Related papers: Robust Visual Embodiment: How Robots Discover Thei…
Place recognition is a critical component in robot navigation that enables it to re-establish previously visited locations, and simultaneously use this information to correct the drift incurred in its dead-reckoned estimate. In this work,…
Robustness is a crucial factor for the successful deployment of robots in unstructured environments, particularly in the domain of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Simulation-based benchmarks have emerged as a highly scalable…
Deep Reinforcement Learning has been successfully applied in various computer games [8]. However, it is still rarely used in real-world applications, especially for the navigation and continuous control of real mobile robots [13]. Previous…
A command-following robot that serves people in everyday life must continually improve itself in deployment domains with minimal help from its end users, instead of engineers. Previous methods are either difficult to continuously improve…
Catastrophic forgetting continues to severely restrict the learnability of controllers suitable for multiple task environments. Efforts to combat catastrophic forgetting reported in the literature to date have focused on how control systems…
Reconstructing physically valid 3D scenes from single-view observations is a prerequisite for bridging the gap between visual perception and robotic control. However, in scenarios requiring precise contact reasoning, such as robotic…
As an attempt towards assessing the robustness of embodied navigation agents, we propose RobustNav, a framework to quantify the performance of embodied navigation agents when exposed to a wide variety of visual - affecting RGB inputs - and…
Vision-based underwater robots can be useful in inspecting and exploring confined spaces where traditional sensors and preplanned paths cannot be followed. Sensor noise and situational change can cause significant uncertainty in…
Long-term monitoring and exploration of extreme environments, such as underwater storage facilities, is costly, labor-intensive, and hazardous. Automating this process with low-cost, collaborative robots can greatly improve efficiency.…
Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have attained exceptional success across multimodal tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. However, their robustness under noisy conditions remains unfamiliar. In this study, we present a…
Image reconstruction techniques such as denoising often need to be applied to the RGB output of cameras and cellphones. Unfortunately, the commonly used additive white noise (AWGN) models do not accurately reproduce the noise and the…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
The performance of graph representation learning is affected by the quality of graph input. While existing research usually pursues a globally smoothed graph embedding, we believe the rarely observed anomalies are as well harmful to an…
The speed and accuracy with which robots are able to interpret natural language is fundamental to realizing effective human-robot interaction. A great deal of attention has been paid to developing models and approximate inference algorithms…
Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a…
Autonomous robotics is critically affected by the robustness of its scene understanding algorithms. We propose a two-axis pipeline based on polarization indices to analyze dynamic urban scenes. As robots evolve in unknown environments, they…
State-of-the art vision models can achieve superhuman performance on image classification tasks when testing and training data come from the same distribution. However, when models are tested on corrupted images (e.g. due to scale changes,…
Modelling individual objects in a scene as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) provides an alternative geometric scene representation that may benefit downstream robotics tasks such as scene understanding and object manipulation. However, we…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…