Leveraging Large Language Model-based Room-Object Relationships Knowledge for Enhancing Multimodal-Input Object Goal Navigation

Object-goal navigation is a crucial engineering task for the community of embodied navigation; it involves navigating to an instance of a specified object category within unseen environments. Although extensive investigations have been conducted on both end-to-end and modular-based, data-driven approaches, fully enabling an agent to comprehend the environment through perceptual knowledge and perform object-goal navigation as efficiently as humans remains a significant challenge. Recently, large language models have shown potential in this task, thanks to their powerful capabilities for knowledge extraction and integration. In this study, we propose a data-driven, modular-based approach, trained on a dataset that incorporates common-sense knowledge of object-to-room relationships extracted from a large language model. We utilize the multi-channel Swin-Unet architecture to conduct multi-task learning incorporating with multimodal inputs. The results in the Habitat simulator demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baseline by an average of 10.6% in the efficiency metric, Success weighted by Path Length (SPL). The real-world demonstration shows that the proposed approach can efficiently conduct this task by traversing several rooms. For more details and real-world demonstrations, please check our project webpage (https://sunleyuan.github.io/ObjectNav).

TransFusionOdom: Interpretable Transformer-based LiDAR-Inertial Fusion Odometry Estimation

Multi-modal fusion of sensors is a commonly used approach to enhance the performance of odometry estimation, which is also a fundamental module for mobile robots. However, the question of \textit{how to perform fusion among different modalities in a supervised sensor fusion odometry estimation task?} is still one of challenging issues remains. Some simple operations, such as element-wise summation and concatenation, are not capable of assigning adaptive attentional weights to incorporate different modalities efficiently, which make it difficult to achieve competitive odometry results. Recently, the Transformer architecture has shown potential for multi-modal fusion tasks, particularly in the domains of vision with language. In this work, we propose an end-to-end supervised Transformer-based LiDAR-Inertial fusion framework (namely TransFusionOdom) for odometry estimation. The multi-attention fusion module demonstrates different fusion approaches for homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities to address the overfitting problem that can arise from blindly increasing the complexity of the model. Additionally, to interpret the learning process of the Transformer-based multi-modal interactions, a general visualization approach is introduced to illustrate the interactions between modalities. Moreover, exhaustive ablation studies evaluate different multi-modal fusion strategies to verify the performance of the proposed fusion strategy. A synthetic multi-modal dataset is made public to validate the generalization ability of the proposed fusion strategy, which also works for other combinations of different modalities. The quantitative and qualitative odometry evaluations on the KITTI dataset verify the proposed TransFusionOdom could achieve superior performance compared with other related works.

Enhanced Visual Feedback with Decoupled Viewpoint Control in Immersive Humanoid Robot Teleoperation using SLAM

In immersive humanoid robot teleoperation, there are three main shortcomings that can alter the transparency of the visual feedback: the lag between the motion of the operator's and robot's head due to network communication delays or slow robot joint motion. This latency could cause a noticeable delay in the visual feedback, which jeopardizes the embodiment quality, can cause dizziness, and affects the interactivity resulting in operator frequent motion pauses for the visual feedback to settle; (ii) the mismatch between the camera's and the headset's field-of-views (FOV), the former having generally a lower FOV; and (iii) a mismatch between human's and robot's range of motions of the neck, the latter being also generally lower. In order to leverage these drawbacks, we developed a decoupled viewpoint control solution for a humanoid platform which allows visual feedback with low-latency and artificially increases the camera's FOV range to match that of the operator's headset. Our novel solution uses SLAM technology to enhance the visual feedback from a reconstructed mesh, complementing the areas that are not covered by the visual feedback from the robot. The visual feedback is presented as a point cloud in real-time to the operator. As a result, the operator is fed with real-time vision from the robot's head orientation by observing the pose of the point cloud. Balancing this kind of awareness and immersion is important in virtual reality based teleoperation, considering the safety and robustness of the control system. An experiment shows the effectiveness of our solution.