59.7ROMay 18
TacSE3: Equivariant SE(3) Motion Estimation from Low-Texture Visuotactile Images for In-Gripper Tracking and CompensationZhongyuan Liao, Junzhe Wang, Qingyang Liu et al.
Robotic in-hand manipulation requires reliable object-motion tracking under frequent visual occlusion, yet low-texture visuotactile images provide few stable correspondences for conventional image- or geometry-matching methods. This paper presents TacSE3, a tactile motion-estimation pipeline that converts low-texture visuotactile observations into a decoupled three-dimensional force field and estimates incremental rigid-body motion on SE(3). The method derives planar translation from contact-centroid motion and estimates rotation primarily from shear-related tactile responses, yielding a physically interpretable signal for in-gripper tracking and compensation. Experiments with paired DM-Tac fingertip sensors show that dual-sensor sensing reduces translation-rotation ambiguity, supports rotation tracking across axes and object geometries, and provides a lightweight compensation signal that improves disturbance tolerance in downstream manipulation tasks without retraining the base policy.
29.9ROMar 10
Provably Safe Trajectory Generation for Manipulators Under Motion and Environmental UncertaintiesFei Meng, Zijiang Yang, Xinyu Mao et al.
Robot manipulators operating in uncertain and non-convex environments present significant challenges for safe and optimal motion planning. Existing methods often struggle to provide efficient and formally certified collision risk guarantees, particularly when dealing with complex geometries and non-Gaussian uncertainties. This article proposes a novel risk-bounded motion planning framework to address this unmet need. Our approach integrates a rigid manipulator deep stochastic Koopman operator (RM-DeSKO) model to robustly predict the robot's state distribution under motion uncertainty. We then introduce an efficient, hierarchical verification method that combines parallelizable physics simulations with sum-of-squares (SOS) programming as a filter for fine-grained, formal certification of collision risk. This method is embedded within a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller that uniquely utilizes binary collision information from SOS decomposition to improve its policy. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on two typical robot manipulators through extensive simulations and real-world experiments, including a challenging human-robot collaboration scenario, demonstrating sim-to-real transfer of the learned model and its ability to generate safe and efficient trajectories in complex, uncertain settings.
CVJun 18, 2025
NTIRE 2025 Image Shadow Removal Challenge ReportFlorin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Tim Seizinger, Zhuyun Zhou et al.
This work examines the findings of the NTIRE 2025 Shadow Removal Challenge. A total of 306 participants have registered, with 17 teams successfully submitting their solutions during the final evaluation phase. Following the last two editions, this challenge had two evaluation tracks: one focusing on reconstruction fidelity and the other on visual perception through a user study. Both tracks were evaluated with images from the WSRD+ dataset, simulating interactions between self- and cast-shadows with a large number of diverse objects, textures, and materials.
ROAug 26, 2025
OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying SystemMingze Liu, Sai Fan, Haozhen Li et al.
Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackle complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on flat rebar setting with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary detection. We implements the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantees a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our propose post-processing procedure based a image to point cloud generation framework. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and the experiments on the real-world rebar setting verifies that the effectiveness of the system in practice.
CVJun 22, 2025
Bird's-eye view safety monitoring for the construction top under the tower craneYanke Wang, Yu Hin Ng, Haobo Liang et al.
The tower crane is involving more automated and intelligent operation procedure, and importantly, the application of automation technologies to the safety issues is imperative ahead of the utilization of any other advances. Among diverse risk management tasks on site, it is essential to protect the human workers on the workspace between the tower crane and constructed building top area (construction top) from the bird's-eye view, especially with Modular Integrated Construction (MiC) lifted. Also, the camera and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) can capture abundant 3D information on site, which is however yet made the best use. Considering the safety protection for humans and tower cranes, we present an AI-based fully automated safety monitoring system for tower crane lifting from the bird's-eye view, surveilling to shield the human workers on the construction top and avoid cranes' collision by alarming the crane operator. The system achieved a 3D data fusion for localization of humans and MiCs by integrating the captured information from camera and LiDAR. The state-of-the-art methods were explored and implemented into our proposed software pipeline coupled with the hardware and display systems. Furthermore, we conducted an analysis of the components in the pipeline to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the involved methods. The display and visualization on the real site proved that our system can serve as a valuable safety monitoring toolkit on site.