CVJul 16, 2024
MapDistill: Boosting Efficient Camera-based HD Map Construction via Camera-LiDAR Fusion Model DistillationXiaoshuai Hao, Ruikai Li, Hui Zhang et al.
Online high-definition (HD) map construction is an important and challenging task in autonomous driving. Recently, there has been a growing interest in cost-effective multi-view camera-based methods without relying on other sensors like LiDAR. However, these methods suffer from a lack of explicit depth information, necessitating the use of large models to achieve satisfactory performance. To address this, we employ the Knowledge Distillation (KD) idea for efficient HD map construction for the first time and introduce a novel KD-based approach called MapDistill to transfer knowledge from a high-performance camera-LiDAR fusion model to a lightweight camera-only model. Specifically, we adopt the teacher-student architecture, i.e., a camera-LiDAR fusion model as the teacher and a lightweight camera model as the student, and devise a dual BEV transform module to facilitate cross-modal knowledge distillation while maintaining cost-effective camera-only deployment. Additionally, we present a comprehensive distillation scheme encompassing cross-modal relation distillation, dual-level feature distillation, and map head distillation. This approach alleviates knowledge transfer challenges between modalities, enabling the student model to learn improved feature representations for HD map construction. Experimental results on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MapDistill, surpassing existing competitors by over 7.7 mAP or 4.5X speedup.
ROMar 11, 2025
TLA: Tactile-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich ManipulationPeng Hao, Chaofan Zhang, Dingzhe Li et al.
Significant progress has been made in vision-language models. However, language-conditioned robotic manipulation for contact-rich tasks remains underexplored, particularly in terms of tactile sensing. To address this gap, we introduce the Tactile-Language-Action (TLA) model, which effectively processes sequential tactile feedback via cross-modal language grounding to enable robust policy generation in contact-intensive scenarios. In addition, we construct a comprehensive dataset that contains 24k pairs of tactile action instruction data, customized for fingertip peg-in-hole assembly, providing essential resources for TLA training and evaluation. Our results show that TLA significantly outperforms traditional imitation learning methods (e.g., diffusion policy) in terms of effective action generation and action accuracy, while demonstrating strong generalization capabilities by achieving over 85\% success rate on previously unseen assembly clearances and peg shapes. We publicly release all data and code in the hope of advancing research in language-conditioned tactile manipulation skill learning. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/tactile-language-action/
CVJul 2, 2025
What Really Matters for Robust Multi-Sensor HD Map Construction?Xiaoshuai Hao, Yuting Zhao, Yuheng Ji et al.
High-definition (HD) map construction methods are crucial for providing precise and comprehensive static environmental information, which is essential for autonomous driving systems. While Camera-LiDAR fusion techniques have shown promising results by integrating data from both modalities, existing approaches primarily focus on improving model accuracy and often neglect the robustness of perception models, which is a critical aspect for real-world applications. In this paper, we explore strategies to enhance the robustness of multi-modal fusion methods for HD map construction while maintaining high accuracy. We propose three key components: data augmentation, a novel multi-modal fusion module, and a modality dropout training strategy. These components are evaluated on a challenging dataset containing 10 days of NuScenes data. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly enhance the robustness of baseline methods. Furthermore, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the clean validation set of the NuScenes dataset. Our findings provide valuable insights for developing more robust and reliable HD map construction models, advancing their applicability in real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Project website: https://robomap-123.github.io.
ROMay 9, 2024
ASGrasp: Generalizable Transparent Object Reconstruction and 6-DoF Grasp Detection from RGB-D Active Stereo CameraJun Shi, Yong A, Yixiang Jin et al.
In this paper, we tackle the problem of grasping transparent and specular objects. This issue holds importance, yet it remains unsolved within the field of robotics due to failure of recover their accurate geometry by depth cameras. For the first time, we propose ASGrasp, a 6-DoF grasp detection network that uses an RGB-D active stereo camera. ASGrasp utilizes a two-layer learning-based stereo network for the purpose of transparent object reconstruction, enabling material-agnostic object grasping in cluttered environments. In contrast to existing RGB-D based grasp detection methods, which heavily depend on depth restoration networks and the quality of depth maps generated by depth cameras, our system distinguishes itself by its ability to directly utilize raw IR and RGB images for transparent object geometry reconstruction. We create an extensive synthetic dataset through domain randomization, which is based on GraspNet-1Billion. Our experiments demonstrate that ASGrasp can achieve over 90% success rate for generalizable transparent object grasping in both simulation and the real via seamless sim-to-real transfer. Our method significantly outperforms SOTA networks and even surpasses the performance upper bound set by perfect visible point cloud inputs.Project page: https://pku-epic.github.io/ASGrasp