arXiv subjects

Chenguang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Chenguang Yang.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Direct tensor processing with coherent light

Tensor processing is the cornerstone of modern technological advancements, powering critical applications in data analytics and artificial intelligence. While optical computing offers exceptional advantages in bandwidth, parallelism, and energy efficiency, existing methods optimized for scalar operations struggle to efficiently handle tensor-based tasks, limiting their applicability in complex applications, such as neural networks. Here, we report Parallel Optical Matrix Matrix Multiplication (POMMM), a novel paradigm that enables fully parallel tensor processing through a single coherent light propagation. This approach addresses key limitations of current optical methods, scaling the performance with data dimension, while improving theoretical computational power and efficiency. We demonstrate its high consistency with GPU based matrix matrix multiplication across both real-valued and complex valued domains. Moreover, we showcase its adaptability, scalability, and versatility in tensor processing applications such as convolutional and vision transformer neural networks. Furthermore, we analyse the theoretical compatibility and efficiency of POMMM in relation to existing optical computing paradigms, highlighting its potential to outperform current state-of-the-art methods. By enabling a variety of computational tasks and supporting multi2 wavelength and large-scale expansion, POMMM provides a scalable, high-efficient foundation for advancing next-generation optical computing.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Behavioral Conflict Avoidance Between Humans and Quadruped Robots in Shared Environments

Nowadays, robots are increasingly operated in environments shared with humans, where conflicts between human and robot behaviors may compromise safety. This paper presents a proactive behavioral conflict avoidance framework based on the principle of adaptation to trends for quadruped robots that not only ensures the robot's safety but also minimizes interference with human activities. It can proactively avoid potential conflicts with approaching humans or other dynamic objects, whether the robot is stationary or in motion, then swiftly resume its tasks once the conflict subsides. An enhanced approach is proposed to achieve precise human detection and tracking on vibratory robot platform equipped with low-cost hybrid solid-state LiDAR. When potential conflict detected, the robot selects an avoidance point and executes an evasion maneuver before resuming its task. This approach contrasts with conventional methods that remain goal-driven, often resulting in aggressive behaviors, such as forcibly bypassing obstacles and causing conflicts or becoming stuck in deadlock scenarios. The selection of avoidance points is achieved by integrating static and dynamic obstacle to generate a potential field map. The robot then searches for feasible regions within this map and determines the optimal avoidance point using an evaluation function. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework significantly reduces interference with human activities, enhances the safety of both robots and persons.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Iterative Shaping of Multi-Particle Aggregates based on Action Trees and VLM

In this paper, we address the problem of manipulating multi-particle aggregates using a bimanual robotic system. Our approach enables the autonomous transport of dispersed particles through a series of shaping and pushing actions using robotically-controlled tools. Achieving this advanced manipulation capability presents two key challenges: high-level task planning and trajectory execution. For task planning, we leverage Vision Language Models (VLMs) to enable primitive actions such as tool affordance grasping and non-prehensile particle pushing. For trajectory execution, we represent the evolving particle aggregate's contour using truncated Fourier series, providing efficient parametrization of its closed shape. We adaptively compute trajectory waypoints based on group cohesion and the geometric centroid of the aggregate, accounting for its spatial distribution and collective motion. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology in actively shaping and manipulating multi-particle aggregates while maintaining high system cohesion.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Fine-Grained Alignment in Vision-and-Language Navigation through Bayesian Optimization

This paper addresses the challenge of fine-grained alignment in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks, where robots navigate realistic 3D environments based on natural language instructions. Current approaches use contrastive learning to align language with visual trajectory sequences. Nevertheless, they encounter difficulties with fine-grained vision negatives. To enhance cross-modal embeddings, we introduce a novel Bayesian Optimization-based adversarial optimization framework for creating fine-grained contrastive vision samples. To validate the proposed methodology, we conduct a series of experiments to assess the effectiveness of the enriched embeddings on fine-grained vision negatives. We conduct experiments on two common VLN benchmarks R2R and REVERIE, experiments on the them demonstrate that these embeddings benefit navigation, and can lead to a promising performance enhancement. Our source code and trained models are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FGVLN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Redundant Observer-Based Tracking Control for Object Extraction Using a Cable Connected UAV

A new disturbance observer based control scheme is developed for a quadrotor under the concurrent disturbances from a lightweight elastic tether cable and a lumped vertical disturbance. This elastic tether is unusual as it creates a disturbance proportional to the multicopter's translational movement. This paper takes an observer-based approach to estimate the stiffness coefficient of the cable and uses the system model to update the estimates of the external forces, which are then compensated in the control action. Given that the tethered cable force affects both horizontal channels of the quadrotor and is also coupled with the vertical channel, the proposed disturbance observer is constructed to exploit the redundant measurements across all three channels to jointly estimate the cable stiffness and the vertical disturbance. A pseudo-inverse method is used to determine the observer gain functions, such that the estimation of the two quantities is decoupled and stable. Compared to standard disturbance observers which assume nearly constant disturbances, the proposed approach can quickly adjust its total force estimate as the tethered quadrotor changes its position or tautness of the tether. This is applied to two experiments - a tracking performance test where the multicopter moves under a constant tether strain, and an object extraction test. In the second test, the multicopter manipulates a nonlinear mechanism mimicking the extraction of a wedged object. In both cases, the proposed approach shows significant improvement over standard Disturbance Observer and Extended State Observer approaches. A video summary of the experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/9gKr13WTj-k.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Bimanual Deformable Bag Manipulation Using a Structure-of-Interest Based Neural Dynamics Model

The manipulation of deformable objects by robotic systems presents a significant challenge due to their complex and infinite-dimensional configuration spaces. This paper introduces a novel approach to Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) by emphasizing the identification and manipulation of Structures of Interest (SOIs) in deformable fabric bags. We propose a bimanual manipulation framework that leverages a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based latent dynamics model to succinctly represent and predict the behavior of these SOIs. Our approach involves constructing a graph representation from partial point cloud data of the object and learning the latent dynamics model that effectively captures the essential deformations of the fabric bag within a reduced computational space. By integrating this latent dynamics model with Model Predictive Control (MPC), we empower robotic manipulators to perform precise and stable manipulation tasks focused on the SOIs. We have validated our framework through various empirical experiments demonstrating its efficacy in bimanual manipulation of fabric bags. Our contributions not only address the complexities inherent in DOM but also provide new perspectives and methodologies for enhancing robotic interactions with deformable objects by concentrating on their critical structural elements. Experimental videos can be obtained from https://sites.google.com/view/bagbot.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Language-Conditioned Imitation Learning with Base Skill Priors under Unstructured Data

The growing interest in language-conditioned robot manipulation aims to develop robots capable of understanding and executing complex tasks, with the objective of enabling robots to interpret language commands and manipulate objects accordingly. While language-conditioned approaches demonstrate impressive capabilities for addressing tasks in familiar environments, they encounter limitations in adapting to unfamiliar environment settings. In this study, we propose a general-purpose, language-conditioned approach that combines base skill priors and imitation learning under unstructured data to enhance the algorithm's generalization in adapting to unfamiliar environments. We assess our model's performance in both simulated and real-world environments using a zero-shot setting. In the simulated environment, the proposed approach surpasses previously reported scores for CALVIN benchmark, especially in the challenging Zero-Shot Multi-Environment setting. The average completed task length, indicating the average number of tasks the agent can continuously complete, improves more than 2.5 times compared to the state-of-the-art method HULC. In addition, we conduct a zero-shot evaluation of our policy in a real-world setting, following training exclusively in simulated environments without additional specific adaptations. In this evaluation, we set up ten tasks and achieved an average 30% improvement in our approach compared to the current state-of-the-art approach, demonstrating a high generalization capability in both simulated environments and the real world. For further details, including access to our code and videos, please refer to https://hk-zh.github.io/spil/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Explicit-Implicit Subgoal Planning for Long-Horizon Tasks with Sparse Reward

The challenges inherent in long-horizon tasks in robotics persist due to the typical inefficient exploration and sparse rewards in traditional reinforcement learning approaches. To address these challenges, we have developed a novel algorithm, termed Explicit-Implicit Subgoal Planning (EISP), designed to tackle long-horizon tasks through a divide-and-conquer approach. We utilize two primary criteria, feasibility and optimality, to ensure the quality of the generated subgoals. EISP consists of three components: a hybrid subgoal generator, a hindsight sampler, and a value selector. The hybrid subgoal generator uses an explicit model to infer subgoals and an implicit model to predict the final goal, inspired by way of human thinking that infers subgoals by using the current state and final goal as well as reason about the final goal conditioned on the current state and given subgoals. Additionally, the hindsight sampler selects valid subgoals from an offline dataset to enhance the feasibility of the generated subgoals. While the value selector utilizes the value function in reinforcement learning to filter the optimal subgoals from subgoal candidates. To validate our method, we conduct four long-horizon tasks in both simulation and the real world. The obtained quantitative and qualitative data indicate that our approach achieves promising performance compared to other baseline methods. These experimental results can be seen on the website \url{https://sites.google.com/view/vaesi}.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

TacShade A New 3D-printed Soft Optical Tactile Sensor Based on Light, Shadow and Greyscale for Shape Reconstruction

In this paper, we present the TacShade a newly designed 3D-printed soft optical tactile sensor. The sensor is developed for shape reconstruction under the inspiration of sketch drawing that uses the density of sketch lines to draw light and shadow, resulting in the creation of a 3D-view effect. TacShade, building upon the strengths of the TacTip, a single-camera tactile sensor of large in-depth deformation and being sensitive to edge and surface following, improves the structure in that the markers are distributed within the gap of papillae pins. Variations in light, dark, and grey effects can be generated inside the sensor through external contact interactions. The contours of the contacting objects are outlined by white markers, while the contact depth characteristics can be indirectly obtained from the distribution of black pins and white markers, creating a 2.5D visualization. Based on the imaging effect, we improve the Shape from Shading (SFS) algorithm to process tactile images, enabling a coarse but fast reconstruction for the contact objects. Two experiments are performed. The first verifies TacShade s ability to reconstruct the shape of the contact objects through one image for object distinction. The second experiment shows the shape reconstruction capability of TacShade for a large panel with ridged patterns based on the location of robots and image splicing technology.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Revolutionizing Packaging: A Robotic Bagging Pipeline with Constraint-aware Structure-of-Interest Planning

Bagging operations, common in packaging and assisted living applications, are challenging due to a bag's complex deformable properties. To address this, we develop a robotic system for automated bagging tasks using an adaptive structure-of-interest (SOI) manipulation approach. Our method relies on real-time visual feedback to dynamically adjust manipulation without requiring prior knowledge of bag materials or dynamics. We present a robust pipeline featuring state estimation for SOIs using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), SOI generation via optimization-based bagging techniques, SOI motion planning with Constrained Bidirectional Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (CBiRRT), and dual-arm manipulation coordinated by Model Predictive Control (MPC). Experiments demonstrate the system's ability to achieve precise, stable bagging of various objects using adaptive coordination of the manipulators. The proposed framework advances the capability of dual-arm robots to perform more sophisticated automation of common tasks involving interactions with deformable objects.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Robot-Assisted Deep Venous Thrombosis Ultrasound Examination using Virtual Fixture

Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) is a common vascular disease with blood clots inside deep veins, which may block blood flow or even cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. A typical exam for DVT using ultrasound (US) imaging is by pressing the target vein until its lumen is fully compressed. However, the compression exam is highly operator-dependent. To alleviate intra- and inter-variations, we present a robotic US system with a novel hybrid force motion control scheme ensuring position and force tracking accuracy, and soft landing of the probe onto the target surface. In addition, a path-based virtual fixture is proposed to realize easy human-robot interaction for repeat compression operation at the lesion location. To ensure the biometric measurements obtained in different examinations are comparable, the 6D scanning path is determined in a coarse-to-fine manner using both an external RGBD camera and US images. The RGBD camera is first used to extract a rough scanning path on the object. Then, the segmented vascular lumen from US images are used to optimize the scanning path to ensure the visibility of the target object. To generate a continuous scan path for developing virtual fixtures, an arc-length based path fitting model considering both position and orientation is proposed. Finally, the whole system is evaluated on a human-like arm phantom with an uneven surface.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Meta-Reinforcement Learning Based on Self-Supervised Task Representation Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning enables artificial agents to learn from related training tasks and adapt to new tasks efficiently with minimal interaction data. However, most existing research is still limited to narrow task distributions that are parametric and stationary, and does not consider out-of-distribution tasks during the evaluation, thus, restricting its application. In this paper, we propose MoSS, a context-based Meta-reinforcement learning algorithm based on Self-Supervised task representation learning to address this challenge. We extend meta-RL to broad non-parametric task distributions which have never been explored before, and also achieve state-of-the-art results in non-stationary and out-of-distribution tasks. Specifically, MoSS consists of a task inference module and a policy module. We utilize the Gaussian mixture model for task representation to imitate the parametric and non-parametric task variations. Additionally, our online adaptation strategy enables the agent to react at the first sight of a task change, thus being applicable in non-stationary tasks. MoSS also exhibits strong generalization robustness in out-of-distributions tasks which benefits from the reliable and robust task representation. The policy is built on top of an off-policy RL algorithm and the entire network is trained completely off-policy to ensure high sample efficiency. On MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks, MoSS outperforms prior works in terms of asymptotic performance, sample efficiency (3-50x faster), adaptation efficiency, and generalization robustness on broad and diverse task distributions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

One-Shot Domain-Adaptive Imitation Learning via Progressive Learning

Traditional deep learning-based visual imitation learning techniques require a large amount of demonstration data for model training, and the pre-trained models are difficult to adapt to new scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a unified framework using a novel progressive learning approach comprised of three phases: i) a coarse learning phase for concept representation, ii) a fine learning phase for action generation, and iii) an imaginary learning phase for domain adaptation. Overall, this approach leads to a one-shot domain-adaptive imitation learning framework. We use robotic pouring task as an example to evaluate its effectiveness. Our results show that the method has several advantages over contemporary end-to-end imitation learning approaches, including an improved success rate for task execution and more efficient training for deep imitation learning. In addition, the generalizability to new domains is improved, as demonstrated here with novel background, target container and granule combinations. We believe that the proposed method can be broadly applicable to different industrial or domestic applications that involve deep imitation learning for robotic manipulation, where the target scenarios have high diversity while the human demonstration data is limited.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Unknown Object Segmentation through Domain Adaptation

The ability to segment unknown objects in cluttered scenes has a profound impact on robot grasping. The rise of deep learning has greatly transformed the pipeline of robotic grasping from model-based approach to data-driven stream, which generally requires a large scale of grasping data either collected in simulation or from real-world examples. In this paper, we proposed a sim-to-real framework to transfer the object segmentation model learned in simulation to the real-world. First, data samples are collected in simulation, including RGB, 6D pose, and point cloud. Second, we also present a GAN-based unknown object segmentation method through domain adaptation, which consists of an image translation module and an image segmentation module. The image translation module is used to shorten the reality gap and the segmentation module is responsible for the segmentation mask generation. We used the above method to perform segmentation experiments on unknown objects in a bin-picking scenario. Finally, the experimental result shows that the segmentation model learned in simulation can be used for real-world data segmentation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Learning compliant grasping and manipulation by teleoperation with adaptive force control

In this work, we focus on improving the robot's dexterous capability by exploiting visual sensing and adaptive force control. TeachNet, a vision-based teleoperation learning framework, is exploited to map human hand postures to a multi-fingered robot hand. We augment TeachNet, which is originally based on an imprecise kinematic mapping and position-only servoing, with a biomimetic learning-based compliance control algorithm for dexterous manipulation tasks. This compliance controller takes the mapped robotic joint angles from TeachNet as the desired goal, computes the desired joint torques. It is derived from a computational model of the biomimetic control strategy in human motor learning, which allows adapting the control variables (impedance and feedforward force) online during the execution of the reference joint angle trajectories. The simultaneous adaptation of the impedance and feedforward profiles enables the robot to interact with the environment in a compliant manner. Our approach has been verified in multiple tasks in physics simulation, i.e., grasping, opening-a-door, turning-a-cap, and touching-a-mouse, and has shown more reliable performances than the existing position control and the fixed-gain-based force control approaches.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Ensemble machine learning approach for screening of coronary heart disease based on echocardiography and risk factors

Background: Extensive clinical evidence suggests that a preventive screening of coronary heart disease (CHD) at an earlier stage can greatly reduce the mortality rate. We use 64 two-dimensional speckle tracking echocardiography (2D-STE) features and seven clinical features to predict whether one has CHD. Methods: We develop a machine learning approach that integrates a number of popular classification methods together by model stacking, and generalize the traditional stacking method to a two-step stacking method to improve the diagnostic performance. Results: By borrowing strengths from multiple classification models through the proposed method, we improve the CHD classification accuracy from around 70% to 87.7% on the testing set. The sensitivity of the proposed method is 0.903 and the specificity is 0.843, with an AUC of 0.904, which is significantly higher than those of the individual classification models. Conclusions: Our work lays a foundation for the deployment of speckle tracking echocardiography-based screening tools for coronary heart disease.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Retrieval-based Localization Based on Domain-invariant Feature Learning under Changing Environments

Visual localization is a crucial problem in mobile robotics and autonomous driving. One solution is to retrieve images with known pose from a database for the localization of query images. However, in environments with drastically varying conditions (e.g. illumination changes, seasons, occlusion, dynamic objects), retrieval-based localization is severely hampered and becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel domain-invariant feature learning method (DIFL) is proposed based on ComboGAN, a multi-domain image translation network architecture. By introducing a feature consistency loss (FCL) between the encoded features of the original image and translated image in another domain, we are able to train the encoders to generate domain-invariant features in a self-supervised manner. To retrieve a target image from the database, the query image is first encoded using the encoder belonging to the query domain to obtain a domain-invariant feature vector. We then preform retrieval by selecting the database image with the most similar domain-invariant feature vector. We validate the proposed approach on the CMU-Seasons dataset, where we outperform state-of-the-art learning-based descriptors in retrieval-based localization for high and medium precision scenarios.

cs.CV↗