Out-of-distribution Object Detection through Bayesian Uncertainty Estimation

The superior performance of object detectors is often established under the condition that the test samples are in the same distribution as the training data. However, in many practical applications, out-of-distribution (OOD) instances are inevitable and usually lead to uncertainty in the results. In this paper, we propose a novel, intuitive, and scalable probabilistic object detection method for OOD detection. Unlike other uncertainty-modeling methods that either require huge computational costs to infer the weight distributions or rely on model training through synthetic outlier data, our method is able to distinguish between in-distribution (ID) data and OOD data via weight parameter sampling from proposed Gaussian distributions based on pre-trained networks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian object detector can achieve satisfactory OOD identification performance by reducing the FPR95 score by up to 8.19% and increasing the AUROC score by up to 13.94% when trained on BDD100k and VOC datasets as the ID datasets and evaluated on COCO2017 dataset as the OOD dataset.

A Human-friendly Verbal Communication Platform for Multi-Robot Systems: Design and Principles

While multi-robot systems have been broadly researched and deployed, their success is built chiefly upon the dependency on network infrastructures, whether wired or wireless. Aiming at the first steps toward de-coupling the application of multi-robot systems from the reliance on network infrastructures, this paper proposes a human-friendly verbal communication platform for multi-robot systems, following the deliberately designed principles of being adaptable, transparent, and secure. The platform is network independent and is subsequently capable of functioning in network infrastructure lacking environments from underwater to planet explorations. A series of experiments were conducted to demonstrate the platform's capability in multi-robot systems communication and task coordination, showing its potential in infrastructure-free applications. To benefit the community, we have made the codes open source at https://github.com/jynxmagic/MSc_AI_project

Attacking Digital Twins of Robotic Systems to Compromise Security and Safety

Security and safety are of paramount importance to human-robot interaction, either for autonomous robots or human-robot collaborative manufacturing. The intertwined relationship between security and safety has imposed new challenges on the emerging digital twin systems of various types of robots. To be specific, the attack of either the cyber-physical system or the digital-twin system could cause severe consequences to the other. Particularly, the attack of a digital-twin system that is synchronized with a cyber-physical system could cause lateral damage to humans and other surrounding facilities. This paper demonstrates that for Robot Operating System (ROS) driven systems, attacks such as the person-in-the-middle attack of the digital-twin system could eventually lead to a collapse of the cyber-physical system, whether it is an industrial robot or an autonomous mobile robot, causing unexpected consequences. We also discuss potential solutions to alleviate such attacks.