Related papers: Transfer learning from synthetic to real images us…

The control of a robot for manipulation tasks generally relies on object detection and pose estimation. An attractive alternative is to learn control policies directly from raw input data. However, this approach is time-consuming and…

Sim-to-real transfer remains a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation due to the entanglement of perception and control in end-to-end learning. We present a decoupled framework that learns each component where it is most reliable:…

We propose a novel self-supervised approach for learning to visually localize robots equipped with controllable LEDs. We rely on a few training samples labeled with position ground truth and many training samples in which only the LED state…

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…

Using synthetic data for training deep neural networks for robotic manipulation holds the promise of an almost unlimited amount of pre-labeled training data, generated safely out of harm's way. One of the key challenges of synthetic data,…

This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories.…

We propose a simple and efficient method for exploiting synthetic images when training a Deep Network to predict a 3D pose from an image. The ability of using synthetic images for training a Deep Network is extremely valuable as it is easy…

Robots play a critical role as the physical agent of human operators in exploring the ocean. However, it remains challenging to grasp objects reliably while fully submerging under a highly pressurized aquatic environment with little visible…

We demonstrate model-based, visual robot manipulation of linear deformable objects. Our approach is based on a state-space representation of the physical system that the robot aims to control. This choice has multiple advantages, including…

This work utilizes a variational autoencoder for channel estimation and evaluates it on real-world measurements. The estimator is trained solely on noisy channel observations and parameterizes an approximation to the mean squared…

3-D pose estimation of instruments is a crucial step towards automatic scene understanding in robotic minimally invasive surgery. Although robotic systems can potentially directly provide joint values, this information is not commonly…

Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the…

We study active object tracking, where a tracker takes visual observations (i.e., frame sequences) as input and produces the corresponding camera control signals as output (e.g., move forward, turn left, etc.). Conventional methods tackle…

Contemporary monocular 6D pose estimation methods can only cope with a handful of object instances. This naturally hampers possible applications as, for instance, robots seamlessly integrated in everyday processes necessarily require the…

Recognising relevant objects or object states in its environment is a basic capability for an autonomous robot. The dominant approach to object recognition in images and range images is classification by supervised machine learning,…

Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…

Operating directly from raw high dimensional sensory inputs like images is still a challenge for robotic control. Recently, Reinforcement Learning methods have been proposed to solve specific tasks end-to-end, from pixels to torques.…

Object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for robots to perform autonomous manipulation in clutter. Real-world bin-picking settings such as warehouses present additional challenges, e.g., new objects are added constantly. Most of the…

Collaborative robots are becoming more common on factory floors as well as regular environments, however, their safety still is not a fully solved issue. Collision detection does not always perform as expected and collision avoidance is…

Developing meaningful and efficient representations that separate the fundamental structure of the data generation mechanism is crucial in representation learning. However, Disentangled Representation Learning has not fully shown its…