Rui Cao

Kai Chen, Rui Cao, Stephen James et al.

In this paper, we propose an iterative self-training framework for sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation to facilitate cost-effective robotic grasping. Given a bin-picking scenario, we establish a photo-realistic simulator to synthesize abundant virtual data, and use this to train an initial pose estimation network. This network then takes the role of a teacher model, which generates pose predictions for unlabeled real data. With these predictions, we further design a comprehensive adaptive selection scheme to distinguish reliable results, and leverage them as pseudo labels to update a student model for pose estimation on real data. To continuously improve the quality of pseudo labels, we iterate the above steps by taking the trained student model as a new teacher and re-label real data using the refined teacher model. We evaluate our method on a public benchmark and our newly-released dataset, achieving an ADD(-S) improvement of 11.49% and 22.62% respectively. Our method is also able to improve robotic bin-picking success by 19.54%, demonstrating the potential of iterative sim-to-real solutions for robotic applications.

Yidan Feng, Biqi Yang, Xianzhi Li et al.

Industrial bin picking is a challenging task that requires accurate and robust segmentation of individual object instances. Particularly, industrial objects can have irregular shapes, that is, thin and concave, whereas in bin-picking scenarios, objects are often closely packed with strong occlusion. To address these challenges, we formulate a novel part-aware instance segmentation pipeline. The key idea is to decompose industrial objects into correlated approximate convex parts and enhance the object-level segmentation with part-level segmentation. We design a part-aware network to predict part masks and part-to-part offsets, followed by a part aggregation module to assemble the recognized parts into instances. To guide the network learning, we also propose an automatic label decoupling scheme to generate ground-truth part-level labels from instance-level labels. Finally, we contribute the first instance segmentation dataset, which contains a variety of industrial objects that are thin and have non-trivial shapes. Extensive experimental results on various industrial objects demonstrate that our method can achieve the best segmentation results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Rui Cao, Chuanxin Song, Biqi Yang et al.

Unseen Object Instance Segmentation (UOIS) is crucial for autonomous robots operating in unstructured environments. Previous approaches require full supervision on large-scale tabletop datasets for effective pretraining. In this paper, we propose UOIS-SAM, a data-efficient solution for the UOIS task that leverages SAM's high accuracy and strong generalization capabilities. UOIS-SAM integrates two key components: (i) a Heatmap-based Prompt Generator (HPG) to generate class-agnostic point prompts with precise foreground prediction, and (ii) a Hierarchical Discrimination Network (HDNet) that adapts SAM's mask decoder, mitigating issues introduced by the SAM baseline, such as background confusion and over-segmentation, especially in scenarios involving occlusion and texture-rich objects. Extensive experimental results on OCID, OSD, and additional photometrically challenging datasets including PhoCAL and HouseCat6D, demonstrate that, even using only 10% of the training samples compared to previous methods, UOIS-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in unseen object segmentation, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in various tabletop scenes.

Bin Sun, Boao Zhang, Jiayi Lu et al.

In end-to-end autonomous driving,the motion prediction plays a pivotal role in ego-vehicle planning. However, existing methods often rely on globally aggregated motion features, ignoring the fact that planning decisions are primarily influenced by a small number of locally interacting agents. Failing to attend to these critical local interactions can obscure potential risks and undermine planning reliability. In this work, we propose FocalAD, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that focuses on critical local neighbors and refines planning by enhancing local motion representations. Specifically, FocalAD comprises two core modules: the Ego-Local-Agents Interactor (ELAI) and the Focal-Local-Agents Loss (FLA Loss). ELAI conducts a graph-based ego-centric interaction representation that captures motion dynamics with local neighbors to enhance both ego planning and agent motion queries. FLA Loss increases the weights of decision-critical neighboring agents, guiding the model to prioritize those more relevant to planning. Extensive experiments show that FocalAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the open-loop nuScenes datasets and closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark. Notably, on the robustness-focused Adv-nuScenes dataset, FocalAD achieves even greater improvements, reducing the average colilision rate by 41.9% compared to DiffusionDrive and by 15.6% compared to SparseDrive.