LogiCity: Advancing Neuro-Symbolic AI with Abstract Urban Simulation

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI systems, which integrate symbolic reasoning into deep neural networks. However, most of the existing benchmarks for NeSy AI fail to provide long-horizon reasoning tasks with complex multi-agent interactions. Furthermore, they are usually constrained by fixed and simplistic logical rules over limited entities, making them far from real-world complexities. To address these crucial gaps, we introduce LogiCity, the first simulator based on customizable first-order logic (FOL) for an urban-like environment with multiple dynamic agents. LogiCity models diverse urban elements using semantic and spatial concepts, such as IsAmbulance(X) and IsClose(X, Y). These concepts are used to define FOL rules that govern the behavior of various agents. Since the concepts and rules are abstractions, they can be universally applied to cities with any agent compositions, facilitating the instantiation of diverse scenarios. Besides, a key feature of LogiCity is its support for user-configurable abstractions, enabling customizable simulation complexities for logical reasoning. To explore various aspects of NeSy AI, LogiCity introduces two tasks, one features long-horizon sequential decision-making, and the other focuses on one-step visual reasoning, varying in difficulty and agent behaviors. Our extensive evaluation reveals the advantage of NeSy frameworks in abstract reasoning. Moreover, we highlight the significant challenges of handling more complex abstractions in long-horizon multi-agent scenarios or under high-dimensional, imbalanced data. With its flexible design, various features, and newly raised challenges, we believe LogiCity represents a pivotal step forward in advancing the next generation of NeSy AI. All the code and data are open-sourced at our website.

MAC-VO: Metrics-aware Covariance for Learning-based Stereo Visual Odometry

We propose the MAC-VO, a novel learning-based stereo VO that leverages the learned metrics-aware matching uncertainty for dual purposes: selecting keypoint and weighing the residual in pose graph optimization. Compared to traditional geometric methods prioritizing texture-affluent features like edges, our keypoint selector employs the learned uncertainty to filter out the low-quality features based on global inconsistency. In contrast to the learning-based algorithms that model the scale-agnostic diagonal weight matrix for covariance, we design a metrics-aware covariance model to capture the spatial error during keypoint registration and the correlations between different axes. Integrating this covariance model into pose graph optimization enhances the robustness and reliability of pose estimation, particularly in challenging environments with varying illumination, feature density, and motion patterns. On public benchmark datasets, MAC-VO outperforms existing VO algorithms and even some SLAM algorithms in challenging environments. The covariance map also provides valuable information about the reliability of the estimated poses, which can benefit decision-making for autonomous systems.

FIReStereo: Forest InfraRed Stereo Dataset for UAS Depth Perception in Visually Degraded Environments

Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset, the use of thermal cameras for unmanned aerial system (UAS) depth perception has remained largely unexplored. This paper presents a stereo thermal depth perception dataset for autonomous aerial perception applications. The dataset consists of stereo thermal images, LiDAR, IMU and ground truth depth maps captured in urban and forest settings under diverse conditions like day, night, rain, and smoke. We benchmark representative stereo depth estimation algorithms, offering insights into their performance in degraded conditions. Models trained on our dataset generalize well to unseen smoky conditions, highlighting the robustness of stereo thermal imaging for depth perception. We aim for this work to enhance robotic perception in disaster scenarios, allowing for exploration and operations in previously unreachable areas. The dataset and source code are available at https://firestereo.github.io.

Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles

Autonomous motorsports aim to replicate the human racecar driver with software and sensors. As in traditional motorsports, Autonomous Racing Vehicles (ARVs) are pushed to their handling limits in multi-agent scenarios at extremely high ($\geq 150mph$) speeds. This Operational Design Domain (ODD) presents unique challenges across the autonomy stack. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is an international competition aiming to advance autonomous vehicle development through ARV competitions. While far from challenging what a human racecar driver can do, the IAC is pushing the state of the art by facilitating full-sized ARV competitions. This paper details the MIT-Pitt-RW Team's approach to autonomous racing in the IAC. In this work, we present our modular and fast approach to agent detection, motion planning and controls to create an autonomy stack. We also provide analysis of the performance of the software stack in single and multi-agent scenarios for rapid deployment in a fast-paced competition environment. We also cover what did and did not work when deployed on a physical system the Dallara AV-21 platform and potential improvements to address these shortcomings. Finally, we convey lessons learned and discuss limitations and future directions for improvement.

Amelia: A Large Model and Dataset for Airport Surface Movement Forecasting

The growing demand for air travel requires technological advancements in air traffic management as well as mechanisms for monitoring and ensuring safe and efficient operations. In terminal airspaces, predictive models of future movements and traffic flows can help with proactive planning and efficient coordination; however, varying airport topologies, and interactions with other agents, among other factors, make accurate predictions challenging. Data-driven predictive models have shown promise for handling numerous variables to enable various downstream tasks, including collision risk assessment, taxi-out time prediction, departure metering, and emission estimations. While data-driven methods have shown improvements in these tasks, prior works lack large-scale curated surface movement datasets within the public domain and the development of generalizable trajectory forecasting models. In response to this, we propose two contributions: (1) Amelia-48, a large surface movement dataset collected using the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Surface Movement Event Service (SMES). With data collection beginning in Dec 2022, the dataset provides more than a year's worth of SMES data (~30TB) and covers 48 airports within the US National Airspace System. In addition to releasing this data in the public domain, we also provide post-processing scripts and associated airport maps to enable research in the forecasting domain and beyond. (2) Amelia-TF model, a transformer-based next-token-prediction large multi-agent multi-airport trajectory forecasting model trained on 292 days or 9.4 billion tokens of position data encompassing 10 different airports with varying topology. The open-sourced model is validated on unseen airports with experiments showcasing the different prediction horizon lengths, ego-agent selection strategies, and training recipes to demonstrate the generalization capabilities.

UNRealNet: Learning Uncertainty-Aware Navigation Features from High-Fidelity Scans of Real Environments

Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute capability present on affordable, small-scale mobile robots. To address this issue, we present a novel method to learn [u]ncertainty-aware [n]avigation features from high-fidelity scans of [real]-world environments (UNRealNet). This network can be deployed on-robot to predict these high-fidelity features using input from lower-quality sensors. UNRealNet predicts dense, metric-space features directly from single-frame lidar scans, thus reducing the effects of occlusion and odometry error. Our approach is label-free, and is able to produce traversability estimates that are robot-agnostic. Additionally, we can leverage UNRealNet's predictive uncertainty to both produce risk-aware traversability estimates, and refine our feature predictions over time. We find that our method outperforms traditional local mapping and inpainting baselines by up to 40%, and demonstrate its efficacy on multiple legged platforms.

Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Data

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datasets. In this context, we show that a more scalable approach towards generalizable map prediction can be enabled by using two large-scale crowd-sourced mapping platforms, Mapillary for FPV images and OpenStreetMap for BEV semantic maps. We introduce Map It Anywhere (MIA), a data engine that enables seamless curation and modeling of labeled map prediction data from existing open-source map platforms. Using our MIA data engine, we display the ease of automatically collecting a dataset of 1.2 million pairs of FPV images & BEV maps encompassing diverse geographies, landscapes, environmental factors, camera models & capture scenarios. We further train a simple camera model-agnostic model on this data for BEV map prediction. Extensive evaluations using established benchmarks and our dataset show that the data curated by MIA enables effective pretraining for generalizable BEV map prediction, with zero-shot performance far exceeding baselines trained on existing datasets by 35%. Our analysis highlights the promise of using large-scale public maps for developing & testing generalizable BEV perception, paving the way for more robust autonomous navigation.

Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation

Aerial manipulation has gained interest in completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection, etc. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force in the surface normal direction and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes a contact-aware trajectory planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories, and a hybrid motion-force controller to track such trajectories. We demonstrate the approach in an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector, whose stroke width is proportional to the contact force. Additionally, we develop a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position (force) tracking RMSE of 2.9 cm (0.7 N). Website: https://xiaofeng-guo.github.io/flying-calligrapher/

Informative Sensor Planning for a Single-Axis Gimbaled Camera on a Fixed-Wing UAV

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a leading choice of platforms for a variety of information-gathering applications. Sensor planning can enhance the efficiency and success of these types of missions when coupled with a higher-level informative path-planning algorithm. This paper aims to address these data acquisition challenges by developing an informative non-myopic sensor planning framework for a single-axis gimbal coupled with an informative path planner to maximize information gain over a prior information map. This is done by finding reduced sensor sweep bounds over a planning horizon such that regions of higher confidence are prioritized. This novel sensor planning framework is evaluated against a predefined sensor sweep and no sensor planning baselines as well as validated in two simulation environments. In our results, we observe an improvement in the performance by 21.88% and 13.34% for the no sensor planning and predefined sensor sweep baselines respectively.

$\textit{UniSaT}$: Unified-Objective Belief Model and Planner to Search for and Track Multiple Objects

The problem of path planning for autonomously searching and tracking multiple objects is important to reconnaissance, surveillance, and many other data-gathering applications. Due to the inherent competing objectives of searching for new objects while maintaining tracks for found objects, most current approaches rely on multi-objective planning methods, leaving it up to the user to tune parameters to balance between the two objectives, usually based on heuristics or trial and error. In this paper, we introduce $\textit{UniSaT}$ ($\textit{Unified Search and Track}$), a unified-objective formulation for the search and track problem based on Random Finite Sets (RFS). This is done by modeling both the unknown and known objects through a combined generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) filter. For the unseen objects, we can leverage both cardinality and spatial prior distributions, which means $\textit{UniSaT}$ does not rely on knowing the exact count of the expected number of objects in the space. The planner maximizes the mutual information of this unified belief model, creating balanced search and tracking behaviors. We demonstrate our work in a simulated environment and show both qualitative results as well as quantitative improvements over a multi-objective method.