Daiju Kanaoka

Yuga Yano, Daiju Kanaoka, Hakaru Tamukoh et al.

We propose Scene-specific Ambiguity-aware 3D Language Fields (SaaF), a novel Gaussian Splatting-based 3D language field designed for interactive object retrieval in a given real-world scene. Interactive object retrieval using natural language is a crucial capability for service robots operating in complex real-world environments. While recent 3D language field methods for object retrieval establish associations between rendered pixels and autoencoder-compressed CLIP features, they suffer from two limitations: (1) reduced discriminability among similar objects due to feature compression, and (2) poor handling of ambiguous queries, often resulting in unstable or incorrect retrieval. To address these limitations, SaaF introduces a metric learning strategy to construct a unified feature space that is both instance-discriminative and ambiguity-aware. (i) To enhance instance-level visual discrimination, SaaF employs metric learning that pulls image features from multiple viewpoints of the same object closer together in the feature space. (ii) To establish ambiguity awareness, the model jointly trains on multiple text labels generated by the proposed method from each tracked object image sequence, including ambiguous descriptions, to learn the semantic relationships between ambiguous and specific features in a target scene. This feature space enables fine-grained visual understanding while allowing the system to estimate query ambiguity and interactively request clarification when needed. Experimental results demonstrate that SaaF not only improves retrieval accuracy over previous methods but also robustly detects and handles ambiguity in the user text queries under open-vocabulary settings.

Daiju Kanaoka, Motoharu Sonogashira, Hakaru Tamukoh et al.

Novel view synthesis has recently made significant progress with the advent of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). DietNeRF is an extension of NeRF that aims to achieve this task from only a few images by introducing a new loss function for unknown viewpoints with no input images. The loss function assumes that a pre-trained feature extractor should output the same feature even if input images are captured at different viewpoints since the images contain the same object. However, while that assumption is ideal, in reality, it is known that as viewpoints continuously change, also feature vectors continuously change. Thus, the assumption can harm training. To avoid this harmful training, we propose ManifoldNeRF, a method for supervising feature vectors at unknown viewpoints using interpolated features from neighboring known viewpoints. Since the method provides appropriate supervision for each unknown viewpoint by the interpolated features, the volume representation is learned better than DietNeRF. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than others in a complex scene. We also experimented with several subsets of viewpoints from a set of viewpoints and identified an effective set of viewpoints for real environments. This provided a basic policy of viewpoint patterns for real-world application. The code is available at https://github.com/haganelego/ManifoldNeRF_BMVC2023

Yuga Yano, Akinobu Mizutani, Yukiya Fukuda et al.

To facilitate human--robot interaction (HRI) tasks in real-world scenarios, service robots must adapt to dynamic environments and understand the required tasks while effectively communicating with humans. To accomplish HRI in practice, we propose a novel indoor dynamic map, task understanding system, and response generation system. The indoor dynamic map optimizes robot behavior by managing an occupancy grid map and dynamic information, such as furniture and humans, in separate layers. The task understanding system targets tasks that require multiple actions, such as serving ordered items. Task representations that predefine the flow of necessary actions are applied to achieve highly accurate understanding. The response generation system is executed in parallel with task understanding to facilitate smooth HRI by informing humans of the subsequent actions of the robot. In this study, we focused on waiter duties in a restaurant setting as a representative application of HRI in a dynamic environment. We developed an HRI system that could perform tasks such as serving food and cleaning up while communicating with customers. In experiments conducted in a simulated restaurant environment, the proposed HRI system successfully communicated with customers and served ordered food with 90\% accuracy. In a questionnaire administered after the experiment, the HRI system of the robot received 4.2 points out of 5. These outcomes indicated the effectiveness of the proposed method and HRI system in executing waiter tasks in real-world environments.

Tomohiro Ono, Yuichiro Tanaka, Yutaro Ishida et al.

Our team, Hibikino-Musashi@Home (HMA), was founded in 2010. It is based in Japan in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park. Since 2010, we have annually participated in the RoboCup@Home Japan Open competition in the open platform league (OPL). We participated as an open platform league team in the 2017 Nagoya RoboCup competition and as a domestic standard platform league (DSPL) team in the 2017 Nagoya, 2018 Montreal, and 2019 Sydney RoboCup competitions. We also participated in the World Robot Challenge (WRC) 2018 in the service-robotics category of the partner-robot challenge (real space) and won first place. Currently, we have 20 members from eight different laboratories within the Kyushu Institute of Technology. In this paper, we introduce the activities that have been performed by our team and the technologies that we use.