Natural Language as Polices: Reasoning for Coordinate-Level Embodied Control with LLMs

We demonstrate experimental results with LLMs that address robotics action planning problems. Recently, LLMs have been applied in robotics action planning, particularly using a code generation approach that converts complex high-level instructions into mid-level policy codes. In contrast, our approach acquires text descriptions of the task and scene objects, then formulates action planning through natural language reasoning, and outputs coordinate level control commands, thus reducing the necessity for intermediate representation code as policies. Our approach is evaluated on a multi-modal prompt simulation benchmark, demonstrating that our prompt engineering experiments with natural language reasoning significantly enhance success rates compared to its absence. Furthermore, our approach illustrates the potential for natural language descriptions to transfer robotics skills from known tasks to previously unseen tasks.

DeepIPCv2: LiDAR-powered Robust Environmental Perception and Navigational Control for Autonomous Vehicle

We present DeepIPCv2, an autonomous driving model that perceives the environment using a LiDAR sensor for more robust drivability, especially when driving under poor illumination conditions where everything is not clearly visible. DeepIPCv2 takes a set of LiDAR point clouds as the main perception input. Since point clouds are not affected by illumination changes, they can provide a clear observation of the surroundings no matter what the condition is. This results in a better scene understanding and stable features provided by the perception module to support the controller module in estimating navigational control properly. To evaluate its performance, we conduct several tests by deploying the model to predict a set of driving records and perform real automated driving under three different conditions. We also conduct ablation and comparative studies with some recent models to justify its performance. Based on the experimental results, DeepIPCv2 shows a robust performance by achieving the best drivability in all driving scenarios. Furthermore, we will upload the codes to https://github.com/oskarnatan/DeepIPCv2.

Multi-Source Soft Pseudo-Label Learning with Domain Similarity-based Weighting for Semantic Segmentation

This paper describes a method of domain adaptive training for semantic segmentation using multiple source datasets that are not necessarily relevant to the target dataset. We propose a soft pseudo-label generation method by integrating predicted object probabilities from multiple source models. The prediction of each source model is weighted based on the estimated domain similarity between the source and the target datasets to emphasize contribution of a model trained on a source that is more similar to the target and generate reasonable pseudo-labels. We also propose a training method using the soft pseudo-labels considering their entropy to fully exploit information from the source datasets while suppressing the influence of possibly misclassified pixels. The experiments show comparative or better performance than our previous work and another existing multi-source domain adaptation method, and applicability to a variety of target environments.

Online Refinement of a Scene Recognition Model for Mobile Robots by Observing Human's Interaction with Environments

This paper describes a method of online refinement of a scene recognition model for robot navigation considering traversable plants, flexible plant parts which a robot can push aside while moving. In scene recognition systems that consider traversable plants growing out to the paths, misclassification may lead the robot to getting stuck due to the traversable plants recognized as obstacles. Yet, misclassification is inevitable in any estimation methods. In this work, we propose a framework that allows for refining a semantic segmentation model on the fly during the robot's operation. We introduce a few-shot segmentation based on weight imprinting for online model refinement without fine-tuning. Training data are collected via observation of a human's interaction with the plant parts. We propose novel robust weight imprinting to mitigate the effect of noise included in the masks generated by the interaction. The proposed method was evaluated through experiments using real-world data and shown to outperform an ordinary weight imprinting and provide competitive results to fine-tuning with model distillation while requiring less computational cost.

DeepIPC: Deeply Integrated Perception and Control for Mobile Robot in Real Environments

We propose DeepIPC, an end-to-end multi-task model that handles both perception and control tasks in driving a mobile robot autonomously. The model consists of two main parts, perception and controller modules. The perception module takes RGB image and depth map to perform semantic segmentation and bird's eye view (BEV) semantic mapping along with providing their encoded features. Meanwhile, the controller module processes these features with the measurement of GNSS locations and angular speed to estimate waypoints that come with latent features. Then, two different agents are used to translate waypoints and latent features into a set of navigational controls to drive the robot. The model is evaluated by predicting driving records and performing automated driving under various conditions in the real environment. Based on the experimental results, DeepIPC achieves the best drivability and multi-task performance even with fewer parameters compared to the other models.

Fully End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Semantic Depth Cloud Mapping and Multi-Agent

Focusing on the task of point-to-point navigation for an autonomous driving vehicle, we propose a novel deep learning model trained with end-to-end and multi-task learning manners to perform both perception and control tasks simultaneously. The model is used to drive the ego vehicle safely by following a sequence of routes defined by the global planner. The perception part of the model is used to encode high-dimensional observation data provided by an RGBD camera while performing semantic segmentation, semantic depth cloud (SDC) mapping, and traffic light state and stop sign prediction. Then, the control part decodes the encoded features along with additional information provided by GPS and speedometer to predict waypoints that come with a latent feature space. Furthermore, two agents are employed to process these outputs and make a control policy that determines the level of steering, throttle, and brake as the final action. The model is evaluated on CARLA simulator with various scenarios made of normal-adversarial situations and different weathers to mimic real-world conditions. In addition, we do a comparative study with some recent models to justify the performance in multiple aspects of driving. Moreover, we also conduct an ablation study on SDC mapping and multi-agent to understand their roles and behavior. As a result, our model achieves the highest driving score even with fewer parameters and computation load. To support future studies, we share our codes at https://github.com/oskarnatan/end-to-end-driving.

Semantic-aware plant traversability estimation in plant-rich environments for agricultural mobile robots

This paper describes a method of estimating the traversability of plant parts covering a path and navigating through them in greenhouses for agricultural mobile robots. Conventional mobile robots rely on scene recognition methods that consider only the presence of objects. Those methods, therefore, cannot recognize paths covered by flexible plants as traversable. In this paper, we present a novel framework of the scene recognition based on image-based semantic segmentation for robot navigation that takes into account the traversable plants covering the paths. In addition, for easily creating training data of the traversability estimation model, we propose a method of generating labels of traversable regions in the images, which we call Traversability masks, based on the robot's traversal experience during the data acquisition phase. It is often difficult for humans to distinguish the traversable plant parts on the images. Our method enables consistent and automatic labeling of those image regions based on the fact of the traversals. We conducted a real world experiment and confirmed that the robot with the proposed recognition method successfully navigated in plant-rich environments.

Multi-task Learning with Attention for End-to-end Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving systems need to handle complex scenarios such as lane following, avoiding collisions, taking turns, and responding to traffic signals. In recent years, approaches based on end-to-end behavioral cloning have demonstrated remarkable performance in point-to-point navigational scenarios, using a realistic simulator and standard benchmarks. Offline imitation learning is readily available, as it does not require expensive hand annotation or interaction with the target environment, but it is difficult to obtain a reliable system. In addition, existing methods have not specifically addressed the learning of reaction for traffic lights, which are a rare occurrence in the training datasets. Inspired by the previous work on multi-task learning and attention modeling, we propose a novel multi-task attention-aware network in the conditional imitation learning (CIL) framework. This does not only improve the success rate of standard benchmarks, but also the ability to react to traffic lights, which we show with standard benchmarks.