Félix Resch

Daniel Scheuchenstuhl, Stefan Ulmer, Felix Resch et al.

Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the environment, we think that embedding auxiliary information about focus point into robot learning would enhance efficiency and robustness of the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model and emulate the human attention with an approximate prediction model. We then leverage this output and feed it as a structured auxiliary feature map into downstream learning tasks. We validate this idea by learning a prediction model from human-gaze recordings of manual driving in the real world. We test our approach on two learning tasks - object detection and imitation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that the inclusion of predicted human attention leads to improved robustness of the trained models to out-of-distribution samples and faster learning in low-data regime settings. Our work highlights the potential of incorporating structured auxiliary information in representation learning for robotics and opens up new avenues for research in this direction. All code and data are available online.

Mihaela-Larisa Clement, Mónika Farsang, Felix Resch et al.

Autonomous agents that rely purely on perception to make real-time control decisions require efficient and robust architectures. In this work, we demonstrate that augmenting RGB input with depth information significantly enhances our agents' ability to predict steering commands compared to using RGB alone. We benchmark lightweight recurrent controllers that leverage the fused RGB-D features for sequential decision-making. To train our models, we collect high-quality data using a small-scale autonomous car controlled by an expert driver via a physical steering wheel, capturing varying levels of steering difficulty. Our models were successfully deployed on real hardware and inherently avoided dynamic and static obstacles, under out-of-distribution conditions. Specifically, our findings reveal that the early fusion of depth data results in a highly robust controller, which remains effective even with frame drops and increased noise levels, without compromising the network's focus on the task.