Real-Time Marker Localization Learning for GelStereo Tactile Sensing

Visuotactile sensing technology is becoming more popular in tactile sensing, but the effectiveness of the existing marker detection localization methods remains to be further explored. Instead of contour-based blob detection, this paper presents a learning-based marker localization network for GelStereo visuotactile sensing called Marknet. Specifically, the Marknet presents a grid regression architecture to incorporate the distribution of the GelStereo markers. Furthermore, a marker rationality evaluator (MRE) is modelled to screen suitable prediction results. The experimental results show that the Marknet combined with MRE achieves 93.90% precision for irregular markers in contact areas, which outperforms the traditional contour-based blob detection method by a large margin of 42.32%. Meanwhile, the proposed learning-based marker localization method can achieve better real-time performance beyond the blob detection interface provided by the OpenCV library through GPU acceleration, which we believe will lead to considerable perceptual sensitivity gains in various robotic manipulation tasks.

Learning Symbolic Operators: A Neurosymbolic Solution for Autonomous Disassembly of Electric Vehicle Battery

The booming of electric vehicles demands efficient battery disassembly for recycling to be environment-friendly. Currently, battery disassembly is still primarily done by humans, probably assisted by robots, due to the unstructured environment and high uncertainties. It is highly desirable to design autonomous solutions to improve work efficiency and lower human risks in high voltage and toxic environments. This paper proposes a novel neurosymbolic method, which augments the traditional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) model to learn symbolic operators based on raw sensory inputs and their relationships. The symbolic operators include a probabilistic state symbol grounding model and a state transition matrix for predicting states after each execution to enable autonomous task and motion planning. At last, the method's feasibility is verified through test results.

ACDER: Augmented Curiosity-Driven Experience Replay

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic manipulation tasks with high dimensional continuous state and action space. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Augmented Curiosity-Driven Experience Replay (ACDER), which leverages (i) a new goal-oriented curiosity-driven exploration to encourage the agent to pursue novel and task-relevant states more purposefully and (ii) the dynamic initial states selection as an automatic exploratory curriculum to further improve the sample-efficiency. Our approach complements Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) by introducing a new way to pursue valuable states. Experiments conducted on four challenging robotic manipulation tasks with binary rewards, including Reach, Push, Pick&Place and Multi-step Push. The empirical results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in the first three basic tasks and also achieves satisfactory performance in multi-step robotic task learning.

FameSVD: Fast and Memory-efficient Singular Value Decomposition

We propose a novel algorithm to perform the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) by leveraging the internal property of SVD. Due to the derivation being explored deterministically rather than stochastically, the convergence is guaranteed. Complexity analysis is also conducted. Our proposed SVD method outperforms classic algorithms with significant margin both in runtime and memory usage. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between SVD and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). For those SVD or PCA algorithms that do not acquire all eigenvalues or cannot get them precisely, we utilize the matrix analysis knowledge to get the sum of all eigenvalues in order that cumulative explained variance criterion could be used in not-all-eigenvalues-are-known cases.

Localizing Discriminative Visual Landmarks for Place Recognition

We address the problem of visual place recognition with perceptual changes. The fundamental problem of visual place recognition is generating robust image representations which are not only insensitive to environmental changes but also distinguishable to different places. Taking advantage of the feature extraction ability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we further investigate how to localize discriminative visual landmarks that positively contribute to the similarity measurement, such as buildings and vegetations. In particular, a Landmark Localization Network (LLN) is designed to indicate which regions of an image are used for discrimination. Detailed experiments are conducted on open source datasets with varied appearance and viewpoint changes. The proposed approach achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods.

Hindsight Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning

Compared to reinforcement learning, imitation learning (IL) is a powerful paradigm for training agents to learn control policies efficiently from expert demonstrations. However, in most cases, obtaining demonstration data is costly and laborious, which poses a significant challenge in some scenarios. A promising alternative is to train agent learning skills via imitation learning without expert demonstrations, which, to some extent, would extremely expand imitation learning areas. To achieve such expectation, in this paper, we propose Hindsight Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (HGAIL) algorithm, with the aim of achieving imitation learning satisfying no need of demonstrations. Combining hindsight idea with the generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) framework, we realize implementing imitation learning successfully in cases of expert demonstration data are not available. Experiments show that the proposed method can train policies showing comparable performance to current imitation learning methods. Further more, HGAIL essentially endows curriculum learning mechanism which is critical for learning policies.

The Multi-Strand Graph for a PTZ Tracker

High-resolution images can be used to resolve matching ambiguities between trajectory fragments (tracklets), which is one of the main challenges in multiple target tracking. A PTZ camera, which can pan, tilt and zoom, is a powerful and efficient tool that offers both close-up views and wide area coverage on demand. The wide-area view makes it possible to track many targets while the close-up view allows individuals to be identified from high-resolution images of their faces. A central component of a PTZ tracking system is a scheduling algorithm that determines which target to zoom in on. In this paper we study this scheduling problem from a theoretical perspective, where the high resolution images are also used for tracklet matching. We propose a novel data structure, the Multi-Strand Tracking Graph (MSG), which represents the set of tracklets computed by a tracker and the possible associations between them. The MSG allows efficient scheduling as well as resolving -- directly or by elimination -- matching ambiguities between tracklets. The main feature of the MSG is the auxiliary data saved in each vertex, which allows efficient computation while avoiding time-consuming graph traversal. Synthetic data simulations are used to evaluate our scheduling algorithm and to demonstrate its superiority over a na\"ive one.