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When faced with accomplishing a task, human experts exhibit intentional behavior. Their unique intents shape their plans and decisions, resulting in experts demonstrating diverse behaviors to accomplish the same task. Due to the uncertainties encountered in the real world and their bounded rationality, experts sometimes adjust their intents, which in turn influences their behaviors during task execution. This paper introduces IDIL, a novel imitation learning algorithm to mimic these diverse intent-driven behaviors of experts. Iteratively, our approach estimates expert intent from heterogeneous demonstrations and then uses it to learn an intent-aware model of their behavior. Unlike contemporary approaches, IDIL is capable of addressing sequential tasks with high-dimensional state representations, while sidestepping the complexities and drawbacks associated with adversarial training (a mainstay of related techniques). Our empirical results suggest that the models generated by IDIL either match or surpass those produced by recent imitation learning benchmarks in metrics of task performance. Moreover, as it creates a generative model, IDIL demonstrates superior performance in intent inference metrics, crucial for human-agent interactions, and aptly captures a broad spectrum of expert behaviors., Comment: Extended version of an identically-titled paper accepted at AAMAS 2024

Recent vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated proficiency in various tasks but require supervised fine-tuning to perform the task of semantic segmentation effectively. Benchmarking their performance is essential for selecting current models and guiding future model developments for this task. The lack of a standardized benchmark complicates comparisons. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to study how VFMs should be benchmarked for semantic segmentation. To do so, various VFMs are fine-tuned under various settings, and the impact of individual settings on the performance ranking and training time is assessed. Based on the results, the recommendation is to fine-tune the ViT-B variants of VFMs with a 16x16 patch size and a linear decoder, as these settings are representative of using a larger model, more advanced decoder and smaller patch size, while reducing training time by more than 13 times. Using multiple datasets for training and evaluation is also recommended, as the performance ranking across datasets and domain shifts varies. Linear probing, a common practice for some VFMs, is not recommended, as it is not representative of end-to-end fine-tuning. The benchmarking setup recommended in this paper enables a performance analysis of VFMs for semantic segmentation. The findings of such an analysis reveal that pretraining with promptable segmentation is not beneficial, whereas masked image modeling (MIM) with abstract representations is crucial, even more important than the type of supervision used. The code for efficiently fine-tuning VFMs for semantic segmentation can be accessed through the project page at: https://tue-mps.github.io/benchmark-vfm-ss/., Comment: CVPR 2024 Workshop Proceedings for the Second Workshop on Foundation Models

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since autonomous driving is a complex domain with partly conflicting objectives with varying degrees of priority, developing a suitable reward function represents a fundamental challenge. This paper aims to highlight the gap in such function design by assessing different proposed formulations in the literature and dividing individual objectives into Safety, Comfort, Progress, and Traffic Rules compliance categories. Additionally, the limitations of the reviewed reward functions are discussed, such as objectives aggregation and indifference to driving context. Furthermore, the reward categories are frequently inadequately formulated and lack standardization. This paper concludes by proposing future research that potentially addresses the observed shortcomings in rewards, including a reward validation framework and structured rewards that are context-aware and able to resolve conflicts., Comment: Accepted at "Interaction-driven Behavior Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Vehicles" workshop in 35th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2024)

Robotic technologies have been an indispensable part for improving human productivity since they have been helping humans in completing diverse, complex, and intensive tasks in a fast yet accurate and efficient way. Therefore, robotic technologies have been deployed in a wide range of applications, ranging from personal to industrial use-cases. However, current robotic technologies and their computing paradigm still lack embodied intelligence to efficiently interact with operational environments, respond with correct/expected actions, and adapt to changes in the environments. Toward this, recent advances in neuromorphic computing with Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have demonstrated the potential to enable the embodied intelligence for robotics through bio-plausible computing paradigm that mimics how the biological brain works, known as "neuromorphic artificial intelligence (AI)". However, the field of neuromorphic AI-based robotics is still at an early stage, therefore its development and deployment for solving real-world problems expose new challenges in different design aspects, such as accuracy, adaptability, efficiency, reliability, and security. To address these challenges, this paper will discuss how we can enable embodied neuromorphic AI for robotic systems through our perspectives: (P1) Embodied intelligence based on effective learning rule, training mechanism, and adaptability; (P2) Cross-layer optimizations for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing; (P3) Representative and fair benchmarks; (P4) Low-cost reliability and safety enhancements; (P5) Security and privacy for neuromorphic computing; and (P6) A synergistic development for energy-efficient and robust neuromorphic-based robotics. Furthermore, this paper identifies research challenges and opportunities, as well as elaborates our vision for future research development toward embodied neuromorphic AI for robotics., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

The rise of automation has provided an opportunity to achieve higher efficiency in manufacturing processes, yet it often compromises the flexibility required to promptly respond to evolving market needs and meet the demand for customization. Human-robot collaboration attempts to tackle these challenges by combining the strength and precision of machines with human ingenuity and perceptual understanding. In this paper, we conceptualize and propose an implementation framework for an autonomous, machine learning-based manipulator that incorporates human-in-the-loop principles and leverages Extended Reality (XR) to facilitate intuitive communication and programming between humans and robots. Furthermore, the conceptual framework foresees human involvement directly in the robot learning process, resulting in higher adaptability and task generalization. The paper highlights key technologies enabling the proposed framework, emphasizing the importance of developing the digital ecosystem as a whole. Additionally, we review the existent implementation approaches of XR in human-robot collaboration, showcasing diverse perspectives and methodologies. The challenges and future outlooks are discussed, delving into the major obstacles and potential research avenues of XR for more natural human-robot interaction and integration in the industrial landscape.

The paper presents a technique using reinforcement learning (RL) to adapt the control gains of a quadcopter controller. Specifically, we employed Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train a policy which adapts the gains of a cascaded feedback controller in-flight. The primary goal of this controller is to minimize tracking error while following a specified trajectory. The paper's key objective is to analyze the effectiveness of the adaptive gain policy and compare it to the performance of a static gain control algorithm, where the Integral Squared Error and Integral Time Squared Error are used as metrics. The results show that the adaptive gain scheme achieves over 40$\%$ decrease in tracking error as compared to the static gain controller.

Recent developments in foundation models, like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), trained on extensive data, facilitate flexible application across different tasks and modalities. Their impact spans various fields, including healthcare, education, and robotics. This paper provides an overview of the practical application of foundation models in real-world robotics, with a primary emphasis on the replacement of specific components within existing robot systems. The summary encompasses the perspective of input-output relationships in foundation models, as well as their role in perception, motion planning, and control within the field of robotics. This paper concludes with a discussion of future challenges and implications for practical robot applications.

Accurate real-time traffic state forecasting plays a pivotal role in traffic control research. In particular, the CIRCLES consortium project necessitates predictive techniques to mitigate the impact of data source delays. After the success of the MegaVanderTest experiment, this paper aims at overcoming the current system limitations and develop a more suited approach to improve the real-time traffic state estimation for the next iterations of the experiment. In this paper, we introduce the SA-LSTM, a deep forecasting method integrating Self-Attention (SA) on the spatial dimension with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) yielding state-of-the-art results in real-time mesoscale traffic forecasting. We extend this approach to multi-step forecasting with the n-step SA-LSTM, which outperforms traditional multi-step forecasting methods in the trade-off between short-term and long-term predictions, all while operating in real-time.

Autonomous robots exploring unknown environments face a significant challenge: navigating effectively without prior maps and with limited external feedback. This challenge intensifies in sparse reward environments, where traditional exploration techniques often fail. In this paper, we present TopoNav, a novel topological navigation framework that integrates active mapping, hierarchical reinforcement learning, and intrinsic motivation to enable efficient goal-oriented exploration and navigation in sparse-reward settings. TopoNav dynamically constructs a topological map of the environment, capturing key locations and pathways. A two-level hierarchical policy architecture, comprising a high-level graph traversal policy and low-level motion control policies, enables effective navigation and obstacle avoidance while maintaining focus on the overall goal. Additionally, TopoNav incorporates intrinsic motivation to guide exploration toward relevant regions and frontier nodes in the topological map, addressing the challenges of sparse extrinsic rewards. We evaluate TopoNav both in the simulated and real-world off-road environments using a Clearpath Jackal robot, across three challenging navigation scenarios: goal-reaching, feature-based navigation, and navigation in complex terrains. We observe an increase in exploration coverage by 7- 20%, in success rates by 9-19%, and reductions in navigation times by 15-36% across various scenarios, compared to state-of-the-art methods, Comment: Paper under review for IROS 2024

This paper introduces DogSurf - a newapproach of using quadruped robots to help visually impaired people navigate in real world. The presented method allows the quadruped robot to detect slippery surfaces, and to use audio and haptic feedback to inform the user when to stop. A state-of-the-art GRU-based neural network architecture with mean accuracy of 99.925% was proposed for the task of multiclass surface classification for quadruped robots. A dataset was collected on a Unitree Go1 Edu robot. The dataset and code have been posted to the public domain., Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at the HRI2024 conference