Kai Zhao

Wenqi Zhang, Kai Zhao, Peng Li et al.

Despite decades of efforts, robot navigation in a real scenario with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA for short), remains a challenging topic. Inspired by the central nervous system (CNS), we propose a hierarchical multi-expert learning framework for autonomous navigation in a VUCA environment. With a heuristic exploration mechanism considering target location, path cost, and safety level, the upper layer performs simultaneous map exploration and route-planning to avoid trapping in a blind alley, similar to the cerebrum in the CNS. Using a local adaptive model fusing multiple discrepant strategies, the lower layer pursuits a balance between collision-avoidance and go-straight strategies, acting as the cerebellum in the CNS. We conduct simulation and real-world experiments on multiple platforms, including legged and wheeled robots. Experimental results demonstrate our algorithm outperforms the existing methods in terms of task achievement, time efficiency, and security.

Jiqing Zhang, Kai Zhao, Bo Dong et al.

Jointly exploiting multiple different yet complementary domain information has been proven to be an effective way to perform robust object tracking. This paper focuses on effectively representing and utilizing complementary features from the frame domain and event domain for boosting object tracking performance in challenge scenarios. Specifically, we propose Common Features Extractor (CFE) to learn potential common representations from the RGB domain and event domain. For learning the unique features of the two domains, we utilize a Unique Extractor for Event (UEE) based on Spiking Neural Networks to extract edge cues in the event domain which may be missed in RGB in some challenging conditions, and a Unique Extractor for RGB (UER) based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to extract texture and semantic information in RGB domain. Extensive experiments on standard RGB benchmark and real event tracking dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We show our approach outperforms all compared state-of-the-art tracking algorithms and verify event-based data is a powerful cue for tracking in challenging scenes.