Gerry Chen

Gerry Chen, Sunil Kumar Narayanan, Thomas Gautier Ottou et al.

Hyperspectral Imagery (HSI) has been used in many applications to non-destructively determine the material and/or chemical compositions of samples. There is growing interest in creating 3D hyperspectral reconstructions, which could provide both spatial and spectral information while also mitigating common HSI challenges such as non-Lambertian surfaces and translucent objects. However, traditional 3D reconstruction with HSI is difficult due to technological limitations of hyperspectral cameras. In recent years, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have seen widespread success in creating high quality volumetric 3D representations of scenes captured by a variety of camera models. Leveraging recent advances in NeRFs, we propose computing a hyperspectral 3D reconstruction in which every point in space and view direction is characterized by wavelength-dependent radiance and transmittance spectra. To evaluate our approach, a dataset containing nearly 2000 hyperspectral images across 8 scenes and 2 cameras was collected. We perform comparisons against traditional RGB NeRF baselines and apply ablation testing with alternative spectra representations. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of hyperspectral NeRFs for hyperspectral super-resolution and imaging sensor simulation. We show that our hyperspectral NeRF approach enables creating fast, accurate volumetric 3D hyperspectral scenes and enables several new applications and areas for future study.

Gerry Chen, Sereym Baek, Juan-Diego Florez et al.

We present GTGraffiti, a graffiti painting system from Georgia Tech that tackles challenges in art, hardware, and human-robot collaboration. The problem of painting graffiti in a human style is particularly challenging and requires a system-level approach because the robotics and art must be designed around each other. The robot must be highly dynamic over a large workspace while the artist must work within the robot's limitations. Our approach consists of three stages: artwork capture, robot hardware, and planning & control. We use motion capture to capture collaborator painting motions which are then composed and processed into a time-varying linear feedback controller for a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) to execute. In this work, we will describe the capturing process, the design and construction of a purpose-built CDPR, and the software for turning an artist's vision into control commands. Our work represents an important step towards faithfully recreating human graffiti artwork by demonstrating that we can reproduce artist motions up to 2m/s and 20m/s$^2$ within 9.3mm RMSE to paint artworks. Changes to the submitted manuscript are colored in blue.

Shuo Yang, Gerry Chen, Yetong Zhang et al.

This paper presents a novel factor graph-based approach to solve the discrete-time finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator problem subject to auxiliary linear equality constraints within and across time steps. We represent such optimal control problems using constrained factor graphs and optimize the factor graphs to obtain the optimal trajectory and the feedback control policies using the variable elimination algorithm with a modified Gram-Schmidt process. We prove that our approach has the same order of computational complexity as the state-of-the-art dynamic programming approach. Furthermore, current dynamic programming approaches can only handle equality constraints between variables at the same time step, but ours can handle equality constraints among any combination of variables at any time step while maintaining linear complexity with respect to trajectory length. Our approach can be used to efficiently generate trajectories and feedback control policies to achieve periodic motion or repetitive manipulation.