Fast Trajectory End-Point Prediction with Event Cameras for Reactive Robot Control

Prediction skills can be crucial for the success of tasks where robots have limited time to act or joints actuation power. In such a scenario, a vision system with a fixed, possibly too low, sampling rate could lead to the loss of informative points, slowing down prediction convergence and reducing the accuracy. In this paper, we propose to exploit the low latency, motion-driven sampling, and data compression properties of event cameras to overcome these issues. As a use-case, we use a Panda robotic arm to intercept a ball bouncing on a table. To predict the interception point, we adopt a Stateful LSTM network, a specific LSTM variant without fixed input length, which perfectly suits the event-driven paradigm and the problem at hand, where the length of the trajectory is not defined. We train the network in simulation to speed up the dataset acquisition and then fine-tune the models on real trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate how using a dense spatial sampling (i.e. event cameras) significantly increases the number of intercepted trajectories as compared to a fixed temporal sampling (i.e. frame-based cameras).

Gestural and Touchscreen Interaction for Human-Robot Collaboration: a Comparative Study

Close human-robot interaction (HRI), especially in industrial scenarios, has been vastly investigated for the advantages of combining human and robot skills. For an effective HRI, the validity of currently available human-machine communication media or tools should be questioned, and new communication modalities should be explored. This article proposes a modular architecture allowing human operators to interact with robots through different modalities. In particular, we implemented the architecture to handle gestural and touchscreen input, respectively, using a smartwatch and a tablet. Finally, we performed a comparative user experience study between these two modalities.

PUCK: Parallel Surface and Convolution-kernel Tracking for Event-Based Cameras

Low latency and accuracy are fundamental requirements when vision is integrated in robots for high-speed interaction with targets, since they affect system reliability and stability. In such a scenario, the choice of the sensor and algorithms is important for the entire control loop. The technology of event-cameras can guarantee fast visual sensing in dynamic environments, but requires a tracking algorithm that can keep up with the high data rate induced by the robot ego-motion while maintaining accuracy and robustness to distractors. In this paper, we introduce a novel tracking method that leverages the Exponential Reduced Ordinal Surface (EROS) data representation to decouple event-by-event processing and tracking computation. The latter is performed using convolution kernels to detect and follow a circular target moving on a plane. To benchmark state-of-the-art event-based tracking, we propose the task of tracking the air hockey puck sliding on a surface, with the future aim of controlling the iCub robot to reach the target precisely and on time. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the best compromise between low latency and tracking accuracy both when the robot is still and when moving.