Manfred Huber

Navigation is a fundamental capacity for mobile robots, enabling them to operate autonomously in complex and dynamic environments. Conventional approaches use probabilistic models to localize robots and build maps simultaneously using sensor observations. Recent approaches employ human-inspired learning, such as imitation and reinforcement learning, to navigate robots more effectively. However, these methods suffer from high computational costs, global map inconsistency, and poor generalization to unseen environments. This paper presents a novel method inspired by how humans perceive and navigate themselves effectively in novel environments. Specifically, we first build local frames that mimic how humans represent essential spatial information in the short term. Points in local frames are hybrid representations, including spatial information and learned features, so-called spatial-implicit local frames. Then, we integrate spatial-implicit local frames into the global topological map represented as a factor graph. Lastly, we developed a novel navigation algorithm based on Rapid-Exploring Random Tree Star (RRT*) that leverages spatial-implicit local frames and the topological map to navigate effectively in environments. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments in real-world datasets and in-lab environments. We open our source code at https://github.com/tuantdang/simn}{https://github.com/tuantdang/simn.

Human activity recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors has advanced through various machine learning paradigms, each with inherent trade-offs between performance and labeling requirements. While fully supervised techniques achieve high accuracy, they demand extensive labeled datasets that are costly to obtain. Conversely, unsupervised methods eliminate labeling needs but often deliver suboptimal performance. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation across the supervision spectrum for wearable-based HAR, with particular focus on novel approaches that minimize labeling requirements while maintaining competitive accuracy. We develop and empirically compare: (1) traditional fully supervised learning, (2) basic unsupervised learning, (3) a weakly supervised learning approach with constraints, (4) a multi-task learning approach with knowledge sharing, (5) a self-supervised approach based on domain expertise, and (6) a novel weakly self-supervised learning framework that leverages domain knowledge and minimal labeled data. Experiments across benchmark datasets demonstrate that: (i) our weakly supervised methods achieve performance comparable to fully supervised approaches while significantly reducing supervision requirements; (ii) the proposed multi-task framework enhances performance through knowledge sharing between related tasks; (iii) our weakly self-supervised approach demonstrates remarkable efficiency with just 10% of labeled data. These results not only highlight the complementary strengths of different learning paradigms, offering insights into tailoring HAR solutions based on the availability of labeled data, but also establish that our novel weakly self-supervised framework offers a promising solution for practical HAR applications where labeled data are limited.

In the real world, humans often collaborate with others without direct communication. To do this successfully, they have to infer their intentions and choose actions that complement the predicted actions of their collaborators to perform the task efficiently. Since the peer’s state and action are generally not directly observable, these are usually estimated based on environmental change and then used to predict the intention. While humans can achieve this easily, this form of collaboration is difficult for artificial intelligent agents operating in partially observable environments, leading to agent architectures that do not attempt to explicitly infer other agents’ intentions but rather rely on additional knowledge or reactive collaboration, relying on the steadystate character of other agents.In this paper, we propose an agent model that explicitly defines and utilizes estimates of other agents’ intentions to yield more effective collaboration in decentralized partially observable domains, where each agent’s knowledge of and current belief state in the environment can be different. The resulting agents explicitly estimate other agents’ intentions from their observationsand utilize these estimates in a Reinforcement Learning process on a modified Dec-POMDP model to learn collaborative strategies. Initial experiments in a simple, partially observable collaborative manipulation domain show the ability of these intention-aware agents to learn optimal hierarchical strategies faster and more stably than equivalent agents without intention awareness.

Reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) scenes with semantic understanding is vital in many robotic applications. Robots need to identify which objects, along with their positions and shapes, to manipulate them precisely with given tasks. Mobile robots, especially, usually use lightweight networks to segment objects on RGB images and then localize them via depth maps; however, they often encounter out-of-distribution scenarios where masks over-cover the objects. In this paper, we address the problem of panoptic segmentation quality in 3D scene reconstruction by refining segmentation errors using non-parametric statistical methods. To enhance mask precision, we map the predicted masks into a depth frame to estimate their distribution via kernel densities. The outliers in depth perception are then rejected without the need for additional parameters in an adaptive manner to out-of-distribution scenarios, followed by 3D reconstruction using projective signed distance functions (SDFs). We validate our method on a synthetic dataset, which shows improvements in both quantitative and qualitative results for panoptic mapping. Through real-world testing, the results furthermore show our method's capability to be deployed on a real-robot system. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/mkhangg/refined panoptic mapping.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in highly dynamic environments is challenging due to the correlation complexity between moving objects and the camera pose. Many methods have been proposed to deal with this problem; however, the moving properties of dynamic objects with a moving camera remain unclear. Therefore, to improve SLAM's performance, minimizing disruptive events of moving objects with a physical understanding of 3D shapes and dynamics of objects is needed. In this paper, we propose a robust method, V3D-SLAM, to remove moving objects via two lightweight re-evaluation stages, including identifying potentially moving and static objects using a spatial-reasoned Hough voting mechanism and refining static objects by detecting dynamic noise caused by intra-object motions using Chamfer distances as similarity measurements. Our experiment on the TUM RGB-D benchmark on dynamic sequences with ground-truth camera trajectories showed that our methods outperform the most recent state-of-the-art SLAM methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tuantdang/v3d-slam.

Perceiving a three-dimensional (3D) scene with multiple objects while moving indoors is essential for vision-based mobile cobots, especially for enhancing their manipulation tasks. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline with instance segmentation, feature matching, and point-set registration for egocentric robots with binocular vision, and demonstrate the robot's grasping capability through the proposed pipeline. First, we design an RGB image-based segmentation approach for single-view 3D semantic scene segmentation, leveraging common object classes in 2D datasets to encapsulate 3D points into point clouds of object instances through corresponding depth maps. Next, 3D correspondences of two consecutive segmented point clouds are extracted based on matched keypoints between objects of interest in RGB images from the prior step. In addition, to be aware of spatial changes in 3D feature distribution, we also weigh each 3D point pair based on the estimated distribution using kernel density estimation (KDE), which subsequently gives robustness with less central correspondences while solving for rigid transformations between point clouds. Finally, we test our proposed pipeline on the 7-DOF dual-arm Baxter robot with a mounted Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D camera. The result shows that our robot can segment objects of interest, register multiple views while moving, and grasp the target object. The source code is available at https://github.com/mkhangg/semantic_scene_perception.

The embedded sensors in widely used smartphones and other wearable devices make the data of human activities more accessible. However, recognizing different human activities from the wearable sensor data remains a challenging research problem in ubiquitous computing. One of the reasons is that the majority of the acquired data has no labels. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach, which is based on the nature of human activity, to project the human activities into an embedding space in which similar activities will be located closely together. Using this, subsequent clustering algorithms can benefit from the embeddings, forming behavior clusters that represent the distinct activities performed by a person. Results of experiments on three labeled benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and show that our approach can help the clustering algorithm achieve improved performance in identifying and categorizing the underlying human activities compared to unsupervised techniques applied directly to the original data set.