RobotKeyframing: Learning Locomotion with High-Level Objectives via Mixture of Dense and Sparse Rewards

This paper presents a novel learning-based control framework that uses keyframing to incorporate high-level objectives in natural locomotion for legged robots. These high-level objectives are specified as a variable number of partial or complete pose targets that are spaced arbitrarily in time. Our proposed framework utilizes a multi-critic reinforcement learning algorithm to effectively handle the mixture of dense and sparse rewards. Additionally, it employs a transformer-based encoder to accommodate a variable number of input targets, each associated with specific time-to-arrivals. Throughout simulation and hardware experiments, we demonstrate that our framework can effectively satisfy the target keyframe sequence at the required times. In the experiments, the multi-critic method significantly reduces the effort of hyperparameter tuning compared to the standard single-critic alternative. Moreover, the proposed transformer-based architecture enables robots to anticipate future goals, which results in quantitative improvements in their ability to reach their targets.

3D Segmentation of Humans in Point Clouds with Synthetic Data

Segmenting humans in 3D indoor scenes has become increasingly important with the rise of human-centered robotics and AR/VR applications. In this direction, we explore the tasks of 3D human semantic-, instance- and multi-human body-part segmentation. Few works have attempted to directly segment humans in point clouds (or depth maps), which is largely due to the lack of training data on humans interacting with 3D scenes. We address this challenge and propose a framework for synthesizing virtual humans in realistic 3D scenes. Synthetic point cloud data is attractive since the domain gap between real and synthetic depth is small compared to images. Our analysis of different training schemes using a combination of synthetic and realistic data shows that synthetic data for pre-training improves performance in a wide variety of segmentation tasks and models. We further propose the first end-to-end model for 3D multi-human body-part segmentation, called Human3D, that performs all the above segmentation tasks in a unified manner. Remarkably, Human3D even outperforms previous task-specific state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we manually annotate humans in test scenes from EgoBody to compare the proposed training schemes and segmentation models.