Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

RO
h-index43
24papers
300citations
Novelty47%
AI Score53

24 Papers

SYNov 29, 2018
Constrained Control of Depth of Hypnosis During Induction Phase

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Guy A. Dumont, Emanuele Garone

This paper proposes a constrained control scheme for the control of the depth of hypnosis during induction phase in clinical anesthesia. In contrast with existing control schemes for propofol delivery, the proposed scheme guarantees overdosing prevention while ensuring good performance. The core idea is to reformulate overdosing prevention as a constraint, and then use the recently introduced Explicit Reference Governor to enforce the constraint satisfaction at all times. The proposed scheme is evaluated in comparison with a robust PID controller on a simulated surgical procedure for 44 patients whose Pharmacokinetic-Pharmacodynamic models have been identified using clinical data. The results demonstrate that the proposed constrained control scheme can deliver propofol to yield good induction phase response while preventing overdosing in patients; whereas other existing schemes might cause overdosing in some patients. Simulations show that mean rise time, mean settling time, and mean overshoot of less than 5 [min], 8 [min], and 10%, respectively, are achieved, which meet typical anesthesiologists' response specifications.

DBSep 17, 2022
Performance Evaluation of Query Plan Recommendation with Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark

Elham Azhir, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Faheem Khan et al.

Access plan recommendation is a query optimization approach that executes new queries using prior created query execution plans (QEPs). The query optimizer divides the query space into clusters in the mentioned method. However, traditional clustering algorithms take a significant amount of execution time for clustering such large datasets. The MapReduce distributed computing model provides efficient solutions for storing and processing vast quantities of data. Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop frameworks are used in the present investigation to cluster different sizes of query datasets in the MapReduce-based access plan recommendation method. The performance evaluation is performed based on execution time. The results of the experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of parallel query clustering in achieving high scalability. Furthermore, Apache Spark achieved better performance than Apache Hadoop, reaching an average speedup of 2x.

LGApr 6, 2022
Stochastic Multi-armed Bandits with Non-stationary Rewards Generated by a Linear Dynamical System

Jonathan Gornet, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Bruno Sinopoli

The stochastic multi-armed bandit has provided a framework for studying decision-making in unknown environments. We propose a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are sampled from a stochastic linear dynamical system. The proposed strategy for this stochastic multi-armed bandit variant is to learn a model of the dynamical system while choosing the optimal action based on the learned model. Motivated by mathematical finance areas such as Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model proposed by Merton and Stochastic Portfolio Theory proposed by Fernholz that both model asset returns with stochastic differential equations, this strategy is applied to quantitative finance as a high-frequency trading strategy, where the goal is to maximize returns within a time period.

46.4NIApr 16
A Q-learning-based QoS-aware multipath routing protocol in IoMT-based wireless body area network

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Amin Beheshti et al.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enables intelligent healthcare services but faces challenges such as dynamic topology, energy constraints, and diverse QoS requirements. This paper proposes QQMR, a Q-learning-based QoS-aware multipath routing method for WBANs. QQMR classifies data into three priority levels and employs adaptive multi-level queuing and fuzzy C-means clustering to optimize routing decisions. It maintains separate learning policies for each data type and selects primary and backup paths accordingly. Experimental results demonstrate improved packet delivery ratio and significant reductions in delay, routing overhead, and energy consumption compared to existing methods.

88.7GNApr 7
Transcriptomic Models for Immunotherapy Response Prediction Show Limited Cross-cohort Generalisability

Yuheng Liang, Lucy Chuo, Ahmadreza Argha et al.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer therapy; yet substantial proportion of patients exhibit intrinsic or acquired resistance, making accurate pre-treatment response prediction a critical unmet need. Transcriptomics-based biomarkers derived from bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) offer a promising avenue for capturing tumour-immune interactions, yet the cross-cohort generalisability of existing prediction models remains unclear.We systematically benchmark nine state-of-the-art transcriptomic ICI response predictors, five bulk RNA-seq-based models (COMPASS, IRNet, NetBio, IKCScore, and TNBC-ICI) and four scRNA-seq-based models (PRECISE, DeepGeneX, Tres and scCURE), using publicly available independent datasets unseen during model development. Overall, predictive performance was modest: bulk RNA-seq models performed at or near chance level across most cohorts, while scRNA-seq models showed only marginal improvements. Pathway-level analyses revealed sparse and inconsistent biomarker signals across models. Although scRNA-seq-based predictors converged on immune-related programs such as allograft rejection, bulk RNA-seq-based models exhibited little reproducible overlap. PRECISE and NetBio identified the most coherent immune-related themes, whereas IRNet predominantly captured metabolic pathways weakly aligned with ICI biology. Together, these findings demonstrate the limited cross-cohort robustness and biological consistency of current transcriptomic ICI prediction models, underscoring the need for improved domain adaptation, standardised preprocessing, and biologically grounded model design.

75.4ROApr 8
A Physical Agentic Loop for Language-Guided Grasping with Execution-State Monitoring

Wenze Wang, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Feras Dayoub

Robotic manipulation systems that follow language instructions often execute grasp primitives in a largely single-shot manner: a model proposes an action, the robot executes it, and failures such as empty grasps, slips, stalls, timeouts, or semantically wrong grasps are not surfaced to the decision layer in a structured way. Inspired by agentic loops in digital tool-using agents, we reformulate language-guided grasping as a bounded embodied agent operating over grounded execution states, where physical actions expose an explicit tool-state stream. We introduce a physical agentic loop that wraps an unmodified learned manipulation primitive (grasp-and-lift) with (i) an event-based interface and (ii) an execution monitoring layer, Watchdog, which converts noisy gripper telemetry into discrete outcome labels using contact-aware fusion and temporal stabilization. These outcome events, optionally combined with post-grasp semantic verification, are consumed by a deterministic bounded policy that finalizes, retries, or escalates to the user for clarification, guaranteeing finite termination. We validate the resulting loop on a mobile manipulator with an eye-in-hand D405 camera, keeping the underlying grasp model unchanged and evaluating representative scenarios involving visual ambiguity, distractors, and induced execution failures. Results show that explicit execution-state monitoring and bounded recovery enable more robust and interpretable behavior than open-loop execution, while adding minimal architectural overhead. For the source code and demo refer to our project page: https://wenzewwz123.github.io/Agentic-Loop/

CVSep 17, 2024
Uncertainty-Guided Self-Questioning and Answering for Video-Language Alignment

Jin Chen, Kaijing Ma, Haojian Huang et al.

The development of multi-modal models has been rapidly advancing, with some demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, annotating video-text pairs remains expensive and insufficient. Take video question answering (VideoQA) tasks as an example, human annotated questions and answers often cover only part of the video, since the corresponding text is often short and monotonous, leading to underutilization of video. To address this, we propose a Bootstrapping Video-Language Alignment framework (BoViLA), a self-training method that augments question samples during training process through LLM-based self-questioning and answering, which help model exploit video information and the internal knowledge of LLMs more thoroughly to improve modality alignment. However, low-quality self-generated questions may instead contaminate the performance, especially in the early stages of training, as we have observed in our experiments. To filter bad self-generated questions, we introduce Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) to estimate uncertainty and assess the quality of self-generated questions by evaluating the modality alignment within the context. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to explore LLM-based self-training frameworks for modality alignment. We evaluate BoViLA on five strong VideoQA benchmarks, where it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate its effectiveness and generality. Additionally, we provide extensive analyses of the self-training framework and the EDL-based uncertainty filtering mechanism. The code will be made available.

ROSep 10, 2025Code
TANGO: Traversability-Aware Navigation with Local Metric Control for Topological Goals

Stefan Podgorski, Sourav Garg, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh et al.

Visual navigation in robotics traditionally relies on globally-consistent 3D maps or learned controllers, which can be computationally expensive and difficult to generalize across diverse environments. In this work, we present a novel RGB-only, object-level topometric navigation pipeline that enables zero-shot, long-horizon robot navigation without requiring 3D maps or pre-trained controllers. Our approach integrates global topological path planning with local metric trajectory control, allowing the robot to navigate towards object-level sub-goals while avoiding obstacles. We address key limitations of previous methods by continuously predicting local trajectory using monocular depth and traversability estimation, and incorporating an auto-switching mechanism that falls back to a baseline controller when necessary. The system operates using foundational models, ensuring open-set applicability without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both simulated environments and real-world tests, highlighting its robustness and deployability. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a more adaptable and effective solution for visual navigation in open-set environments. The source code is made publicly available: https://github.com/podgorki/TANGO.

27.2LGApr 9
PriPG-RL: Privileged Planner-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Partially Observable Systems with Anytime-Feasible MPC

Mohsen Amiri, Mohsen Amiri, Ali Beikmohammadi et al.

This paper addresses the problem of training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy under partial observability by exploiting a privileged, anytime-feasible planner agent available exclusively during training. We formalize this as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) in which a planner agent with access to an approximate dynamical model and privileged state information guides a learning agent that observes only a lossy projection of the true state. To realize this framework, we introduce an anytime-feasible Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm that serves as the planner agent. For the learning agent, we propose Planner-to-Policy Soft Actor-Critic (P2P-SAC), a method that distills the planner agent's privileged knowledge to mitigate partial observability and thereby improve both sample efficiency and final policy performance. We support this framework with rigorous theoretical analysis. Finally, we validate our approach in simulation using NVIDIA Isaac Lab and successfully deploy it on a real-world Unitree Go2 quadruped navigating complex, obstacle-rich environments.

IVMay 6, 2020Code
CovidCTNet: An Open-Source Deep Learning Approach to Identify Covid-19 Using CT Image

Tahereh Javaheri, Morteza Homayounfar, Zohreh Amoozgar et al.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is highly contagious with limited treatment options. Early and accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 is crucial in reducing the spread of the disease and its accompanied mortality. Currently, detection by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the gold standard of outpatient and inpatient detection of Covid-19. RT-PCR is a rapid method, however, its accuracy in detection is only ~70-75%. Another approved strategy is computed tomography (CT) imaging. CT imaging has a much higher sensitivity of ~80-98%, but similar accuracy of 70%. To enhance the accuracy of CT imaging detection, we developed an open-source set of algorithms called CovidCTNet that successfully differentiates Covid-19 from community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and other lung diseases. CovidCTNet increases the accuracy of CT imaging detection to 90% compared to radiologists (70%). The model is designed to work with heterogeneous and small sample sizes independent of the CT imaging hardware. In order to facilitate the detection of Covid-19 globally and assist radiologists and physicians in the screening process, we are releasing all algorithms and parametric details in an open-source format. Open-source sharing of our CovidCTNet enables developers to rapidly improve and optimize services, while preserving user privacy and data ownership.

CVDec 19, 2025
G3Splat: Geometrically Consistent Generalizable Gaussian Splatting

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Shin-Fang Chng, Yi Xu et al.

3D Gaussians have recently emerged as an effective scene representation for real-time splatting and accurate novel-view synthesis, motivating several works to adapt multi-view structure prediction networks to regress per-pixel 3D Gaussians from images. However, most prior work extends these networks to predict additional Gaussian parameters -- orientation, scale, opacity, and appearance -- while relying almost exclusively on view-synthesis supervision. We show that a view-synthesis loss alone is insufficient to recover geometrically meaningful splats in this setting. We analyze and address the ambiguities of learning 3D Gaussian splats under self-supervision for pose-free generalizable splatting, and introduce G3Splat, which enforces geometric priors to obtain geometrically consistent 3D scene representations. Trained on RE10K, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in (i) geometrically consistent reconstruction, (ii) relative pose estimation, and (iii) novel-view synthesis. We further demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization on ScanNet, substantially outperforming prior work in both geometry recovery and relative pose estimation. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page (https://m80hz.github.io/g3splat/).

OCFeb 1, 2025
Provably-Stable Neural Network-Based Control of Nonlinear Systems

Anran Li, John P. Swensen, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

In recent years, Neural Networks (NNs) have been employed to control nonlinear systems due to their potential capability in dealing with situations that might be difficult for conventional nonlinear control schemes. However, to the best of our knowledge, the current literature on NN-based control lacks theoretical guarantees for stability and tracking performance. This precludes the application of NN-based control schemes to systems where stringent stability and performance guarantees are required. To address this gap, this paper proposes a systematic and comprehensive methodology to design provably-stable NN-based control schemes for affine nonlinear systems. Rigorous analysis is provided to show that the proposed approach guarantees stability of the closed-loop system with the NN in the loop. Also, it is shown that the resulting NN-based control scheme ensures that system states asymptotically converge to a neighborhood around the desired equilibrium point, with a tunable proximity threshold. The proposed methodology is validated and evaluated via simulation studies on an inverted pendulum and experimental studies on a Parrot Bebop 2 drone.

65.1ROApr 8
KITE: Keyframe-Indexed Tokenized Evidence for VLM-Based Robot Failure Analysis

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, King Hang Wong, Feras Dayoub

We present KITE, a training-free, keyframe-anchored, layout-grounded front-end that converts long robot-execution videos into compact, interpretable tokenized evidence for vision-language models (VLMs). KITE distills each trajectory into a small set of motion-salient keyframes with open-vocabulary detections and pairs each keyframe with a schematic bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation that encodes relative object layout, axes, timestamps, and detection confidence. These visual cues are serialized with robot-profile and scene-context tokens into a unified prompt, allowing the same front-end to support failure detection, identification, localization, explanation, and correction with an off-the-shelf VLM. On the RoboFAC benchmark, KITE with Qwen2.5-VL substantially improves over vanilla Qwen2.5-VL in the training-free setting, with especially large gains on simulation failure detection, identification, and localization, while remaining competitive with a RoboFAC-tuned baseline. A small QLoRA fine-tune further improves explanation and correction quality. We also report qualitative results on real dual-arm robots, demonstrating the practical applicability of KITE as a structured and interpretable front-end for robot failure analysis. Code and models are released on our project page: https://m80hz.github.io/kite/

ROOct 28, 2024
BEVPose: Unveiling Scene Semantics through Pose-Guided Multi-Modal BEV Alignment

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Ian Reid

In the field of autonomous driving and mobile robotics, there has been a significant shift in the methods used to create Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. This shift is characterised by using transformers and learning to fuse measurements from disparate vision sensors, mainly lidar and cameras, into a 2D planar ground-based representation. However, these learning-based methods for creating such maps often rely heavily on extensive annotated data, presenting notable challenges, particularly in diverse or non-urban environments where large-scale datasets are scarce. In this work, we present BEVPose, a framework that integrates BEV representations from camera and lidar data, using sensor pose as a guiding supervisory signal. This method notably reduces the dependence on costly annotated data. By leveraging pose information, we align and fuse multi-modal sensory inputs, facilitating the learning of latent BEV embeddings that capture both geometric and semantic aspects of the environment. Our pretraining approach demonstrates promising performance in BEV map segmentation tasks, outperforming fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods, while necessitating only a minimal amount of annotated data. This development not only confronts the challenge of data efficiency in BEV representation learning but also broadens the potential for such techniques in a variety of domains, including off-road and indoor environments.

LGOct 24, 2025
Pruning and Quantization Impact on Graph Neural Networks

Khatoon Khedri, Reza Rawassizadeh, Qifu Wen et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are known to operate with high accuracy on learning from graph-structured data, but they suffer from high computational and resource costs. Neural network compression methods are used to reduce the model size while maintaining reasonable accuracy. Two of the common neural network compression techniques include pruning and quantization. In this research, we empirically examine the effects of three pruning methods and three quantization methods on different GNN models, including graph classification tasks, node classification tasks, and link prediction. We conducted all experiments on three graph datasets, including Cora, Proteins, and BBBP. Our findings demonstrate that unstructured fine-grained and global pruning can significantly reduce the model's size(50\%) while maintaining or even improving precision after fine-tuning the pruned model. The evaluation of different quantization methods on GNN shows diverse impacts on accuracy, inference time, and model size across different datasets.

LGSep 1, 2025
GradES: Significantly Faster Training in Transformers with Gradient-Based Early Stopping

Qifu Wen, Xi Zeng, Zihan Zhou et al.

Early stopping monitors global validation loss and halts all parameter updates simultaneously, which is computationally costly for large transformers due to the extended time required for validation inference. We propose \textit{GradES}, a novel gradient-based early stopping approach that operates within transformer components (attention projections and Feed-Forward layer matrices). We found that different components converge at varying rates during fine-tuning for both language and vision-language models. \textit{GradES} tracks the magnitude of gradient changes in backpropagation for these matrices during training. When a projection matrix's magnitude of gradient changes fall below a convergence threshold $τ$, we exclude that projection matrix from further updates individually, eliminating costly validation passes while allowing slow converging matrices to continue learning. \textit{GradES} speeds up training time by 1.57--7.22$\times$ while simultaneously enhancing generalization through early prevention of overfitting, resulting in 1.2\% higher average accuracy in language tasks and 3.88\% on multimodal benchmarks.

SDAug 31, 2025
TinyMusician: On-Device Music Generation with Knowledge Distillation and Mixed Precision Quantization

Hainan Wang, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Reza Rawassizadeh

The success of the generative model has gained unprecedented attention in the music generation area. Transformer-based architectures have set new benchmarks for model performance. However, their practical adoption is hindered by some critical challenges: the demand for massive computational resources and inference time, due to their large number of parameters. These obstacles make them infeasible to deploy on edge devices, such as smartphones and wearables, with limited computational resources. In this work, we present TinyMusician, a lightweight music generation model distilled from MusicGen (a State-of-the-art music generation model). TinyMusician integrates two innovations: (i) Stage-mixed Bidirectional and Skewed KL-Divergence and (ii) Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization. The experimental results demonstrate that TinyMusician retains 93% of the MusicGen-Small performance with 55% less model size. TinyMusician is the first mobile-deployable music generation model that eliminates cloud dependency while maintaining high audio fidelity and efficient resource usage

OCJan 28, 2025
A Guaranteed-Stable Neural Network Approach for Optimal Control of Nonlinear Systems

Anran Li, John P. Swensen, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

A promising approach to optimal control of nonlinear systems involves iteratively linearizing the system and solving an optimization problem at each time instant to determine the optimal control input. Since this approach relies on online optimization, it can be computationally expensive, and thus unrealistic for systems with limited computing resources. One potential solution to this issue is to incorporate a Neural Network (NN) into the control loop to emulate the behavior of the optimal control scheme. Ensuring stability and reference tracking in the resulting NN-based closed-loop system requires modifications to the primary optimization problem. These modifications often introduce non-convexity and nonlinearity with respect to the decision variables, which may surpass the capabilities of existing solvers and complicate the generation of the training dataset. To address this issue, this paper develops a Neural Optimization Machine (NOM) to solve the resulting optimization problems. The central concept of a NOM is to transform the optimization challenges into the problem of training a NN. Rigorous proofs demonstrate that when a NN trained on data generated by the NOM is used in the control loop, all signals remain bounded and the system states asymptotically converge to a neighborhood around the desired equilibrium point, with a tunable proximity threshold. Simulation and experimental studies are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

CVJun 2, 2024
A Diagnostic Model for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Using Metaheuristics and Deep Learning Methods

Amir Masoud Rahmani, Parisa Khoshvaght, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny et al.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) severity is determined by the presence and ratios of blast cells (abnormal white blood cells) in both bone marrow and peripheral blood. Manual diagnosis of this disease is a tedious and time-consuming operation, making it difficult for professionals to accurately examine blast cell characteristics. To address this difficulty, researchers use deep learning and machine learning. In this paper, a ResNet-based feature extractor is utilized to detect ALL, along with a variety of feature selectors and classifiers. To get the best results, a variety of transfer learning models, including the Resnet, VGG, EfficientNet, and DensNet families, are used as deep feature extractors. Following extraction, different feature selectors are used, including Genetic algorithm, PCA, ANOVA, Random Forest, Univariate, Mutual information, Lasso, XGB, Variance, and Binary ant colony. After feature qualification, a variety of classifiers are used, with MLP outperforming the others. The recommended technique is used to categorize ALL and HEM in the selected dataset which is C-NMC 2019. This technique got an impressive 90.71% accuracy and 95.76% sensitivity for the relevant classifications, and its metrics on this dataset outperformed others.

SDJun 2, 2024
Enhanced Heart Sound Classification Using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and Comparative Analysis of Single vs. Ensemble Classifier Strategies

Amir Masoud Rahmani, Amir Haider, Mohammad Adeli et al.

This paper explores the efficacy of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) in detecting abnormal heart sounds using two classification strategies: a single classifier and an ensemble classifier approach. Heart sounds were first pre-processed to remove noise and then segmented into S1, systole, S2, and diastole intervals, with thirteen MFCCs estimated from each segment, yielding 52 MFCCs per beat. Finally, MFCCs were used for heart sound classification. For that purpose, in the single classifier strategy, the MFCCs from nine consecutive beats were averaged to classify heart sounds by a single classifier (either a support vector machine (SVM), the k nearest neighbors (kNN), or a decision tree (DT)). Conversely, the ensemble classifier strategy employed nine classifiers (either nine SVMs, nine kNN classifiers, or nine DTs) to individually assess beats as normal or abnormal, with the overall classification based on the majority vote. Both methods were tested on a publicly available phonocardiogram database. The heart sound classification accuracy was 91.95% for the SVM, 91.9% for the kNN, and 87.33% for the DT in the single classifier strategy. Also, the accuracy was 93.59% for the SVM, 91.84% for the kNN, and 92.22% for the DT in the ensemble classifier strategy. Overall, the results demonstrated that the ensemble classifier strategy improved the accuracies of the DT and the SVM by 4.89% and 1.64%, establishing MFCCs as more effective than other features, including time, time-frequency, and statistical features, evaluated in similar studies.

ROMay 9, 2024
RoboHop: Segment-based Topological Map Representation for Open-World Visual Navigation

Sourav Garg, Krishan Rana, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh et al.

Mapping is crucial for spatial reasoning, planning and robot navigation. Existing approaches range from metric, which require precise geometry-based optimization, to purely topological, where image-as-node based graphs lack explicit object-level reasoning and interconnectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel topological representation of an environment based on "image segments", which are semantically meaningful and open-vocabulary queryable, conferring several advantages over previous works based on pixel-level features. Unlike 3D scene graphs, we create a purely topological graph with segments as nodes, where edges are formed by a) associating segment-level descriptors between pairs of consecutive images and b) connecting neighboring segments within an image using their pixel centroids. This unveils a "continuous sense of a place", defined by inter-image persistence of segments along with their intra-image neighbours. It further enables us to represent and update segment-level descriptors through neighborhood aggregation using graph convolution layers, which improves robot localization based on segment-level retrieval. Using real-world data, we show how our proposed map representation can be used to i) generate navigation plans in the form of "hops over segments" and ii) search for target objects using natural language queries describing spatial relations of objects. Furthermore, we quantitatively analyze data association at the segment level, which underpins inter-image connectivity during mapping and segment-level localization when revisiting the same place. Finally, we show preliminary trials on segment-level `hopping' based zero-shot real-world navigation. Project page with supplementary details: oravus.github.io/RoboHop/

ROFeb 9, 2021
Toward Safe and Efficient Human-Robot Interaction via Behavior-Driven Danger Signaling

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Bruno Sinopoli, Aaron F. Bobick

This paper introduces the notion of danger awareness in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), which decodes whether a human is aware of the existence of the robot, and illuminates whether the human is willing to engage in enforcing the safety. This paper also proposes a method to quantify this notion as a single binary variable, so-called danger awareness coefficient. By analyzing the effect of this coefficient on the human's actions, an online Bayesian learning method is proposed to update the belief about the value of the coefficient. It is shown that based upon the danger awareness coefficient and the proposed learning method, the robot can build a predictive human model to anticipate the human's future actions. In order to create a communication channel between the human and the robot, to enrich the observations and get informative data about the human, and to improve the efficiency of the robot, the robot is equipped with a danger signaling system. A predictive planning scheme, coupled with the predictive human model, is also proposed to provide an efficient and Probabilistically safe plan for the robot. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through simulation studies on an interaction between a self-driving car and a pedestrian.

ROSep 24, 2018
Real-Time Monocular Object-Model Aware Sparse SLAM

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Kejie Li, Yasir Latif et al.

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. While sparse point-based SLAM methods provide accurate camera localization, the generated maps lack semantic information. On the other hand, state of the art object detection methods provide rich information about entities present in the scene from a single image. This work incorporates a real-time deep-learned object detector to the monocular SLAM framework for representing generic objects as quadrics that permit detections to be seamlessly integrated while allowing the real-time performance. Finer reconstruction of an object, learned by a CNN network, is also incorporated and provides a shape prior for the quadric leading further refinement. To capture the dominant structure of the scene, additional planar landmarks are detected by a CNN-based plane detector and modeled as independent landmarks in the map. Extensive experiments support our proposed inclusion of semantic objects and planar structures directly in the bundle-adjustment of SLAM - Semantic SLAM - that enriches the reconstructed map semantically, while significantly improving the camera localization. The performance of our SLAM system is demonstrated in https://youtu.be/UMWXd4sHONw and https://youtu.be/QPQqVrvP0dE .

ROApr 24, 2018
Structure Aware SLAM using Quadrics and Planes

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Yasir Latif, Trung Pham et al.

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. While point-based SLAM methods provide accurate camera localization, the generated maps lack semantic information. On the other hand, state of the art object detection methods provide rich information about entities present in the scene from a single image. This work marries the two and proposes a method for representing generic objects as quadrics which allows object detections to be seamlessly integrated in a SLAM framework. For scene coverage, additional dominant planar structures are modeled as infinite planes. Experiments show that the proposed points-planes-quadrics representation can easily incorporate Manhattan and object affordance constraints, greatly improving camera localization and leading to semantically meaningful maps. The performance of our SLAM system is demonstrated in https://youtu.be/dR-rB9keF8M .