Combining Self-Supervised Learning and Imitation for Vision-Based Rope Manipulation

Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an initial to goal configuration, and outputs a sequence of actions that can reproduce the human demonstration, using only monocular images as input. To perform this task, the robot learns a pixel-level inverse dynamics model of rope manipulation directly from images in a self-supervised manner, using about 60K interactions with the rope collected autonomously by the robot. The human demonstration provides a high-level plan of what to do and the low-level inverse model is used to execute the plan. We show that by combining the high and low-level plans, the robot can successfully manipulate a rope into a variety of target shapes using only a sequence of human-provided images for direction.Comment: 8 pages, accepted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201

Human Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning Networks with Enhanced Channel State Information

© 2018 IEEE. Channel State Information (CSI) is widely used for device free human activity recognition. Feature extraction remains as one of the most challenging tasks in a dynamic and complex environment. In this paper, we propose a human activity recognition scheme using Deep Learning Networks with enhanced Channel State information (DLN-eCSI). We develop a CSI feature enhancement scheme (CFES), including two modules of background reduction and correlation feature enhancement, for preprocessing the data input to the DLN. After cleaning and compressing the signals using CFES, we apply the recurrent neural networking (RNN) to automatically extract deeper features and then the softmax regression algorithm for activity classification. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme