DBPF: A Framework for Efficient and Robust Dynamic Bin-Picking

Efficiency and reliability are critical in robotic bin-picking as they directly impact the productivity of automated industrial processes. However, traditional approaches, demanding static objects and fixed collisions, lead to deployment limitations, operational inefficiencies, and process unreliability. This paper introduces a Dynamic Bin-Picking Framework (DBPF) that challenges traditional static assumptions. The DBPF endows the robot with the reactivity to pick multiple moving arbitrary objects while avoiding dynamic obstacles, such as the moving bin. Combined with scene-level pose generation, the proposed pose selection metric leverages the Tendency-Aware Manipulability Network optimizing suction pose determination. Heuristic task-specific designs like velocity-matching, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and the resight policy, enhance the picking success rate and reliability. Empirical experiments demonstrate the importance of these components. Our method achieves an average 84% success rate, surpassing the 60% of the most comparable baseline, crucially, with zero collisions. Further evaluations under diverse dynamic scenarios showcase DBPF's robust performance in dynamic bin-picking. Results suggest that our framework offers a promising solution for efficient and reliable robotic bin-picking under dynamics.

Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis

The analysis of the ubiquitous human-human interactions is pivotal for understanding humans as social beings. Existing human-human interaction datasets typically suffer from inaccurate body motions, lack of hand gestures and fine-grained textual descriptions. To better perceive and generate human-human interactions, we propose Inter-X, a currently largest human-human interaction dataset with accurate body movements and diverse interaction patterns, together with detailed hand gestures. The dataset includes ~11K interaction sequences and more than 8.1M frames. We also equip Inter-X with versatile annotations of more than 34K fine-grained human part-level textual descriptions, semantic interaction categories, interaction order, and the relationship and personality of the subjects. Based on the elaborate annotations, we propose a unified benchmark composed of 4 categories of downstream tasks from both the perceptual and generative directions. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis show that Inter-X serves as a testbed for promoting the development of versatile human-human interaction analysis. Our dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for research purposes.

Two-Stage Grasping: A New Bin Picking Framework for Small Objects

This paper proposes a novel bin picking framework, two-stage grasping, aiming at precise grasping of cluttered small objects. Object density estimation and rough grasping are conducted in the first stage. Fine segmentation, detection, grasping, and pushing are performed in the second stage. A small object bin picking system has been realized to exhibit the concept of two-stage grasping. Experiments have shown the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Unlike traditional bin picking methods focusing on vision-based grasping planning using classic frameworks, the challenges of picking cluttered small objects can be solved by the proposed new framework with simple vision detection and planning.

End-to-End Deep Visual Control for Mastering Needle-Picking Skills With World Models and Behavior Cloning

Needle picking is a challenging surgical task in robot-assisted surgery due to the characteristics of small slender shapes of needles, needles' variations in shapes and sizes, and demands for millimeter-level control. Prior works, heavily relying on the prior of needles (e.g., geometric models), are hard to scale to unseen needles' variations. In addition, visual tracking errors can not be minimized online using their approaches. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep visual learning framework for needle-picking tasks where both visual and control components can be learned jointly online. Our proposed framework integrates a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning framework, Dreamer, with behavior cloning (BC). Besides, two novel techniques, i.e., Virtual Clutch and Dynamic Spotlight Adaptation (DSA), are introduced to our end-to-end visual controller for needle-picking tasks. We conducted extensive experiments in simulation to evaluate the performance, robustness, variation adaptation, and effectiveness of individual components of our method. Our approach, trained by 8k demonstration timesteps and 140k online policy timesteps, can achieve a remarkable success rate of 80%, a new state-of-the-art with end-to-end vision-based surgical robot learning for delicate operations tasks. Furthermore, our method effectively demonstrated its superiority in generalization to unseen dynamic scenarios with needle variations and image disturbance, highlighting its robustness and versatility. Codes and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/dreamerbc.

Open-source High-precision Autonomous Suturing Framework With Visual Guidance

Autonomous surgery has attracted increasing attention for revolutionizing robotic patient care, yet remains a distant and challenging goal. In this paper, we propose an image-based framework for high-precision autonomous suturing operation. We first build an algebraic geometric algorithm to achieve accurate needle pose estimation, then design the corresponding keypoint-based calibration network for joint-offset compensation, and further plan and control suture trajectory. Our solution ranked first among all competitors in the AccelNet Surgical Robotics Challenge. The source code is opened here to accelerate future autonomous surgery research.

GenLoco: Generalized Locomotion Controllers for Quadrupedal Robots

Recent years have seen a surge in commercially-available and affordable quadrupedal robots, with many of these platforms being actively used in research and industry. As the availability of legged robots grows, so does the need for controllers that enable these robots to perform useful skills. However, most learning-based frameworks for controller development focus on training robot-specific controllers, a process that needs to be repeated for every new robot. In this work, we introduce a framework for training generalized locomotion (GenLoco) controllers for quadrupedal robots. Our framework synthesizes general-purpose locomotion controllers that can be deployed on a large variety of quadrupedal robots with similar morphologies. We present a simple but effective morphology randomization method that procedurally generates a diverse set of simulated robots for training. We show that by training a controller on this large set of simulated robots, our models acquire more general control strategies that can be directly transferred to novel simulated and real-world robots with diverse morphologies, which were not observed during training.

AutoLaparo: A New Dataset of Integrated Multi-tasks for Image-guided Surgical Automation in Laparoscopic Hysterectomy

Computer-assisted minimally invasive surgery has great potential in benefiting modern operating theatres. The video data streamed from the endoscope provides rich information to support context-awareness for next-generation intelligent surgical systems. To achieve accurate perception and automatic manipulation during the procedure, learning based technique is a promising way, which enables advanced image analysis and scene understanding in recent years. However, learning such models highly relies on large-scale, high-quality, and multi-task labelled data. This is currently a bottleneck for the topic, as available public dataset is still extremely limited in the field of CAI. In this paper, we present and release the first integrated dataset (named AutoLaparo) with multiple image-based perception tasks to facilitate learning-based automation in hysterectomy surgery. Our AutoLaparo dataset is developed based on full-length videos of entire hysterectomy procedures. Specifically, three different yet highly correlated tasks are formulated in the dataset, including surgical workflow recognition, laparoscope motion prediction, and instrument and key anatomy segmentation. In addition, we provide experimental results with state-of-the-art models as reference benchmarks for further model developments and evaluations on this dataset. The dataset is available at https://autolaparo.github.io.

A Visual Navigation Perspective for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

This paper studies category-level object pose estimation based on a single monocular image. Recent advances in pose-aware generative models have paved the way for addressing this challenging task using analysis-by-synthesis. The idea is to sequentially update a set of latent variables, e.g., pose, shape, and appearance, of the generative model until the generated image best agrees with the observation. However, convergence and efficiency are two challenges of this inference procedure. In this paper, we take a deeper look at the inference of analysis-by-synthesis from the perspective of visual navigation, and investigate what is a good navigation policy for this specific task. We evaluate three different strategies, including gradient descent, reinforcement learning and imitation learning, via thorough comparisons in terms of convergence, robustness and efficiency. Moreover, we show that a simple hybrid approach leads to an effective and efficient solution. We further compare these strategies to state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrate superior performance on synthetic and real-world datasets leveraging off-the-shelf pose-aware generative models.

Lifting 2D Human Pose to 3D with Domain Adapted 3D Body Concept

Lifting the 2D human pose to the 3D pose is an important yet challenging task. Existing 3D pose estimation suffers from 1) the inherent ambiguity between the 2D and 3D data, and 2) the lack of well labeled 2D-3D pose pairs in the wild. Human beings are able to imagine the human 3D pose from a 2D image or a set of 2D body key-points with the least ambiguity, which should be attributed to the prior knowledge of the human body that we have acquired in our mind. Inspired by this, we propose a new framework that leverages the labeled 3D human poses to learn a 3D concept of the human body to reduce the ambiguity. To have consensus on the body concept from 2D pose, our key insight is to treat the 2D human pose and the 3D human pose as two different domains. By adapting the two domains, the body knowledge learned from 3D poses is applied to 2D poses and guides the 2D pose encoder to generate informative 3D "imagination" as embedding in pose lifting. Benefiting from the domain adaptation perspective, the proposed framework unifies the supervised and semi-supervised 3D pose estimation in a principled framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks. More importantly, it is validated that the explicitly learned 3D body concept effectively alleviates the 2D-3D ambiguity in 2D pose lifting, improves the generalization, and enables the network to exploit the abundant unlabeled 2D data.

Fuzzy-Depth Objects Grasping Based on FSG Algorithm and a Soft Robotic Hand

Autonomous grasping is an important factor for robots physically interacting with the environment and executing versatile tasks. However, a universally applicable, cost-effective, and rapidly deployable autonomous grasping approach is still limited by those target objects with fuzzy-depth information. Examples are transparent, specular, flat, and small objects whose depth is difficult to be accurately sensed. In this work, we present a solution to those fuzzy-depth objects. The framework of our approach includes two major components: one is a soft robotic hand and the other one is a Fuzzy-depth Soft Grasping (FSG) algorithm. The soft hand is replaceable for most existing soft hands/grippers with body compliance. FSG algorithm exploits both RGB and depth images to predict grasps while not trying to reconstruct the whole scene. Two grasping primitives are designed to further increase robustness. The proposed method outperforms reference baselines in unseen fuzzy-depth objects grasping experiments (84% success rate).