Correspondence-Guided SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting for NVS

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) without Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pre-processed camera poses--referred to as SfM-free methods--is crucial for promoting rapid response capabilities and enhancing robustness against variable operating conditions. Recent SfM-free methods have integrated pose optimization, designing end-to-end frameworks for joint camera pose estimation and NVS. However, most existing works rely on per-pixel image loss functions, such as L2 loss. In SfM-free methods, inaccurate initial poses lead to misalignment issue, which, under the constraints of per-pixel image loss functions, results in excessive gradients, causing unstable optimization and poor convergence for NVS. In this study, we propose a correspondence-guided SfM-free 3D Gaussian splatting for NVS. We use correspondences between the target and the rendered result to achieve better pixel alignment, facilitating the optimization of relative poses between frames. We then apply the learned poses to optimize the entire scene. Each 2D screen-space pixel is associated with its corresponding 3D Gaussians through approximated surface rendering to facilitate gradient back propagation. Experimental results underline the superior performance and time efficiency of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

On Flange-based 3D Hand-Eye Calibration for Soft Robotic Tactile Welding

This paper investigates the direct application of standardized designs on the robot for conducting robot hand-eye calibration by employing 3D scanners with collaborative robots. The well-established geometric features of the robot flange are exploited by directly capturing its point cloud data. In particular, an iterative method is proposed to facilitate point cloud processing toward a refined calibration outcome. Several extensive experiments are conducted over a range of collaborative robots, including Universal Robots UR5 & UR10 e-series, Franka Emika, and AUBO i5 using an industrial-grade 3D scanner Photoneo Phoxi S & M and a commercial-grade 3D scanner Microsoft Azure Kinect DK. Experimental results show that translational and rotational errors converge efficiently to less than 0.28 mm and 0.25 degrees, respectively, achieving a hand-eye calibration accuracy as high as the camera's resolution, probing the hardware limit. A welding seam tracking system is presented, combining the flange-based calibration method with soft tactile sensing. The experiment results show that the system enables the robot to adjust its motion in real-time, ensuring consistent weld quality and paving the way for more efficient and adaptable manufacturing processes.

Close the Sim2real Gap via Physically-based Structured Light Synthetic Data Simulation

Despite the substantial progress in deep learning, its adoption in industrial robotics projects remains limited, primarily due to challenges in data acquisition and labeling. Previous sim2real approaches using domain randomization require extensive scene and model optimization. To address these issues, we introduce an innovative physically-based structured light simulation system, generating both RGB and physically realistic depth images, surpassing previous dataset generation tools. We create an RGBD dataset tailored for robotic industrial grasping scenarios and evaluate it across various tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and embedding sim2real visual perception in industrial robotic grasping. By reducing the sim2real gap and enhancing deep learning training, we facilitate the application of deep learning models in industrial settings. Project details are available at https://baikaixinpublic.github.io/structured light 3D synthesizer/.

Evaluation of Text-to-Video Generation Models: A Dynamics Perspective

Comprehensive and constructive evaluation protocols play an important role in the development of sophisticated text-to-video (T2V) generation models. Existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on temporal consistency and content continuity, yet largely ignore the dynamics of video content. Dynamics are an essential dimension for measuring the visual vividness and the honesty of video content to text prompts. In this study, we propose an effective evaluation protocol, termed DEVIL, which centers on the dynamics dimension to evaluate T2V models. For this purpose, we establish a new benchmark comprising text prompts that fully reflect multiple dynamics grades, and define a set of dynamics scores corresponding to various temporal granularities to comprehensively evaluate the dynamics of each generated video. Based on the new benchmark and the dynamics scores, we assess T2V models with the design of three metrics: dynamics range, dynamics controllability, and dynamics-based quality. Experiments show that DEVIL achieves a Pearson correlation exceeding 90% with human ratings, demonstrating its potential to advance T2V generation models. Code is available at https://github.com/MingXiangL/DEVIL.

Evolutionary Morphology Towards Overconstrained Locomotion via Large-Scale, Multi-Terrain Deep Reinforcement Learning

While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained locomotion from a design and learning perspective inspired by evolutionary morphology, aiming to integrate the concept of `intelligent design under constraints' - hereafter referred to as constraint-driven design intelligence - in developing modern robotic limbs with superior energy efficiency. We propose a 3D-printable design of robotic limbs parametrically reconfigurable as a classical planar 4-bar linkage, an overconstrained Bennett linkage, and a spherical 4-bar linkage. These limbs adopt a co-axial actuation, identical to the modern legged robot platforms, with the added capability of upgrading into a wheel-legged system. Then, we implemented a large-scale, multi-terrain deep reinforcement learning framework to train these reconfigurable limbs for a comparative analysis of overconstrained locomotion in energy efficiency. Results show that the overconstrained limbs exhibit more efficient locomotion than planar limbs during forward and sideways walking over different terrains, including floors, slopes, and stairs, with or without random noises, by saving at least 22% mechanical energy in completing the traverse task, with the spherical limbs being the least efficient. It also achieves the highest average speed of 0.85 meters per second on flat terrain, which is 20% faster than the planar limbs. This study paves the path for an exciting direction for future research in overconstrained robotics leveraging evolutionary morphology and reconfigurable mechanism intelligence when combined with state-of-the-art methods in deep reinforcement learning.

One Fling to Goal: Environment-aware Dynamics for Goal-conditioned Fabric Flinging

Fabric manipulation dynamically is commonly seen in manufacturing and domestic settings. While dynamically manipulating a fabric piece to reach a target state is highly efficient, this task presents considerable challenges due to the varying properties of different fabrics, complex dynamics when interacting with environments, and meeting required goal conditions. To address these challenges, we present \textit{One Fling to Goal}, an algorithm capable of handling fabric pieces with diverse shapes and physical properties across various scenarios. Our method learns a graph-based dynamics model equipped with environmental awareness. With this dynamics model, we devise a real-time controller to enable high-speed fabric manipulation in one attempt, requiring less than 3 seconds to finish the goal-conditioned task. We experimentally validate our method on a goal-conditioned manipulation task in five diverse scenarios. Our method significantly improves this goal-conditioned task, achieving an average error of 13.2mm in complex scenarios. Our method can be seamlessly transferred to real-world robotic systems and generalized to unseen scenarios in a zero-shot manner.

DynRefer: Delving into Region-level Multi-modality Tasks via Dynamic Resolution

Region-level multi-modality methods can translate referred image regions to human preferred language descriptions. Unfortunately, most of existing methods using fixed visual inputs remain lacking the resolution adaptability to find out precise language descriptions. In this study, we propose a dynamic resolution approach, referred to as DynRefer, to pursue high-accuracy region-level referring through mimicking the resolution adaptability of human visual cognition. DynRefer first implements stochastic vision-language alignment. It aligns desired language descriptions of multi-modality tasks with images of stochastic resolution, which are constructed by nesting a set of views around the referred region. DynRefer then implements dynamic multi-modality referring, which is realized by selecting views based on image and language priors. This allows the visual information used for referring to better match human preferences, thereby improving the representational adaptability of region-level multi-modality models. Extensive experiments show that DynRefer brings mutual improvement upon tasks including region-level captioning, open-vocabulary region recognition and attribute detection. Last but not least, DynRefer achieves new state-of-the-art on multiple region-level multi-modality tasks using a single model. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/DynRefer.

BEAM: Beta Distribution Ray Denoising for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Multi-view 3D object detectors struggle with duplicate predictions due to the lack of depth information, resulting in false positive detections. In this study, we introduce BEAM, a novel Beta Distribution Ray Denoising approach that can be applied to any DETR-style multi-view 3D detector to explicitly incorporate structure prior knowledge of the scene. By generating rays from cameras to objects and sampling spatial denoising queries from the Beta distribution family along these rays, BEAM enhances the model's ability to distinguish spatial hard negative samples arising from ambiguous depths. BEAM is a plug-and-play technique that adds only marginal computational costs during training, while impressively preserving the inference speed. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the NuScenes dataset demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines, outperforming the state-of-the-art method StreamPETR by 1.9% mAP. The code will be available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/BEAM.

Controllable Dense Captioner with Multimodal Embedding Bridging

In this paper, we propose a controllable dense captioner (ControlCap), which accommodates user's intention to dense captioning by introducing linguistic guidance. ControlCap is defined as a multimodal embedding bridging architecture, which comprises multimodal embedding generation (MEG) module and bi-directional embedding bridging (BEB) module. While MEG module represents objects/regions by combining embeddings of detailed information with context-aware ones, it also endows ControlCap the adaptability to specialized controls by utilizing them as linguistic guidance. BEB module aligns the linguistic guidance with visual embeddings through borrowing/returning features from/to the visual domain and gathering such features to predict text descriptions. Experiments on Visual Genome and VG-COCO datasets show that ControlCap respectively outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 1.5% and 3.7% (mAP). Last but not least, with the capability of converting region-category pairs to region-text pairs, ControlCap is able to act as a powerful data engine for dense captioning. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/ControlCap.

Describing Robots from Design to Learning: Towards an Interactive Lifecycle Representation of Robots

The robot development process is divided into several stages, which create barriers to the exchange of information between these different stages. We advocate for an interactive lifecycle representation, extending from robot morphology design to learning, and introduce the role of robot description formats in facilitating information transfer throughout this pipeline. We analyzed the relationship between design and simulation, enabling us to employ robot process automation methods for transferring information from the design phase to the learning phase in simulation. As part of this effort, we have developed an open-source plugin called ACDC4Robot for Fusion 360, which automates this process and transforms Fusion 360 into a user-friendly graphical interface for creating and editing robot description formats. Additionally, we offer an out-of-the-box robot model library to streamline and reduce repetitive tasks. All codes are hosted open-source. (\url{https://github.com/bionicdl-sustech/ACDC4Robot})