Cheng Zhou

Lei Han, Qingxu Zhu, Jiapeng Sheng et al.

Knowledge from animals and humans inspires robotic innovations. Numerous efforts have been made to achieve agile locomotion in quadrupedal robots through classical controllers or reinforcement learning approaches. These methods usually rely on physical models or handcrafted rewards to accurately describe the specific system, rather than on a generalized understanding like animals do. Here we propose a hierarchical framework to construct primitive-, environmental- and strategic-level knowledge that are all pre-trainable, reusable and enrichable for legged robots. The primitive module summarizes knowledge from animal motion data, where, inspired by large pre-trained models in language and image understanding, we introduce deep generative models to produce motor control signals stimulating legged robots to act like real animals. Then, we shape various traversing capabilities at a higher level to align with the environment by reusing the primitive module. Finally, a strategic module is trained focusing on complex downstream tasks by reusing the knowledge from previous levels. We apply the trained hierarchical controllers to the MAX robot, a quadrupedal robot developed in-house, to mimic animals, traverse complex obstacles and play in a designed challenging multi-agent chase tag game, where lifelike agility and strategy emerge in the robots.

Wentao Gao, Cheng Zhou

Accurate prediction of human behavior is crucial for effective human-robot interaction (HRI) systems, especially in dynamic environments where real-time decisions are essential. This paper addresses the challenge of forecasting future human behavior using multivariate time series data from wearable sensors, which capture various aspects of human movement. The presence of hidden confounding factors in this data often leads to biased predictions, limiting the reliability of traditional models. To overcome this, we propose a robust predictive model that integrates deconfounding techniques with advanced time series prediction methods, enhancing the model's ability to isolate true causal relationships and improve prediction accuracy. Evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms traditional methods, providing a more reliable foundation for responsive and adaptive HRI systems.

Yingtian Tang, Jiangtao Liu, Cheng Zhou et al.

Motion style transfer is highly desired for motion generation systems for gaming. Compared to its offline counterpart, the research on online motion style transfer under interactive control is limited. In this work, we propose an end-to-end neural network that can generate motions with different styles and transfer motion styles in real-time under user control. Our approach eliminates the use of handcrafted phase features, and could be easily trained and directly deployed in game systems. In the experiment part, we evaluate our approach from three aspects that are essential for industrial game design: accuracy, flexibility, and variety, and our model performs a satisfying result.

Mingjie Li, Youqian Feng, Zhonghai Yin et al.

Common target detection is usually based on single frame images, which is vulnerable to affected by the similar targets in the image and not applicable to video images. In this paper , anchor mask is proposed to add the prior knowledge for target detection and an anchor mask net is designed to impove the RPN performance for single target detection. Tested in the VOT2016, the model perform better.