Mobile Manipulation Leveraging Multiple Views

While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and shape completion methods to manipulate an object with a mobile robot. Our system utilizes uncertainty in the initial estimation of a manipulation target to calculate a predicted next-best-view. Without the need of localization, the robot then uses the predicted panoramic view at the next-best-view location to navigate to the desired location, capture a second view of the object, create a new model that predicts the shape of object more accurately than a single image alone, and uses this model for grasp planning. We show that the system is highly effective for mobile manipulation tasks through simulation experiments using real world data, as well as ablations on each component of our system.

Image to Language Understanding: Captioning approach

Extracting context from visual representations is of utmost importance in the advancement of Computer Science. Representation of such a format in Natural Language has a huge variety of applications such as helping the visually impaired etc. Such an approach is a combination of Computer Vision and Natural Language techniques which is a hard problem to solve. This project aims to compare different approaches for solving the image captioning problem. In specific, the focus was on comparing two different types of models: Encoder-Decoder approach and a Multi-model approach. In the encoder-decoder approach, inject and merge architectures were compared against a multi-modal image captioning approach based primarily on object detection. These approaches have been compared on the basis on state of the art sentence comparison metrics such as BLEU, GLEU, Meteor, and Rouge on a subset of the Google Conceptual captions dataset which contains 100k images. On the basis of this comparison, we observed that the best model was the Inception injected encoder model. This best approach has been deployed as a web-based system. On uploading an image, such a system will output the best caption associated with the image.