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When interacting in unstructured human environments, occasional robot failures are inevitable. When such failures occur, everyday people, rather than trained technicians, will be the first to respond. Existing natural language explanations…
This work investigates how semantics influence localisation performance and robustness in a learned self-supervised, contrastive semantic localisation framework. After training a localisation network on both original and perturbed maps, we…
Today's mobile robots are expected to operate in complex environments they share with humans. To allow intuitive human-robot collaboration, robots require a human-like understanding of their surroundings in terms of semantically classified…
In an augmented reality (AR) application, placing labels in a manner that is clear and readable without occluding the critical information from the real-world can be a challenging problem. This paper introduces a label placement technique…
Humans have a natural ability to perform semantic associations with the surrounding objects in the environment. This allows them to create a mental map of the environment, allowing them to navigate on-demand when given linguistic…
We present a Visual Place Recognition system that follows the two-stage format common to image retrieval pipelines. The system encodes images of places by employing the activations of different layers of a pre-trained, off-the-shelf, VGG16…
We propose a novel learning-based formulation for visual localization of vehicles that can operate in real-time in city-scale environments. Visual localization algorithms determine the position and orientation from which an image has been…
Visual place recognition (VPR) capabilities enable autonomous robots to navigate complex environments by discovering the environment's topology based on visual input. Most research efforts focus on enhancing the accuracy and robustness of…
Place Recognition enables the estimation of a globally consistent map and trajectory by providing non-local constraints in Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). This paper presents Locus, a novel place recognition method using 3D…
Visual localization is a useful alternative to standard localization techniques. It works by utilizing cameras. In a typical scenario, features are extracted from captured images and compared with geo-referenced databases. Location…
Semantic navigation is the navigation paradigm in which environmental semantic concepts and their relationships are taken into account to plan the route of a mobile robot. This paradigm facilitates the interaction with humans and the…
Semantic localization, i.e., robot self-localization with semantic image modality, is critical in recently emerging embodied AI applications (e.g., point-goal navigation, object-goal navigation, vision language navigation) and topological…
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
Seamless Human-Robot Interaction is the ultimate goal of developing service robotic systems. For this, the robotic agents have to understand their surroundings to better complete a given task. Semantic scene understanding allows a robotic…
Accurate maps are a prerequisite for virtually all mobile robot tasks. Most state-of-the-art maps assume a static world; therefore, dynamic objects are filtered out of the measurements. However, this division ignores movable but non-moving…
Enabling robots to understand the world in terms of objects is a critical building block towards higher level autonomy. The success of foundation models in vision has created the ability to segment and identify nearly all objects in the…
A robot understands its world through the raw information it senses from its surroundings. This raw information is not suitable as a shared representation between the robot and its user. A semantic map, containing high-level information…
We present a novel framework for estimating accident-prone regions in everyday indoor scenes, aimed at improving real-time risk awareness in service robots operating in human-centric environments. As robots become integrated into daily…
Localization is an essential capability for mobile robots. A rapidly growing field of research in this area is Visual Place Recognition (VPR), which is the ability to recognize previously seen places in the world based solely on images.…
This paper describes a fast and accurate semantic image segmentation approach that encodes not only the discriminative features from deep neural networks, but also the high-order context compatibility among adjacent objects as well as low…