Charith Munasinghe

Hanyi Zhang, Khang Nguyen, Charith Munasinghe et al.

Robust robotic grasping remains a fundamental challenge for complex real-world applications. Recent advances in large-scale models demonstrate promising capabilities for reasoning in robotic tasks. However, existing benchmarks for grasping primarily focus on isolated, visual-based grasp pose detection, failing to capture the complexity of grasping tasks that require multi-step reasoning and semantic understanding during execution. To address this gap, we propose GCA-Bench, a benchmark featuring challenging \textit{grasping with complex action} scenarios that involve both scene-level reasoning and semantic constraints. GCA-Bench enables the evaluation of recent large foundation models under the same settings. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our new benchmark, we implement a diverse set of baselines, ranging from traditional grasp detection pipelines to end-to-end learning methods. Empirical studies achieve success rates below 70\% on complex grasping scenarios, underscoring critical limitations. In addition, we propose new evaluation metrics, analyze critical failure models, and provide insights to guide the development of more robust and generalizable grasping strategies.

Charith Munasinghe, Fatemeh Mohammadi Amin, Davide Scaramuzza et al.

Safe human-robot collaboration (HRC) has recently gained a lot of interest with the emerging Industry 5.0 paradigm. Conventional robots are being replaced with more intelligent and flexible collaborative robots (cobots). Safe and efficient collaboration between cobots and humans largely relies on the cobot's comprehensive semantic understanding of the dynamic surrounding of industrial environments. Despite the importance of semantic understanding for such applications, 3D semantic segmentation of collaborative robot workspaces lacks sufficient research and dedicated datasets. The performance limitation caused by insufficient datasets is called 'data hunger' problem. To overcome this current limitation, this work develops a new dataset specifically designed for this use case, named "COVERED", which includes point-wise annotated point clouds of a robotic cell. Lastly, we also provide a benchmark of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithm performance on the dataset and demonstrate a real-time semantic segmentation of a collaborative robot workspace using a multi-LiDAR system. The promising results from using the trained Deep Networks on a real-time dynamically changing situation shows that we are on the right track. Our perception pipeline achieves 20Hz throughput with a prediction point accuracy of $>$96\% and $>$92\% mean intersection over union (mIOU) while maintaining an 8Hz throughput.