Mani Amani

Zhirui Dai, Tianxing Fan, Mani Amani et al.

Accurate and efficient environment representation is crucial for robotic applications such as motion planning, manipulation, and navigation. Signed distance functions (SDFs) have emerged as a powerful representation for encoding distance to obstacle boundaries, enabling efficient collision-checking and trajectory optimization techniques. However, existing SDF reconstruction methods have limitations when it comes to large-scale uncertainty-aware SDF estimation from streaming sensor data. Voxel-based approaches are limited by fixed resolution and lack uncertainty quantification, neural network methods require significant training time, while Gaussian process (GP) methods struggle with scalability, sign estimation, and uncertainty calibration. In this letter, we develop an open-source library, Kernel-SDF, which uses kernel regression to learn SDF with calibrated uncertainty quantification in real-time. Our approach consists of a front-end that learns a continuous occupancy field via kernel regression, and a back-end that estimates accurate SDF via GP regression using samples from the front-end surface boundaries. Kernel-SDF provides accurate SDF, SDF gradient, SDF uncertainty, and mesh construction in real-time. Evaluation results show that Kernel-SDF achieves superior accuracy compared to existing methods, while maintaining real-time performance, making it suitable for various robotics applications requiring reliable uncertainty-aware geometric information.

Riley Tavassoli, Mani Amani, Reza Akhavian

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown powerful capabilities in visual question answering and reasoning tasks by combining visual representations with the abstract skill set large language models (LLMs) learn during pretraining. Vision, while the most popular modality to augment LLMs with, is only one representation of a scene. In human-robot interaction scenarios, robot perception requires accurate scene understanding by the robot. In this paper, we define and demonstrate a method of aligning the embedding spaces of different modalities (in this case, inertial measurement unit (IMU) data) to the vision embedding space through a combination of supervised and contrastive training, enabling the VLM to understand and reason about these additional modalities without retraining. We opt to give the model IMU embeddings directly over using a separate human activity recognition model that feeds directly into the prompt to allow for any nonlinear interactions between the query, image, and IMU signal that would be lost by mapping the IMU data to a discrete activity label. Further, we demonstrate our methodology's efficacy through experiments involving human activity recognition using IMU data and visual inputs. Our results show that using multiple modalities as input improves the VLM's scene understanding and enhances its overall performance in various tasks, thus paving the way for more versatile and capable language models in multi-modal contexts.