arXiv subjects

Berk Calli

Publications and source records attributed to Berk Calli.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Utilizing Inpainting for Keypoint Detection for Vision-Based Control of Robotic Manipulators

We present a novel visual servoing framework for controlling a robotic manipulator in configuration space using only natural visual features. To train our data-driven keypoint detector, we attach ArUco markers along the robot body, use their centers as keypoint labels, and apply image inpainting to remove the markers and reconstruct the occluded regions. This produces automatically labeled, markerless robot images without requiring accurate camera calibration or robot models. At runtime, a second inpainting model reconstructs robot regions that are partially occluded, enabling continuous keypoint detection. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) further improves temporal consistency and robustness of the keypoint estimates. We demonstrate successful model-free, vision-based control using natural robot features under both full visibility and partial occlusion. To show broader applicability, we also extend the perception pipeline to two-module and three-module soft origami arms and qualitatively evaluate keypoint detection and temporal tracking on these platforms.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

3D Shape Control of Extensible Multi-Section Soft Continuum Robots via Visual Servoing

In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based control algorithm for regulating the whole body shape of extensible multisection soft continuum manipulators. Contrary to existing vision-based control algorithms in the literature that regulate the robot's end effector pose, our proposed control algorithm regulates the robot's whole body configuration, enabling us to leverage its kinematic redundancy. Additionally, our model-based 2.5D shape visual servoing provides globally stable asymptotic convergence in the robot's 3D workspace compared to the closest works in the literature that report local minima. Unlike existing visual servoing algorithms in the literature, our approach does not require information from proprioceptive sensors, making it suitable for continuum manipulators without such capabilities. Instead, robot state is estimated from images acquired by an external camera that observes the robot's whole body shape and is also utilized to close the shape control loop. Traditionally, visual servoing schemes require an image of the robot at its reference pose to generate the reference features. In this work, we utilize an inverse kinematics solver to generate reference features for the desired robot configuration and do not require images of the robot at the reference. Experiments are performed on a multisection continuum manipulator demonstrating the controller's capability to regulate the robot's whole body shape while precisely positioning the robot's end effector. Results validate our controller's ability to regulate the shape of continuum robots while demonstrating a smooth transient response and a steady-state error within 1 mm. Proof-of-concept object manipulation experiments including stacking, pouring, and pulling tasks are performed to demonstrate our controller's applicability.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Developing Modular Grasping and Manipulation Pipeline Infrastructure to Streamline Performance Benchmarking

The robot manipulation ecosystem currently faces issues with integrating open-source components and reproducing results. This limits the ability of the community to benchmark and compare the performance of different solutions to one another in an effective manner, instead relying on largely holistic evaluations. As part of the COMPARE Ecosystem project, we are developing modular grasping and manipulation pipeline infrastructure in order to streamline performance benchmarking. The infrastructure will be used towards the establishment of standards and guidelines for modularity and improved open-source development and benchmarking. This paper provides a high-level overview of the architecture of the pipeline infrastructure, experiments conducted to exercise it during development, and future work to expand its modularity.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

A Benchmarking Study of Vision-based Robotic Grasping Algorithms

We present a benchmarking study of vision-based robotic grasping algorithms with distinct approaches, and provide a comparative analysis. In particular, we compare two machine-learning-based and two analytical algorithms using an existing benchmarking protocol from the literature and determine the algorithm's strengths and weaknesses under different experimental conditions. These conditions include variations in lighting, background textures, cameras with different noise levels, and grippers. We also run analogous experiments in simulations and with real robots and present the discrepancies. Some experiments are also run in two different laboratories using same protocols to further analyze the repeatability of our results. We believe that this study, comprising 5040 experiments, provides important insights into the role and challenges of systematic experimentation in robotic manipulation, and guides the development of new algorithms by considering the factors that could impact the performance. The experiment recordings and our benchmarking software are publicly available.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Image-Based Roadmaps for Vision-Only Planning and Control of Robotic Manipulators

This work presents a motion planning framework for robotic manipulators that computes collision-free paths directly in image space. The generated paths can then be tracked using vision-based control, eliminating the need for an explicit robot model or proprioceptive sensing. At the core of our approach is the construction of a roadmap entirely in image space. To achieve this, we explicitly define sampling, nearest-neighbor selection, and collision checking based on visual features rather than geometric models. We first collect a set of image-space samples by moving the robot within its workspace, capturing keypoints along its body at different configurations. These samples serve as nodes in the roadmap, which we construct using either learned or predefined distance metrics. At runtime, the roadmap generates collision-free paths directly in image space, removing the need for a robot model or joint encoders. We validate our approach through an experimental study in which a robotic arm follows planned paths using an adaptive vision-based control scheme to avoid obstacles. The results show that paths generated with the learned-distance roadmap achieved 100% success in control convergence, whereas the predefined image-space distance roadmap enabled faster transient responses but had a lower success rate in convergence.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Simultaneous Estimation of Manipulation Skill and Hand Grasp Force from Forearm Ultrasound Images

Accurate estimation of human hand configuration and the forces they exert is critical for effective teleoperation and skill transfer in robotic manipulation. A deeper understanding of human interactions with objects can further enhance teleoperation performance. To address this need, researchers have explored methods to capture and translate human manipulation skills and applied forces to robotic systems. Among these, biosignal-based approaches, particularly those using forearm ultrasound data, have shown significant potential for estimating hand movements and finger forces. In this study, we present a method for simultaneously estimating manipulation skills and applied hand force using forearm ultrasound data. Data collected from seven participants were used to train deep learning models for classifying manipulation skills and estimating grasp force. Our models achieved an average classification accuracy of 94.87 percent plus or minus 10.16 percent for manipulation skills and an average root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.51 plus or minus 0.19 Newtons for force estimation, as evaluated using five-fold cross-validation. These results highlight the effectiveness of forearm ultrasound in advancing human-machine interfacing and robotic teleoperation for complex manipulation tasks. This work enables new and effective possibilities for human-robot skill transfer and tele-manipulation, bridging the gap between human dexterity and robotic control.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

A Benchmarking Study of Vision-Based Robotic Grasping Algorithms: A Comparative Analysis

We present a benchmarking study of vision-based robotic grasping algorithms and provide a comparative analysis. In particular, we compare two machine-learning-based and two analytical algorithms using an existing benchmarking protocol from the literature and determine the algorithms strengths and weaknesses under different experimental conditions. These conditions include variations in lighting, background textures, cameras with different noise levels, and grippers. We also run analogous experiments in simulations and with real robots and present the discrepancies. Some experiments are also run in two different laboratories using the same protocols to further analyze the repeatability of our results. We believe that this study, comprising 5040 experiments, provides important insights into the role and challenges of systematic experimentation in robotic manipulation and guides the development of new algorithms by considering the factors that could impact the performance. The experiment recordings and our benchmarking software are publicly available.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Vision-based Oxy-fuel Torch Control for Robotic Metal Cutting

The automation of key processes in metal cutting would substantially benefit many industries such as manufacturing and metal recycling. We present a vision-based control scheme for automated metal cutting with oxy-fuel torches, an established cutting medium in industry. The system consists of a robot equipped with a cutting torch and an eye-in-hand camera observing the scene behind a tinted visor. We develop a vision-based control algorithm to servo the torch's motion by visually observing its effects on the metal surface. As such, the vision system processes the metal surface's heat pool and computes its associated features, specifically pool convexity and intensity, which are then used for control. The operating conditions of the control problem are defined within which the stability is proven. In addition, metal cutting experiments are performed using a physical 1-DOF robot and oxy-fuel cutting equipment. Our results demonstrate the successful cutting of metal plates across three different plate thicknesses, relying purely on visual information without a priori knowledge of the thicknesses.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

VisDA 2022 Challenge: Domain Adaptation for Industrial Waste Sorting

Label-efficient and reliable semantic segmentation is essential for many real-life applications, especially for industrial settings with high visual diversity, such as waste sorting. In industrial waste sorting, one of the biggest challenges is the extreme diversity of the input stream depending on factors like the location of the sorting facility, the equipment available in the facility, and the time of year, all of which significantly impact the composition and visual appearance of the waste stream. These changes in the data are called ``visual domains'', and label-efficient adaptation of models to such domains is needed for successful semantic segmentation of industrial waste. To test the abilities of computer vision models on this task, we present the VisDA 2022 Challenge on Domain Adaptation for Industrial Waste Sorting. Our challenge incorporates a fully-annotated waste sorting dataset, ZeroWaste, collected from two real material recovery facilities in different locations and seasons, as well as a novel procedurally generated synthetic waste sorting dataset, SynthWaste. In this competition, we aim to answer two questions: 1) can we leverage domain adaptation techniques to minimize the domain gap? and 2) can synthetic data augmentation improve performance on this task and help adapt to changing data distributions? The results of the competition show that industrial waste detection poses a real domain adaptation problem, that domain generalization techniques such as augmentations, ensembling, etc., improve the overall performance on the unlabeled target domain examples, and that leveraging synthetic data effectively remains an open problem. See https://ai.bu.edu/visda-2022/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

RB2: Robotic Manipulation Benchmarking with a Twist

Benchmarks offer a scientific way to compare algorithms using objective performance metrics. Good benchmarks have two features: (a) they should be widely useful for many research groups; (b) and they should produce reproducible findings. In robotic manipulation research, there is a trade-off between reproducibility and broad accessibility. If the benchmark is kept restrictive (fixed hardware, objects), the numbers are reproducible but the setup becomes less general. On the other hand, a benchmark could be a loose set of protocols (e.g. object sets) but the underlying variation in setups make the results non-reproducible. In this paper, we re-imagine benchmarking for robotic manipulation as state-of-the-art algorithmic implementations, alongside the usual set of tasks and experimental protocols. The added baseline implementations will provide a way to easily recreate SOTA numbers in a new local robotic setup, thus providing credible relative rankings between existing approaches and new work. However, these local rankings could vary between different setups. To resolve this issue, we build a mechanism for pooling experimental data between labs, and thus we establish a single global ranking for existing (and proposed) SOTA algorithms. Our benchmark, called Ranking-Based Robotics Benchmark (RB2), is evaluated on tasks that are inspired from clinically validated Southampton Hand Assessment Procedures. Our benchmark was run across two different labs and reveals several surprising findings. For example, extremely simple baselines like open-loop behavior cloning, outperform more complicated models (e.g. closed loop, RNN, Offline-RL, etc.) that are preferred by the field. We hope our fellow researchers will use RB2 to improve their research's quality and rigor.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Household Cloth Object Set: Fostering Benchmarking in Deformable Object Manipulation

Benchmarking of robotic manipulations is one of the open issues in robotic research. An important factor that has enabled progress in this area in the last decade is the existence of common object sets that have been shared among different research groups. However, the existing object sets are very limited when it comes to cloth-like objects that have unique particularities and challenges. This paper is a first step towards the design of a cloth object set to be distributed among research groups from the robotics cloth manipulation community. We present a set of household cloth objects and related tasks that serve to expose the challenges related to gathering such an object set and propose a roadmap to the design of common benchmarks in cloth manipulation tasks, with the intention to set the grounds for a future debate in the community that will be necessary to foster benchmarking for the manipulation of cloth-like objects. Some RGB-D and object scans are also collected as examples for the objects in relevant configurations. More details about the cloth set are shared in http://www.iri.upc.edu/groups/perception/ClothObjectSet/HouseholdClothSet.html.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Research Challenges and Progress in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions

This paper discusses recent research progress in robotic grasping and manipulation in the light of the latest Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions (RGMCs). We first provide an overview of past benchmarks and competitions related to the robotics manipulation field. Then, we discuss the methodology behind designing the manipulation tasks in RGMCs. We provide a detailed analysis of key challenges for each task and identify the most difficult aspects based on the competing teams' performance in recent years. We believe that such an analysis is insightful to determine the future research directions for the robotic manipulation domain.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes

Less than 35% of recyclable waste is being actually recycled in the US, which leads to increased soil and sea pollution and is one of the major concerns of environmental researchers as well as the common public. At the heart of the problem are the inefficiencies of the waste sorting process (separating paper, plastic, metal, glass, etc.) due to the extremely complex and cluttered nature of the waste stream. Recyclable waste detection poses a unique computer vision challenge as it requires detection of highly deformable and often translucent objects in cluttered scenes without the kind of context information usually present in human-centric datasets. This challenging computer vision task currently lacks suitable datasets or methods in the available literature. In this paper, we take a step towards computer-aided waste detection and present the first in-the-wild industrial-grade waste detection and segmentation dataset, ZeroWaste. We believe that ZeroWaste will catalyze research in object detection and semantic segmentation in extreme clutter as well as applications in the recycling domain. Our project page can be found at http://ai.bu.edu/zerowaste/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

ECNNs: Ensemble Learning Methods for Improving Planar Grasp Quality Estimation

We present an ensemble learning methodology that combines multiple existing robotic grasp synthesis algorithms and obtain a success rate that is significantly better than the individual algorithms. The methodology treats the grasping algorithms as "experts" providing grasp "opinions". An Ensemble Convolutional Neural Network (ECNN) is trained using a Mixture of Experts (MOE) model that integrates these opinions and determines the final grasping decision. The ECNN introduces minimal computational cost overhead, and the network can virtually run as fast as the slowest expert. We test this architecture using open-source algorithms in the literature by adopting GQCNN 4.0, GGCNN and a custom variation of GGCNN as experts and obtained a 6% increase in the grasp success on the Cornell Dataset compared to the best-performing individual algorithm. The performance of the method is also demonstrated using a Franka Emika Panda arm.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Grasp Synthesis for Novel Objects Using Heuristic-based and Data-driven Active Vision Methods

In this work, we present several heuristic-based and data-driven active vision strategies for viewpoint optimization of an arm-mounted depth camera for the purpose of aiding robotic grasping. These strategies aim to efficiently collect data to boost the performance of an underlying grasp synthesis algorithm. We created an open-source benchmarking platform in simulation (https://github.com/galenbr/2021ActiveVision), and provide an extensive study for assessing the performance of the proposed methods as well as comparing them against various baseline strategies. We also provide an experimental study with a real-world setup by utilizing an existing grasping planning benchmark in the literature. With these analyses, we were able to quantitatively demonstrate the versatility of heuristic methods that prioritize certain types of exploration, and qualitatively show their robustness to both novel objects and the transition from simulation to the real world. We identified scenarios in which our methods did not perform well and scenarios that are objectively difficult, and present a discussion on which avenues for future research show promise.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

OCRTOC: A Cloud-Based Competition and Benchmark for Robotic Grasping and Manipulation

In this paper, we propose a cloud-based benchmark for robotic grasping and manipulation, called the OCRTOC benchmark. The benchmark focuses on the object rearrangement problem, specifically table organization tasks. We provide a set of identical real robot setups and facilitate remote experiments of standardized table organization scenarios in varying difficulties. In this workflow, users upload their solutions to our remote server and their code is executed on the real robot setups and scored automatically. After each execution, the OCRTOC team resets the experimental setup manually. We also provide a simulation environment that researchers can use to develop and test their solutions. With the OCRTOC benchmark, we aim to lower the barrier of conducting reproducible research on robotic grasping and manipulation and accelerate progress in this field. Executing standardized scenarios on identical real robot setups allows us to quantify algorithm performances and achieve fair comparisons. Using this benchmark we held a competition in the 2020 International Conference on Intelligence Robots and Systems (IROS 2020). In total, 59 teams took part in this competition worldwide. We present the results and our observations of the 2020 competition, and discuss our adjustments and improvements for the upcoming OCRTOC 2021 competition. The homepage of the OCRTOC competition is www.ocrtoc.org, and the OCRTOC software package is available at https://github.com/OCRTOC/OCRTOC_software_package.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Region-Based Planning for 3D Within-Hand-Manipulation via Variable Friction Robot Fingers and Extrinsic Contacts

Attempts to achieve robotic Within-Hand-Manipulation (WIHM) generally utilize either high-DOF robotic hands with elaborate sensing apparatus or multi-arm robotic systems. In prior work we presented a simple robot hand with variable friction robot fingers, which allow a low-complexity approach to within-hand object translation and rotation, though this manipulation was limited to planar actions. In this work we extend the capabilities of this system to 3D manipulation with a novel region-based WIHM planning algorithm and utilizing extrinsic contacts. The ability to modulate finger friction enhances extrinsic dexterity for three-dimensional WIHM, and allows us to operate in the quasi-static level. The region-based planner automatically generates 3D manipulation sequences with a modified A* formulation that navigates the contact regions between the fingers and the object surface to reach desired regions. Central to this method is a set of object-motion primitives (i.e. within-hand sliding, rotation and pivoting), which can easily be achieved via changing contact friction. A wide range of goal regions can be achieved via this approach, which is demonstrated via real robot experiments following a standardized in-hand manipulation benchmarking protocol.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2015

Benchmarking in Manipulation Research: The YCB Object and Model Set and Benchmarking Protocols

In this paper we present the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) Object and Model set, intended to be used to facilitate benchmarking in robotic manipulation, prosthetic design and rehabilitation research. The objects in the set are designed to cover a wide range of aspects of the manipulation problem; it includes objects of daily life with different shapes, sizes, textures, weight and rigidity, as well as some widely used manipulation tests. The associated database provides high-resolution RGBD scans, physical properties, and geometric models of the objects for easy incorporation into manipulation and planning software platforms. In addition to describing the objects and models in the set along with how they were chosen and derived, we provide a framework and a number of example task protocols, laying out how the set can be used to quantitatively evaluate a range of manipulation approaches including planning, learning, mechanical design, control, and many others. A comprehensive literature survey on existing benchmarks and object datasets is also presented and their scope and limitations are discussed. The set will be freely distributed to research groups worldwide at a series of tutorials at robotics conferences, and will be otherwise available at a reasonable purchase cost. It is our hope that the ready availability of this set along with the ground laid in terms of protocol templates will enable the community of manipulation researchers to more easily compare approaches as well as continually evolve benchmarking tests as the field matures.

cs.RO↗