Yingbai Hu

Jingjia Teng, Yang Li, Yougang Bian et al.

Four-wheel Independent Steering (4WIS) vehicles have attracted increasing attention for their superior maneuverability. Human drivers typically choose to cross or drive over the low-profile obstacles (e.g., plastic bags) to efficiently navigate through narrow spaces, while existing planners neglect obstacle attributes, leading to suboptimal efficiency or planning failures. To address this issue, we propose a novel multimodal trajectory planning framework that employs a neural network for scene perception, combines 4WIS hybrid A* search to generate a warm start, and utilizes an optimal control problem (OCP) for trajectory optimization. Specifically, a multimodal perception network fusing visual information and vehicle states is employed to capture semantic and contextual scene understanding, enabling the planner to adapt the strategy according to scene complexity (hard or easy task). For hard tasks, guided points are introduced to decompose complex tasks into local subtasks, improving the search efficiency. The multiple steering modes of 4WIS vehicles, Ackermann, diagonal, and zero-turn, are also incorporated as kinematically feasible motion primitives. Moreover, a hierarchical obstacle handling strategy, which categorizes obstacles as "non-traversable", "crossable", and "drive-over", is incorporated into the node expansion process, explicitly linking obstacle attributes to planning actions to enable efficient decisions. Furthermore, to address dynamic obstacles with motion uncertainty, we introduce a probabilistic risk field model, constructing risk-aware driving corridors that serve as linear collision constraints in OCP. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed framework's effectiveness in generating safe, efficient, and smooth trajectories for 4WIS vehicles, especially in constrained environments.

Maximilian Link, Yingjie Xu, Yingbai Hu et al.

We present MC-Risk, a planner-aligned, multi-component risk field on a bird's-eye-view grid that yields early, calibrated, and class-aware risk localization. MC-Risk linearly composes three interpretable modules: (i) a motorized-agent field that fuses a black-box multimodal trajectory predictor with an analytic Gaussian-torus construction whose lateral width grows with speed/curvature and whose height attenuates with look-ahead; (ii) a VRU risk field that replaces isotropic pedestrian blobs with a forward-biased anisotropic kernel aligned to heading and speed; and (iii) a road penalty field that exploits full HD-map topology, imposing an off-road penalty and lane-aware risk exposure for same/opposite directions. We conduct, to our knowledge, the first standardized quantitative evaluation of a risk-field formulation on RiskBench's collision subset. MC-Risk attains the best overall risk localization and the earliest hazard indication. Finally, we demonstrate a plug-and-play planning interface by using the field as an MPC cost density, enabling risk-aware trajectory generation without additional training.

Shunlei Li, Longsen Gao, Jin Wang et al.

Teaching robots dexterous skills from human videos remains challenging due to the reliance on low-level trajectory imitation, which fails to generalize across object types, spatial layouts, and manipulator configurations. We propose Graph-Fused Vision-Language-Action (GF-VLA), a framework that enables dual-arm robotic systems to perform task-level reasoning and execution directly from RGB and Depth human demonstrations. GF-VLA first extracts Shannon-information-based cues to identify hands and objects with the highest task relevance, then encodes these cues into temporally ordered scene graphs that capture both hand-object and object-object interactions. These graphs are fused with a language-conditioned transformer that generates hierarchical behavior trees and interpretable Cartesian motion commands. To improve execution efficiency in bimanual settings, we further introduce a cross-hand selection policy that infers optimal gripper assignment without explicit geometric reasoning. We evaluate GF-VLA on four structured dual-arm block assembly tasks involving symbolic shape construction and spatial generalization. Experimental results show that the information-theoretic scene representation achieves over 95 percent graph accuracy and 93 percent subtask segmentation, supporting the LLM planner in generating reliable and human-readable task policies. When executed by the dual-arm robot, these policies yield 94 percent grasp success, 89 percent placement accuracy, and 90 percent overall task success across stacking, letter-building, and geometric reconfiguration scenarios, demonstrating strong generalization and robustness across diverse spatial and semantic variations.

Yingbai Hu, Jian Li, Yongquan Chen et al.

The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID-19 OP-swab sampling. This robot is composed of a visual system, UR5 robot arm, micro-pneumatic actuator and force-sensing system. The robot is expected to reduce risk and free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work. Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way. In addition, a varying-parameter zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOF redundant manipulator. The developed robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and volunteers.

Bin Li, Hu Cao, Zhongnan Qu et al.

Robotic grasping plays an important role in the field of robotics. The current state-of-the-art robotic grasping detection systems are usually built on the conventional vision, such as RGB-D camera. Compared to traditional frame-based computer vision, neuromorphic vision is a small and young community of research. Currently, there are limited event-based datasets due to the troublesome annotation of the asynchronous event stream. Annotating large scale vision dataset often takes lots of computation resources, especially the troublesome data for video-level annotation. In this work, we consider the problem of detecting robotic grasps in a moving camera view of a scene containing objects. To obtain more agile robotic perception, a neuromorphic vision sensor (DAVIS) attaching to the robot gripper is introduced to explore the potential usage in grasping detection. We construct a robotic grasping dataset named Event-Stream Dataset with 91 objects. A spatio-temporal mixed particle filter (SMP Filter) is proposed to track the led-based grasp rectangles which enables video-level annotation of a single grasp rectangle per object. As leds blink at high frequency, the Event-Stream dataset is annotated in a high frequency of 1 kHz. Based on the Event-Stream dataset, we develop a deep neural network for grasping detection which consider the angle learning problem as classification instead of regression. The method performs high detection accuracy on our Event-Stream dataset with 93% precision at object-wise level. This work provides a large-scale and well-annotated dataset, and promotes the neuromorphic vision applications in agile robot.