Sven Behnke

Jonas Bode, Raphael Memmesheimer, Sven Behnke

Acting in human environments is a crucial capability for general-purpose robots, necessitating a robust understanding of natural language and its application to physical tasks. This paper seeks to harness the capabilities of diffusion models within a visuomotor policy framework that merges visual and textual inputs to generate precise robotic trajectories. By employing reference demonstrations during training, the model learns to execute manipulation tasks specified through textual commands within the robot's immediate environment. The proposed research aims to extend an existing model by leveraging improved embeddings, and adapting techniques from diffusion models for image generation. We evaluate our methods on the CALVIN dataset, proving enhanced performance on various manipulation tasks and an increased long-horizon success rate when multiple tasks are executed in sequence. Our approach reinforces the usefulness of diffusion models and contributes towards general multitask manipulation.

Moritz Heep, Sven Behnke, Eduard Zell

Normal integration reconstructs 3D surfaces from normal maps obtained e.g. by photometric stereo. These normal maps capture surface details down to the pixel level but require large computational resources for integration at high resolutions. In this work, we replace the dense pixel grid with a sparse anisotropic triangle mesh prior to normal integration. We adapt the triangle mesh to the local geometry in the case of complex surface structures and remove oversampling from flat featureless regions. For high-resolution images, the resulting compression reduces normal integration runtimes from hours to minutes while maintaining high surface accuracy. Our main contribution is the derivation of the well-known quadric error measure from mesh decimation for screen space applications and its combination with optimal Delaunay triangulation.

Evgenii Kruzhkov, Sven Behnke

One of the current trends in robotics is to employ large language models (LLMs) to provide non-predefined command execution and natural human-robot interaction. It is useful to have an environment map together with its language representation, which can be further utilized by LLMs. Such a comprehensive scene representation enables numerous ways of interaction with the map for autonomously operating robots. In this work, we present an approach that enhances incremental implicit mapping through the integration of vision-language features. Specifically, we (i) propose a decoder optimization technique for implicit language maps which can be used when new objects appear on the scene, and (ii) address the problem of inconsistent vision-language predictions between different viewing positions. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LiLMaps and solid improvements in performance.