Luis Felipe Wolf Batista

Luis Felipe Wolf Batista, Salim Khazem, Mehran Adibi et al.

Plastic waste in aquatic environments poses severe risks to marine life and human health. Autonomous robots can be utilized to collect floating waste, but they require accurate object identification capability. While deep learning has been widely used as a powerful tool for this task, its performance is significantly limited by outdoor light conditions and water surface reflection. Light polarization, abundant in such environments yet invisible to the human eye, can be captured by modern sensors to significantly improve litter detection accuracy on water surfaces. With this goal in mind, we introduce PoTATO, a dataset containing 12,380 labeled plastic bottles and rich polarimetric information. We demonstrate under which conditions polarization can enhance object detection and, by providing raw image data, we offer an opportunity for the research community to explore novel approaches and push the boundaries of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms even further. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/luisfelipewb/ PoTATO/tree/eccv2024.

Matteo El-Hariry, Antoine Richard, Ricard M. Castan et al.

Autonomous robots must navigate and operate in diverse environments, from terrestrial and aquatic settings to aerial and space domains. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in training policies for specific autonomous robots, existing frameworks and benchmarks are often constrained to unique platforms, limiting generalization and fair comparisons across different mobility systems. In this paper, we present a multi-domain framework for training, evaluating and deploying RL-based navigation policies across diverse robotic platforms and operational environments. Our work presents four key contributions: (1) a scalable and modular framework, facilitating seamless robot-task interchangeability and reproducible training pipelines; (2) sim-to-real transfer demonstrated through real-world experiments with multiple robots, including a satellite robotic simulator, an unmanned surface vessel, and a wheeled ground vehicle; (3) the release of the first open-source API for deploying Isaac Lab-trained policies to real robots, enabling lightweight inference and rapid field validation; and (4) uniform tasks and metrics for cross-medium evaluation, through a unified evaluation testbed to assess performance of navigation tasks in diverse operational conditions (aquatic, terrestrial and space). By ensuring consistency between simulation and real-world deployment, RoboRAN lowers the barrier to developing adaptable RL-based navigation strategies. Its modular design enables straightforward integration of new robots and tasks through predefined templates, fostering reproducibility and extension to diverse domains. To support the community, we release RoboRAN as open-source.

Luis F. W. Batista, Stéphanie Aravecchia, Seth Hutchinson et al.

Despite significant advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), their robustness in real-world conditions, particularly under external disturbances, remains insufficiently explored. In this paper, we evaluate the resilience of a DRL-based agent designed to capture floating waste under various perturbations. We train the agent using domain randomization and evaluate its performance in real-world field tests, assessing its ability to handle unexpected disturbances such as asymmetric drag and an off-center payload. We assess the agent's performance under these perturbations in both simulation and real-world experiments, quantifying performance degradation and benchmarking it against an MPC baseline. Results indicate that the DRL agent performs reliably despite significant disturbances. Along with the open-source release of our implementation, we provide insights into effective training strategies, real-world challenges, and practical considerations for deploying DRLbased ASV controllers.

Luis F. W. Batista, Tom Bourbon, Cedric Pradalier

Accurate segmentation of floating debris on water is often compromised by surface glare and changing outdoor illumination. Polarimetric imaging offers a single-sensor route to mitigate water-surface glare that disrupts semantic segmentation of floating objects. We benchmark state-of-the-art fusion networks on PoTATO, a public dataset of polarimetric images of plastic bottles in inland waterways, and compare their performance with single-image baselines using traditional models. Our results indicate that polarimetric cues help recover low-contrast objects and suppress reflection-induced false positives, raising mean IoU and lowering contour error relative to RGB inputs. These sharper masks come at a cost: the additional channels enlarge the models increasing the computational load and introducing the risk of new false positives. By providing a reproducible, diagnostic benchmark and publicly available code, we hope to help researchers choose if polarized cameras are suitable for their applications and to accelerate related research.