical Processing Units (such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2 GB and 4 GB, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2), TPU -- Tensor Processing Unit (such as Coral Dev Board TPU), and DPU -- Deep Learning Processor Unit (such as in AMD-Xilinx ZCU104 Development Board, and AMD-Xilinx Kria KV260 Starter Kit). Method: The authors used the RetinaNet ResNet-50 fine-tuned using the natural VineSet dataset. After the trained model was converted and compiled for target-specific hardware formats to improve the execution efficiency. Conclusions and Results: The platforms were assessed in terms of performance of the evaluation metrics and efficiency (time of inference). Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) were the slowest devices, running at 3 FPS to 5 FPS, and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were the fastest devices, running at 14 FPS to 25 FPS. The efficiency of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is irrelevant and similar to NVIDIA Jetson TX2. TPU and GPU are the most power-efficient, consuming about 5W. The performance differences, in the evaluation metrics, across devices are irrelevant and have an F1 of about 70 % and mean Average Precision (mAP) of about 60 %.

Multi-Agent Chance-Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path with Application to Risk-Aware Intelligent Intersection

In transportation networks, where traffic lights have traditionally been used for vehicle coordination, intersections act as natural bottlenecks. A formidable challenge for existing automated intersections lies in detecting and reasoning about uncertainty from the operating environment and human-driven vehicles. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware intelligent intersection system for autonomous vehicles (AVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). We cast the problem as a novel class of Multi-agent Chance-Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path (MCC-SSP) problems and devise an exact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that is scalable in the number of agents' interaction points (e.g., potential collision points at the intersection). In particular, when the number of agents within an interaction point is small, which is often the case in intersections, the ILP has a polynomial number of variables and constraints. To further improve the running time performance, we show that the collision risk computation can be performed offline. Additionally, a trajectory optimization workflow is provided to generate risk-aware trajectories for any given intersection. The proposed framework is implemented in CARLA simulator and evaluated under a fully autonomous intersection with AVs only as well as in a hybrid setup with a signalized intersection for HVs and an intelligent scheme for AVs. As verified via simulations, the featured approach improves intersection's efficiency by up to $200\%$ while also conforming to the specified tunable risk threshold.

Robot Person Following in Uniform Crowd Environment

Person-tracking robots have many applications, such as in security, elderly care, and socializing robots. Such a task is particularly challenging when the person is moving in a Uniform crowd. Also, despite significant progress of trackers reported in the literature, state-of-the-art trackers have hardly addressed person following in such scenarios. In this work, we focus on improving the perceptivity of a robot for a person following task by developing a robust and real-time applicable object tracker. We present a new robot person tracking system with a new RGB-D tracker, Deep Tracking with RGB-D (DTRD) that is resilient to tricky challenges introduced by the uniform crowd environment. Our tracker utilizes transformer encoder-decoder architecture with RGB and depth information to discriminate the target person from similar distractors. A substantial amount of comprehensive experiments and results demonstrate that our tracker has higher performance in two quantitative evaluation metrics and confirms its superiority over other SOTA trackers.

Real-Time Face Recognition System

Over the past few decades, interest in algorithms for face recognition has been growing rapidly and has even surpassed human-level performance. Despite their accomplishments, their practical integration with a real-time performance-hungry system is not feasible due to high computational costs. So in this paper, we explore the recent, fast, and accurate face recognition system that can be easily integrated with real-time devices, and tested the algorithms on robot hardware platforms to confirm their robustness and speed.

Underwater Image Enhancement Using Pre-trained Transformer

The goal of this work is to apply a denoising image transformer to remove the distortion from underwater images and compare it with other similar approaches. Automatic restoration of underwater images plays an important role since it allows to increase the quality of the images, without the need for more expensive equipment. This is a critical example of the important role of the machine learning algorithms to support marine exploration and monitoring, reducing the need for human intervention like the manual processing of the images, thus saving time, effort, and cost. This paper is the first application of the image transformer-based approach called "Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer" to underwater images. This approach is tested on the UFO-120 dataset, containing 1500 images with the corresponding clean images.