Bayesian optimization for robust robotic grasping using a sensorized compliant hand

One of the first tasks we learn as children is to grasp objects based on our tactile perception. Incorporating such skill in robots will enable multiple applications, such as increasing flexibility in industrial processes or providing assistance to people with physical disabilities. However, the difficulty lies in adapting the grasping strategies to a large variety of tasks and objects, which can often be unknown. The brute-force solution is to learn new grasps by trial and error, which is inefficient and ineffective. In contrast, Bayesian optimization applies active learning by adding information to the approximation of an optimal grasp. This paper proposes the use of Bayesian optimization techniques to safely perform robotic grasping. We analyze different grasp metrics to provide realistic grasp optimization in a real system including tactile sensors. An experimental evaluation in the robotic system shows the usefulness of the method for performing unknown object grasping even in the presence of noise and uncertainty inherent to a real-world environment.

Gen-Swarms: Adapting Deep Generative Models to Swarms of Drones

Gen-Swarms is an innovative method that leverages and combines the capabilities of deep generative models with reactive navigation algorithms to automate the creation of drone shows. Advancements in deep generative models, particularly diffusion models, have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in generating high-quality 2D images. Building on this success, various works have extended diffusion models to 3D point cloud generation. In contrast, alternative generative models such as flow matching have been proposed, offering a simple and intuitive transition from noise to meaningful outputs. However, the application of flow matching models to 3D point cloud generation remains largely unexplored. Gen-Swarms adapts these models to automatically generate drone shows. Existing 3D point cloud generative models create point trajectories which are impractical for drone swarms. In contrast, our method not only generates accurate 3D shapes but also guides the swarm motion, producing smooth trajectories and accounting for potential collisions through a reactive navigation algorithm incorporated into the sampling process. For example, when given a text category like Airplane, Gen-Swarms can rapidly and continuously generate numerous variations of 3D airplane shapes. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is particularly well-suited for drone shows, providing feasible trajectories, creating representative final shapes, and significantly enhancing the overall performance of drone show generation.

ZARRIO @ Ego4D Short Term Object Interaction Anticipation Challenge: Leveraging Affordances and Attention-based models for STA

Short-Term object-interaction Anticipation (STA) consists of detecting the location of the next-active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, and the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. We propose STAformer, a novel attention-based architecture integrating frame-guided temporal pooling, dual image-video attention, and multi-scale feature fusion to support STA predictions from an image-input video pair. Moreover, we introduce two novel modules to ground STA predictions on human behavior by modeling affordances. First, we integrate an environment affordance model which acts as a persistent memory of interactions that can take place in a given physical scene. Second, we predict interaction hotspots from the observation of hands and object trajectories, increasing confidence in STA predictions localized around the hotspot. On the test set, our results obtain a final 33.5 N mAP, 17.25 N+V mAP, 11.77 N+{\delta} mAP and 6.75 Overall top-5 mAP metric when trained on the v2 training dataset.

CARLOR @ Ego4D Step Grounding Challenge: Bayesian temporal-order priors for test time refinement

The goal of the Step Grounding task is to locate temporal boundaries of activities based on natural language descriptions. This technical report introduces a Bayesian-VSLNet to address the challenge of identifying such temporal segments in lengthy, untrimmed egocentric videos. Our model significantly improves upon traditional models by incorporating a novel Bayesian temporal-order prior during inference, enhancing the accuracy of moment predictions. This prior adjusts for cyclic and repetitive actions within videos. Our evaluations demonstrate superior performance over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on the Ego4D Goal-Step dataset with a 35.18 Recall Top-1 at 0.3 IoU and 20.48 Recall Top-1 at 0.5 IoU on the test set.

AFF-ttention! Affordances and Attention models for Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation

Short-Term object-interaction Anticipation consists of detecting the location of the next-active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, and the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. This ability is fundamental for wearable assistants or human robot interaction to understand the user goals, but there is still room for improvement to perform STA in a precise and reliable way. In this work, we improve the performance of STA predictions with two contributions: 1. We propose STAformer, a novel attention-based architecture integrating frame guided temporal pooling, dual image-video attention, and multiscale feature fusion to support STA predictions from an image-input video pair. 2. We introduce two novel modules to ground STA predictions on human behavior by modeling affordances.First, we integrate an environment affordance model which acts as a persistent memory of interactions that can take place in a given physical scene. Second, we predict interaction hotspots from the observation of hands and object trajectories, increasing confidence in STA predictions localized around the hotspot. Our results show significant relative Overall Top-5 mAP improvements of up to +45% on Ego4D and +42% on a novel set of curated EPIC-Kitchens STA labels. We will release the code, annotations, and pre extracted affordances on Ego4D and EPIC- Kitchens to encourage future research in this area.

EventSleep: Sleep Activity Recognition with Event Cameras

Event cameras are a promising technology for activity recognition in dark environments due to their unique properties. However, real event camera datasets under low-lighting conditions are still scarce, which also limits the number of approaches to solve these kind of problems, hindering the potential of this technology in many applications. We present EventSleep, a new dataset and methodology to address this gap and study the suitability of event cameras for a very relevant medical application: sleep monitoring for sleep disorders analysis. The dataset contains synchronized event and infrared recordings emulating common movements that happen during the sleep, resulting in a new challenging and unique dataset for activity recognition in dark environments. Our novel pipeline is able to achieve high accuracy under these challenging conditions and incorporates a Bayesian approach (Laplace ensembles) to increase the robustness in the predictions, which is fundamental for medical applications. Our work is the first application of Bayesian neural networks for event cameras, the first use of Laplace ensembles in a realistic problem, and also demonstrates for the first time the potential of event cameras in a new application domain: to enhance current sleep evaluation procedures. Our activity recognition results highlight the potential of event cameras under dark conditions, and its capacity and robustness for sleep activity recognition, and open problems as the adaptation of event data pre-processing techniques to dark environments.

Active Exploration in Bayesian Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Robot Manipulation

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environment, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions, such as reinforcement learning (RL). Model-based RL, by building a dynamic model of the robot, enables data reuse and transfer learning between tasks with the same robot and similar environment. Furthermore, data gathering in robotics is expensive and we must rely on data efficient approaches such as model-based RL, where policy learning is mostly conducted on cheaper simulations based on the learned model. Therefore, the quality of the model is fundamental for the performance of the posterior tasks. In this work, we focus on improving the quality of the model and maintaining the data efficiency by performing active learning of the dynamic model during a preliminary exploration phase based on maximize information gathering. We employ Bayesian neural network models to represent, in a probabilistic way, both the belief and information encoded in the dynamic model during exploration. With our presented strategies we manage to actively estimate the novelty of each transition, using this as the exploration reward. In this work, we compare several Bayesian inference methods for neural networks, some of which have never been used in a robotics context, and evaluate them in a realistic robot manipulation setup. Our experiments show the advantages of our Bayesian model-based RL approach, with similar quality in the results than relevant alternatives with much lower requirements regarding robot execution steps. Unlike related previous studies that focused the validation solely on toy problems, our research takes a step towards more realistic setups, tackling robotic arm end-tasks.

Finding safe 3D robot grasps through efficient haptic exploration with unscented Bayesian optimization and collision penalty

Robust grasping is a major, and still unsolved, problem in robotics. Information about the 3D shape of an object can be obtained either from prior knowledge (e.g., accurate models of known objects or approximate models of familiar objects) or real-time sensing (e.g., partial point clouds of unknown objects) and can be used to identify good potential grasps. However, due to modeling and sensing inaccuracies, local exploration is often needed to refine such grasps and successfully apply them in the real world. The recently proposed unscented Bayesian optimization technique can make such exploration safer by selecting grasps that are robust to uncertainty in the input space (e.g., inaccuracies in the grasp execution). Extending our previous work on 2D optimization, in this paper we propose a 3D haptic exploration strategy that combines unscented Bayesian optimization with a novel collision penalty heuristic to find safe grasps in a very efficient way: while by augmenting the search-space to 3D we are able to find better grasps, the collision penalty heuristic allows us to do so without increasing the number of exploration steps.

Bayesian Optimization with Adaptive Kernels for Robot Control

Active policy search combines the trial-and-error methodology from policy search with Bayesian optimization to actively find the optimal policy. First, policy search is a type of reinforcement learning which has become very popular for robot control, for its ability to deal with complex continuous state and action spaces. Second, Bayesian optimization is a sample efficient global optimization method that uses a surrogate model, like a Gaussian process, and optimal decision making to carefully select each sample during the optimization process. Sample efficiency is of paramount importance when each trial involves the real robot, expensive Monte Carlo runs, or a complex simulator. Black-box Bayesian optimization generally assumes a cost function from a stationary process, because nonstationary modeling is usually based on prior knowledge. However, many control problems are inherently nonstationary due to their failure conditions, terminal states and other abrupt effects. In this paper, we present a kernel function specially designed for Bayesian optimization, that allows nonstationary modeling without prior knowledge, using an adaptive local region. The new kernel results in an improved local search (exploitation), without penalizing the global search (exploration), as shown experimentally in well-known optimization benchmarks and robot control scenarios. We finally show its potential for the design of the wing shape of a UAV.

Body Schema Acquisition through Active Learning

We present an active learning algorithm for the problem of body schema learning, i.e. estimating a kinematic model of a serial robot. The learning process is done online using Recursive Least Squares (RLS) estimation, which outperforms gradient methods usually applied in the literature. In addiction, the method provides the required information to apply an active learning algorithm to find the optimal set of robot configurations and observations to improve the learning process. By selecting the most informative observations, the proposed method minimizes the required amount of data. We have developed an efficient version of the active learning algorithm to select the points in real-time. The algorithms have been tested and compared using both simulated environments and a real humanoid robot.