Xiang Yu

Jishnu Jaykumar P, Cole Salvato, Vinaya Bomnale et al.

Robotic perception models often fail when deployed in real-world environments due to out-of-distribution conditions such as clutter, occlusion, and novel object instances. Existing approaches address this gap through offline data collection and retraining, which are slow and do not resolve deployment-time failures. We propose iTeach, a failure-driven interactive teaching framework for adapting robot perception in the wild. A co-located human observes model predictions during deployment, identifies failure cases, and performs short human-object interaction (HumanPlay) to expose informative object configurations while recording RGB-D sequences. To minimize annotation effort, iTeach employs a Few-Shot Semi- Supervised (FS3) labeling strategy, where only the final frame of a short interaction sequence is annotated using hands-free eye-gaze and voice commands, and labels are propagated across the video to produce dense supervision. The collected failure-driven samples are used for iterative fine-tuning, enabling progressive deployment-time adaptation of the perception model. We evaluate iTeach on unseen object instance segmentation (UOIS) starting from a pretrained MSMFormer model. Using a small number of failure-driven samples, our method significantly improves segmentation performance across diverse real-world scenes. These improvements directly translate to higher grasping and pick-and-place success on the SceneReplica benchmark and real robotic experiments. Our results demonstrate that failure-driven, co-located interactive teaching enables efficient in-the-wild adaptation of robot perception and improves downstream manipulation performance. Project page at https://irvlutd.github.io/iTeach

Sai Haneesh Allu, Itay Kadosh, Tyler Summers et al.

We present a modular robotic system for autonomous exploration and semantic updating of large-scale unknown environments. Our approach enables a mobile robot to build, revisit, and update a hybrid semantic map that integrates a 2D occupancy grid for geometry with a topological graph for object semantics. Unlike prior methods that rely on manual teleoperation or precollected datasets, our two-phase approach achieves end-to-end autonomy: first, a modified frontier-based exploration algorithm with dynamic search windows constructs a geometric map; second, using a greedy trajectory planner, environments are revisited, and object semantics are updated using open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation. This modular system, compatible with any metric SLAM framework, supports continuous operation by efficiently updating the semantic graph to reflect short-term and long-term changes such as object relocation, removal, or addition. We validate the approach on a Fetch robot in real-world indoor environments of approximately $8,500$m$^2$ and $117$m$^2$, demonstrating robust and scalable semantic mapping and continuous adaptation, marking a fully autonomous integration of exploration, mapping, and semantic updating on a physical robot.

Yu Xiang, Sai Haneesh Allu, Rohith Peddi et al.

We introduce a new trajectory optimization method for robotic grasping based on a point-cloud representation of robots and task spaces. In our method, robots are represented by 3D points on their link surfaces. The task space of a robot is represented by a point cloud that can be obtained from depth sensors. Using the point-cloud representation, goal reaching in grasping can be formulated as point matching, while collision avoidance can be efficiently achieved by querying the signed distance values of the robot points in the signed distance field of the scene points. Consequently, a constrained nonlinear optimization problem is formulated to solve the joint motion and grasp planning problem. The advantage of our method is that the point-cloud representation is general to be used with any robot in any environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by performing experiments on a tabletop scene and a shelf scene for grasping with a Fetch mobile manipulator and a Franka Panda arm. The project page is available at \url{https://irvlutd.github.io/GraspTrajOpt}