3,196 research outputs found
A Model that Predicts the Material Recognition Performance of Thermal Tactile Sensing
Tactile sensing can enable a robot to infer properties of its surroundings,
such as the material of an object. Heat transfer based sensing can be used for
material recognition due to differences in the thermal properties of materials.
While data-driven methods have shown promise for this recognition problem, many
factors can influence performance, including sensor noise, the initial
temperatures of the sensor and the object, the thermal effusivities of the
materials, and the duration of contact. We present a physics-based mathematical
model that predicts material recognition performance given these factors. Our
model uses semi-infinite solids and a statistical method to calculate an F1
score for the binary material recognition. We evaluated our method using
simulated contact with 69 materials and data collected by a real robot with 12
materials. Our model predicted the material recognition performance of support
vector machine (SVM) with 96% accuracy for the simulated data, with 92%
accuracy for real-world data with constant initial sensor temperatures, and
with 91% accuracy for real-world data with varied initial sensor temperatures.
Using our model, we also provide insight into the roles of various factors on
recognition performance, such as the temperature difference between the sensor
and the object. Overall, our results suggest that our model could be used to
help design better thermal sensors for robots and enable robots to use them
more effectively.Comment: This article is currently under review for possible publicatio
Gated-Attention Architectures for Task-Oriented Language Grounding
To perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, autonomous
agents need to extract semantically meaningful representations of language and
map it to visual elements and actions in the environment. This problem is
called task-oriented language grounding. We propose an end-to-end trainable
neural architecture for task-oriented language grounding in 3D environments
which assumes no prior linguistic or perceptual knowledge and requires only raw
pixels from the environment and the natural language instruction as input. The
proposed model combines the image and text representations using a
Gated-Attention mechanism and learns a policy to execute the natural language
instruction using standard reinforcement and imitation learning methods. We
show the effectiveness of the proposed model on unseen instructions as well as
unseen maps, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also introduce a novel
environment based on a 3D game engine to simulate the challenges of
task-oriented language grounding over a rich set of instructions and
environment states.Comment: To appear in AAAI-1
Multi-Modal Trip Hazard Affordance Detection On Construction Sites
Trip hazards are a significant contributor to accidents on construction and
manufacturing sites, where over a third of Australian workplace injuries occur
[1]. Current safety inspections are labour intensive and limited by human
fallibility,making automation of trip hazard detection appealing from both a
safety and economic perspective. Trip hazards present an interesting challenge
to modern learning techniques because they are defined as much by affordance as
by object type; for example wires on a table are not a trip hazard, but can be
if lying on the ground. To address these challenges, we conduct a comprehensive
investigation into the performance characteristics of 11 different colour and
depth fusion approaches, including 4 fusion and one non fusion approach; using
colour and two types of depth images. Trained and tested on over 600 labelled
trip hazards over 4 floors and 2000m in an active construction
site,this approach was able to differentiate between identical objects in
different physical configurations (see Figure 1). Outperforming a colour-only
detector, our multi-modal trip detector fuses colour and depth information to
achieve a 4% absolute improvement in F1-score. These investigative results and
the extensive publicly available dataset moves us one step closer to assistive
or fully automated safety inspection systems on construction sites.Comment: 9 Pages, 12 Figures, 2 Tables, Accepted to Robotics and Automation
Letters (RA-L
RABBIT: A Robot-Assisted Bed Bathing System with Multimodal Perception and Integrated Compliance
This paper introduces RABBIT, a novel robot-assisted bed bathing system
designed to address the growing need for assistive technologies in personal
hygiene tasks. It combines multimodal perception and dual (software and
hardware) compliance to perform safe and comfortable physical human-robot
interaction. Using RGB and thermal imaging to segment dry, soapy, and wet skin
regions accurately, RABBIT can effectively execute washing, rinsing, and drying
tasks in line with expert caregiving practices. Our system includes
custom-designed motion primitives inspired by human caregiving techniques, and
a novel compliant end-effector called Scrubby, optimized for gentle and
effective interactions. We conducted a user study with 12 participants,
including one participant with severe mobility limitations, demonstrating the
system's effectiveness and perceived comfort. Supplementary material and videos
can be found on our website https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/rabbit.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on
Human Robot Interaction (HRI
- …