691 research outputs found
Learning Stable Robotic Skills on Riemannian Manifolds
In this paper, we propose an approach to learn stable dynamical systems
evolving on Riemannian manifolds. The approach leverages a data-efficient
procedure to learn a diffeomorphic transformation that maps simple stable
dynamical systems onto complex robotic skills. By exploiting mathematical tools
from differential geometry, the method ensures that the learned skills fulfill
the geometric constraints imposed by the underlying manifolds, such as unit
quaternion (UQ) for orientation and symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices
for impedance, while preserving the convergence to a given target. The proposed
approach is firstly tested in simulation on a public benchmark, obtained by
projecting Cartesian data into UQ and SPD manifolds, and compared with existing
approaches. Apart from evaluating the approach on a public benchmark, several
experiments were performed on a real robot performing bottle stacking in
different conditions and a drilling task in cooperation with a human operator.
The evaluation shows promising results in terms of learning accuracy and task
adaptation capabilities.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, journa
Transverse Contraction Criteria for Existence, Stability, and Robustness of a Limit Cycle
This paper derives a differential contraction condition for the existence of
an orbitally-stable limit cycle in an autonomous system. This transverse
contraction condition can be represented as a pointwise linear matrix
inequality (LMI), thus allowing convex optimization tools such as
sum-of-squares programming to be used to search for certificates of the
existence of a stable limit cycle. Many desirable properties of contracting
dynamics are extended to this context, including preservation of contraction
under a broad class of interconnections. In addition, by introducing the
concepts of differential dissipativity and transverse differential
dissipativity, contraction and transverse contraction can be established for
large scale systems via LMI conditions on component subsystems.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Conference submissio
Boosting Deep Open World Recognition by Clustering
While convolutional neural networks have brought significant advances in
robot vision, their ability is often limited to closed world scenarios, where
the number of semantic concepts to be recognized is determined by the available
training set. Since it is practically impossible to capture all possible
semantic concepts present in the real world in a single training set, we need
to break the closed world assumption, equipping our robot with the capability
to act in an open world. To provide such ability, a robot vision system should
be able to (i) identify whether an instance does not belong to the set of known
categories (i.e. open set recognition), and (ii) extend its knowledge to learn
new classes over time (i.e. incremental learning). In this work, we show how we
can boost the performance of deep open world recognition algorithms by means of
a new loss formulation enforcing a global to local clustering of class-specific
features. In particular, a first loss term, i.e. global clustering, forces the
network to map samples closer to the class centroid they belong to while the
second one, local clustering, shapes the representation space in such a way
that samples of the same class get closer in the representation space while
pushing away neighbours belonging to other classes. Moreover, we propose a
strategy to learn class-specific rejection thresholds, instead of heuristically
estimating a single global threshold, as in previous works. Experiments on
RGB-D Object and Core50 datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: IROS/RAL 202
Dynamic Facial Expression Generation on Hilbert Hypersphere with Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets
In this work, we propose a novel approach for generating videos of the six
basic facial expressions given a neutral face image. We propose to exploit the
face geometry by modeling the facial landmarks motion as curves encoded as
points on a hypersphere. By proposing a conditional version of manifold-valued
Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) for motion generation on the
hypersphere, we learn the distribution of facial expression dynamics of
different classes, from which we synthesize new facial expression motions. The
resulting motions can be transformed to sequences of landmarks and then to
images sequences by editing the texture information using another conditional
Generative Adversarial Network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
work that explores manifold-valued representations with GAN to address the
problem of dynamic facial expression generation. We evaluate our proposed
approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on two public datasets;
Oulu-CASIA and MUG Facial Expression. Our experimental results demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach in generating realistic videos with continuous
motion, realistic appearance and identity preservation. We also show the
efficiency of our framework for dynamic facial expressions generation, dynamic
facial expression transfer and data augmentation for training improved emotion
recognition models
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