Shared Representation for 3D Pose Estimation, Action Classification, and Progress Prediction from Tactile Signals

Estimating human pose, classifying actions, and predicting movement progress are essential for human-robot interaction. While vision-based methods suffer from occlusion and privacy concerns in realistic environments, tactile sensing avoids these issues. However, prior tactile-based approaches handle each task separately, leading to suboptimal performance. In this study, we propose a Shared COnvolutional Transformer for Tactile Inference (SCOTTI) that learns a shared representation to simultaneously address three separate prediction tasks: 3D human pose estimation, action class categorization, and action completion progress estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore action progress prediction using foot tactile signals from custom wireless insole sensors. This unified approach leverages the mutual benefits of multi-task learning, enabling the model to achieve improved performance across all three tasks compared to learning them independently. Experimental results demonstrate that SCOTTI outperforms existing approaches across all three tasks. Additionally, we introduce a novel dataset collected from 15 participants performing various activities and exercises, with 7 hours of total duration, across eight different activities.

A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact opportunities for collaboration between roboticists and experts across climate domains such as energy, the built environment, transportation, industry, land use, and Earth sciences. These applications include problems such as energy systems optimization, construction, precision agriculture, building envelope retrofits, autonomous trucking, and large-scale environmental monitoring. Critically, we include opportunities to apply not only physical robots but also the broader robotics toolkit - including planning, perception, control, and estimation algorithms - to climate-relevant problems. A central goal of this roadmap is to inspire new research directions and collaboration by highlighting specific, actionable problems at the intersection of robotics and climate. This work represents a collaboration between robotics researchers and domain experts in various climate disciplines, and it serves as an invitation to the robotics community to bring their expertise to bear on urgent climate priorities.

Counterfactual Explanation-Based Badminton Motion Guidance Generation Using Wearable Sensors

This study proposes a framework for enhancing the stroke quality of badminton players by generating personalized motion guides, utilizing a multimodal wearable dataset. These guides are based on counterfactual algorithms and aim to reduce the performance gap between novice and expert players. Our approach provides joint-level guidance through visualizable data to assist players in improving their movements without requiring expert knowledge. The method was evaluated against a traditional algorithm using metrics to assess validity, proximity, and plausibility, including arithmetic measures and motion-specific evaluation metrics. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework can generate motions that maintain the essence of original movements while enhancing stroke quality, providing closer guidance than direct expert motion replication. The results highlight the potential of our approach for creating personalized sports motion guides by generating counterfactual motion guidance for arbitrary input motion samples of badminton strokes.