Nitin J. Sanket

Chahat Deep Singh, Riya Kumari, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

In the era of deep learning, data is the critical determining factor in the performance of neural network models. Generating large datasets suffers from various difficulties such as scalability, cost efficiency and photorealism. To avoid expensive and strenuous dataset collection and annotations, researchers have inclined towards computer-generated datasets. Although, a lack of photorealism and a limited amount of computer-aided data, has bounded the accuracy of network predictions. To this end, we present WorldGen -- an open source framework to autonomously generate countless structured and unstructured 3D photorealistic scenes such as city view, object collection, and object fragmentation along with its rich ground truth annotation data. WorldGen being a generative model gives the user full access and control to features such as texture, object structure, motion, camera and lens properties for better generalizability by diminishing the data bias in the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of WorldGen by presenting an evaluation on deep optical flow. We hope such a tool can open doors for future research in a myriad of domains related to robotics and computer vision by reducing manual labor and the cost of acquiring rich and high-quality data.

Chethan M. Parameshwara, Gokul Hari, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

Current deep neural network approaches for camera pose estimation rely on scene structure for 3D motion estimation, but this decreases the robustness and thereby makes cross-dataset generalization difficult. In contrast, classical approaches to structure from motion estimate 3D motion utilizing optical flow and then compute depth. Their accuracy, however, depends strongly on the quality of the optical flow. To avoid this issue, direct methods have been proposed, which separate 3D motion from depth estimation but compute 3D motion using only image gradients in the form of normal flow. In this paper, we introduce a network NFlowNet, for normal flow estimation which is used to enforce robust and direct constraints. In particular, normal flow is used to estimate relative camera pose based on the cheirality (depth positivity) constraint. We achieve this by formulating the optimization problem as a differentiable cheirality layer, which allows for end-to-end learning of camera pose. We perform extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the proposed DiffPoseNet's sensitivity to noise and its generalization across datasets. We compare our approach to existing state-of-the-art methods on KITTI, TartanAir, and TUM-RGBD datasets.

Xiaomin Lin, Nitin J. Sanket, Nare Karapetyan et al.

Oysters play a pivotal role in the bay living ecosystem and are considered the living filters for the ocean. In recent years, oyster reefs have undergone major devastation caused by commercial over-harvesting, requiring preservation to maintain ecological balance. The foundation of this preservation is to estimate the oyster density which requires accurate oyster detection. However, systems for accurate oyster detection require large datasets obtaining which is an expensive and labor-intensive task in underwater environments. To this end, we present a novel method to mathematically model oysters and render images of oysters in simulation to boost the detection performance with minimal real data. Utilizing our synthetic data along with real data for oyster detection, we obtain up to 35.1% boost in performance as compared to using only real data with our OysterNet network. We also improve the state-of-the-art by 12.7%. This shows that using underlying geometrical properties of objects can help to enhance recognition task accuracy on limited datasets successfully and we hope more researchers adopt such a strategy for hard-to-obtain datasets.

Levi Burner, Nitin J. Sanket, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

Distance estimation from vision is fundamental for a myriad of robotic applications such as navigation, manipulation, and planning. Inspired by the mammal's visual system, which gazes at specific objects, we develop two novel constraints relating time-to-contact, acceleration, and distance that we call the $τ$-constraint and $Φ$-constraint. They allow an active (moving) camera to estimate depth efficiently and accurately while using only a small portion of the image. The constraints are applicable to range sensing, sensor fusion, and visual servoing. We successfully validate the proposed constraints with two experiments. The first applies both constraints in a trajectory estimation task with a monocular camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Our methods achieve 30-70% less average trajectory error while running 25$\times$ and 6.2$\times$ faster than the popular Visual-Inertial Odometry methods VINS-Mono and ROVIO respectively. The second experiment demonstrates that when the constraints are used for feedback with efference copies the resulting closed loop system's eigenvalues are invariant to scaling of the applied control signal. We believe these results indicate the $τ$ and $Φ$ constraint's potential as the basis of robust and efficient algorithms for a multitude of robotic applications.

Yianni Karabatis, Xiaomin Lin, Nitin J. Sanket et al.

Modern robotics has enabled the advancement in yield estimation for precision agriculture. However, when applied to the olive industry, the high variation of olive colors and their similarity to the background leaf canopy presents a challenge. Labeling several thousands of very dense olive grove images for segmentation is a labor-intensive task. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting olives without the need to manually label data. In this work, we present the world's first olive detection dataset comprised of synthetic and real olive tree images. This is accomplished by generating an auto-labeled photorealistic 3D model of an olive tree. Its geometry is then simplified for lightweight rendering purposes. In addition, experiments are conducted with a mix of synthetically generated and real images, yielding an improvement of up to 66% compared to when only using a small sample of real data. When access to real, human-labeled data is limited, a combination of mostly synthetic data and a small amount of real data can enhance olive detection.

Manoj Velmurugan, Phillip Brush, Colin Balfour et al.

Tiny palm-sized aerial robots possess exceptional agility and cost-effectiveness in navigating confined and cluttered environments. However, their limited payload capacity directly constrains the sensing suite on-board the robot, thereby limiting critical navigational tasks in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied wild scenes. Common methods for obstacle avoidance use cameras and LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR), which become ineffective in visually degraded conditions such as low visibility, dust, fog or darkness. Other sensors, such as RAdio Detection And Ranging (RADAR), have high power consumption, making them unsuitable for tiny aerial robots. Inspired by bats, we propose Saranga, a low-power ultrasound-based perception stack that localizes obstacles using a dual sonar array. We present two key solutions to combat the low Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of $-4.9$ decibels: physical noise reduction and a deep learning based denoising method. Firstly, we present a practical way to block propeller induced ultrasound noise on the weak echoes. The second solution is to train a neural network to utilize the \textcolor{black}{long horizon of ultrasound echoes} for finding signal patterns under high amounts of uncorrelated noise where classical methods were insufficient. We generalize to the real world by using a synthetic data generation pipeline and limited real noise data for training. We enable a palm-sized aerial robot to navigate in visually degraded conditions of dense fog, darkness, and snow in a cluttered environment with thin and transparent obstacles using only on-board sensing and computation. We provide extensive real world results to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Kushagra Srivastava, Rutwik Kulkarni, Manoj Velmurugan et al.

Autonomous aerial robots are becoming commonplace in our lives. Hands-on aerial robotics courses are pivotal in training the next-generation workforce to meet the growing market demands. Such an efficient and compelling course depends on a reliable testbed. In this paper, we present VizFlyt, an open-source perception-centric Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL) photorealistic testing framework for aerial robotics courses. We utilize pose from an external localization system to hallucinate real-time and photorealistic visual sensors using 3D Gaussian Splatting. This enables stress-free testing of autonomy algorithms on aerial robots without the risk of crashing into obstacles. We achieve over 100Hz of system update rate. Lastly, we build upon our past experiences of offering hands-on aerial robotics courses and propose a new open-source and open-hardware curriculum based on VizFlyt for the future. We test our framework on various course projects in real-world HITL experiments and present the results showing the efficacy of such a system and its large potential use cases. Code, datasets, hardware guides and demo videos are available at https://pear.wpi.edu/research/vizflyt.html

Chethan M. Parameshwara, Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh et al.

Segmentation of moving objects in dynamic scenes is a key process in scene understanding for navigation tasks. Classical cameras suffer from motion blur in such scenarios rendering them effete. On the contrary, event cameras, because of their high temporal resolution and lack of motion blur, are tailor-made for this problem. We present an approach for monocular multi-motion segmentation, which combines bottom-up feature tracking and top-down motion compensation into a unified pipeline, which is the first of its kind to our knowledge. Using the events within a time-interval, our method segments the scene into multiple motions by splitting and merging. We further speed up our method by using the concept of motion propagation and cluster keyslices. The approach was successfully evaluated on both challenging real-world and synthetic scenarios from the EV-IMO, EED, and MOD datasets and outperformed the state-of-the-art detection rate by 12\%, achieving a new state-of-the-art average detection rate of 81.06%, 94.2% and 82.35% on the aforementioned datasets. To enable further research and systematic evaluation of multi-motion segmentation, we present and open-source a new dataset/benchmark called MOD++, which includes challenging sequences and extensive data stratification in-terms of camera and object motion, velocity magnitudes, direction, and rotational speeds.

Chahat Deep Singh, Nitin J. Sanket, Chethan M. Parameshwara et al.

Recent advances in object segmentation have demonstrated that deep neural networks excel at object segmentation for specific classes in color and depth images. However, their performance is dictated by the number of classes and objects used for training, thereby hindering generalization to never seen objects or zero-shot samples. To exacerbate the problem further, object segmentation using image frames rely on recognition and pattern matching cues. Instead, we utilize the 'active' nature of a robot and their ability to 'interact' with the environment to induce additional geometric constraints for segmenting zero-shot samples. In this paper, we present the first framework to segment unknown objects in a cluttered scene by repeatedly 'nudging' at the objects and moving them to obtain additional motion cues at every step using only a monochrome monocular camera. We call our framework NudgeSeg. These motion cues are used to refine the segmentation masks. We successfully test our approach to segment novel objects in various cluttered scenes and provide an extensive study with image and motion segmentation methods. We show an impressive average detection rate of over 86% on zero-shot objects.

Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, Chethan M. Parameshwara et al.

The rapid rise of accessibility of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones pose a threat to general security and confidentiality. Most of the commercially available or custom-built drones are multi-rotors and are comprised of multiple propellers. Since these propellers rotate at a high-speed, they are generally the fastest moving parts of an image and cannot be directly "seen" by a classical camera without severe motion blur. We utilize a class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios called event cameras, which have a high temporal resolution, low-latency, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we model the geometry of a propeller and use it to generate simulated events which are used to train a deep neural network called EVPropNet to detect propellers from the data of an event camera. EVPropNet directly transfers to the real world without any fine-tuning or retraining. We present two applications of our network: (a) tracking and following an unmarked drone and (b) landing on a near-hover drone. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with different propeller shapes and sizes. Our network can detect propellers at a rate of 85.1% even when 60% of the propeller is occluded and can run at upto 35Hz on a 2W power budget. To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based solution for detecting propellers (to detect drones). Finally, our applications also show an impressive success rate of 92% and 90% for the tracking and landing tasks respectively.

Chethan M. Parameshwara, Simin Li, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are the so-called third generation of neural networks which attempt to more closely match the functioning of the biological brain. They inherently encode temporal data, allowing for training with less energy usage and can be extremely energy efficient when coded on neuromorphic hardware. In addition, they are well suited for tasks involving event-based sensors, which match the event-based nature of the SNN. However, SNNs have not been as effectively applied to real-world, large-scale tasks as standard Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to the algorithmic and training complexity. To exacerbate the situation further, the input representation is unconventional and requires careful analysis and deep understanding. In this paper, we propose \textit{SpikeMS}, the first deep encoder-decoder SNN architecture for the real-world large-scale problem of motion segmentation using the event-based DVS camera as input. To accomplish this, we introduce a novel spatio-temporal loss formulation that includes both spike counts and classification labels in conjunction with the use of new techniques for SNN backpropagation. In addition, we show that \textit{SpikeMS} is capable of \textit{incremental predictions}, or predictions from smaller amounts of test data than it is trained on. This is invaluable for providing outputs even with partial input data for low-latency applications and those requiring fast predictions. We evaluated \textit{SpikeMS} on challenging synthetic and real-world sequences from EV-IMO, EED and MOD datasets and achieving results on a par with a comparable ANN method, but using potentially 50 times less power.

Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, Varun Asthana et al.

Morphable design and depth-based visual control are two upcoming trends leading to advancements in the field of quadrotor autonomy. Stereo-cameras have struck the perfect balance of weight and accuracy of depth estimation but suffer from the problem of depth range being limited and dictated by the baseline chosen at design time. In this paper, we present a framework for quadrotor navigation based on a stereo camera system whose baseline can be adapted on-the-fly. We present a method to calibrate the system at a small number of discrete baselines and interpolate the parameters for the entire baseline range. We present an extensive theoretical analysis of calibration and synchronization errors. We showcase three different applications of such a system for quadrotor navigation: (a) flying through a forest, (b) flying through an unknown shaped/location static/dynamic gap, and (c) accurate 3D pose detection of an independently moving object. We show that our variable baseline system is more accurate and robust in all three scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first work that applies the concept of morphable design to achieve a variable baseline stereo vision system on a quadrotor.

Kanishka Ganguly, Behzad Sadrfaridpour, Pavan Mantripragada et al.

Grasping and manipulating a wide variety of objects is a fundamental skill that would determine the success and wide spread adaptation of robots in homes. Several end-effector designs for robust manipulation have been proposed but they mostly work when provided with prior information about the objects or equipped with external sensors for estimating object shape or size. Such approaches are limited to many-shot or unknown objects and are prone to estimation errors from external estimation systems. We propose an approach to grasp and manipulate previously unseen or zero-shot objects: the objects without any prior of their shape, size, material and weight properties, using only feedback from tactile sensors which is contrary to the state-of-the-art. Such an approach provides robust manipulation of objects either when the object model is not known or when it is estimated incorrectly from an external system. Our approach is inspired by the ideology of how animals or humans manipulate objects, i.e., by using feedback from their skin. Our grasping and manipulation revolves around the simple notion that objects slip if not grasped stably. This slippage can be detected and counteracted for a robust grasp that is agnostic to the type, shape, size, material and weight of the object. At the crux of our approach is a novel tactile feedback based controller that detects and compensates for slip during grasp. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate our proposed approach on many real world experiments using the Shadow Dexterous Hand equipped with BioTac SP tactile sensors for different object shapes, sizes, weights and materials. We obtain an overall success rate of 73.5%

Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

Odometry on aerial robots has to be of low latency and high robustness whilst also respecting the Size, Weight, Area and Power (SWAP) constraints as demanded by the size of the robot. A combination of visual sensors coupled with Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) has proven to be the best combination to obtain robust and low latency odometry on resource-constrained aerial robots. Recently, deep learning approaches for Visual Inertial fusion have gained momentum due to their high accuracy and robustness. However, the remarkable advantages of these techniques are their inherent scalability (adaptation to different sized aerial robots) and unification (same method works on different sized aerial robots) by utilizing compression methods and hardware acceleration, which have been lacking from previous approaches. To this end, we present a deep learning approach for visual translation estimation and loosely fuse it with an Inertial sensor for full 6DoF odometry estimation. We also present a detailed benchmark comparing different architectures, loss functions and compression methods to enable scalability. We evaluate our network on the MSCOCO dataset and evaluate the VI fusion on multiple real-flight trajectories.

Nitin J. Sanket, Chethan M. Parameshwara, Chahat Deep Singh et al.

Dynamic obstacle avoidance on quadrotors requires low latency. A class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios are event cameras. In this paper, we present a deep learning -- based solution for dodging multiple dynamic obstacles on a quadrotor with a single event camera and on-board computation. Our approach uses a series of shallow neural networks for estimating both the ego-motion and the motion of independently moving objects. The networks are trained in simulation and directly transfer to the real world without any fine-tuning or retraining. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with obstacles of different shapes and sizes, achieving an overall success rate of 70% including objects of unknown shape and a low light testing scenario. To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning -- based solution to the problem of dynamic obstacle avoidance using event cameras on a quadrotor. Finally, we also extend our work to the pursuit task by merely reversing the control policy, proving that our navigation stack can cater to different scenarios.

Huai-Jen Liang, Nitin J. Sanket, Cornelia Fermüller et al.

Although cluttered indoor scenes have a lot of useful high-level semantic information which can be used for mapping and localization, most Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms rely on the usage of geometric features such as points, lines and planes. Lately, driven by this idea, the joint optimization of semantic labels and obtaining odometry has gained popularity in the robotics community. The joint optimization is good for accurate results but is generally very slow. At the same time, in the vision community, direct and sparse approaches for VO have stricken the right balance between speed and accuracy. We merge the successes of these two communities and present a way to incorporate semantic information in the form of visual saliency to Direct Sparse Odometry - a highly successful direct sparse VO algorithm. We also present a framework to filter the visual saliency based on scene parsing. Our framework, SalientDSO, relies on the widely successful deep learning based approaches for visual saliency and scene parsing which drives the feature selection for obtaining highly-accurate and robust VO even in the presence of as few as 40 point features per frame. We provide extensive quantitative evaluation of SalientDSO on the ICL-NUIM and TUM monoVO datasets and show that we outperform DSO and ORB-SLAM - two very popular state-of-the-art approaches in the literature. We also collect and publicly release a CVL-UMD dataset which contains two indoor cluttered sequences on which we show qualitative evaluations. To our knowledge this is the first paper to use visual saliency and scene parsing to drive the feature selection in direct VO.