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Kai-Fung Chu

Publications and source records attributed to Kai-Fung Chu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Distributed Virtual Model Control for Scalable Human-Robot Collaboration in Shared Workspace

We present a decentralized, agent agnostic, and safety-aware control framework for human-robot collaboration based on Virtual Model Control (VMC). In our approach, both humans and robots are embedded in the same virtual-component-shaped workspace, where motion is the result of the interaction with virtual springs and dampers rather than explicit trajectory planning. A decentralized, force-based stall detector identifies deadlocks, which are resolved through negotiation. This reduces the probability of robots getting stuck in the block placement task from up to 61.2% to zero in our experiments. The framework scales without structural changes thanks to the distributed implementation: in experiments we demonstrate safe collaboration with up to two robots and two humans, and in simulation up to four robots, maintaining inter-agent separation at around 20 cm. Results show that the method shapes robot behavior intuitively by adjusting control parameters and achieves deadlock-free operation across team sizes in all tested scenarios.

cs.RO

Hierarchical Procedural Framework for Low-latency Robot-Assisted Hand-Object Interaction

Advances in robotics have been driving the development of human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies. However, accurately perceiving human actions and achieving adaptive control remains a challenge in facilitating seamless coordination between human and robotic movements. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical procedural framework to enable dynamic robot-assisted hand-object interaction (HOI). An open-loop hierarchy leverages the RGB-based 3D reconstruction of the human hand, based on which motion primitives have been designed to translate hand motions into robotic actions. The low-level coordination hierarchy fine-tunes the robot's action by using the continuously updated 3D hand models. Experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the hierarchical control architecture. The adaptive coordination between human and robot behavior has achieved a delay of $\leq 0.3$ seconds in the tele-interaction scenario. A case study of ring-wearing tasks indicates the potential application of this work in assistive technologies such as healthcare and manufacturing.

cs.RO

A Survey of AI-Related Cyber Security Risks and Countermeasures in Mobility-as-a-Service

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) integrates different transport modalities and can support more personalisation of travellers' journey planning based on their individual preferences, behaviours and wishes. To fully achieve the potential of MaaS, a range of AI (including machine learning and data mining) algorithms are needed to learn personal requirements and needs, to optimise journey planning of each traveller and all travellers as a whole, to help transport service operators and relevant governmental bodies to operate and plan their services, and to detect and prevent cyber attacks from various threat actors including dishonest and malicious travellers and transport operators. The increasing use of different AI and data processing algorithms in both centralised and distributed settings opens the MaaS ecosystem up to diverse cyber and privacy attacks at both the AI algorithm level and the connectivity surfaces. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive review on the coupling between AI-driven MaaS design and the diverse cyber security challenges related to cyber attacks and countermeasures. In particular, we focus on how current and emerging AI-facilitated privacy risks (profiling, inference, and third-party threats) and adversarial AI attacks (evasion, extraction, and gamification) may impact the MaaS ecosystem. These risks often combine novel attacks (e.g., inverse learning) with traditional attack vectors (e.g., man-in-the-middle attacks), exacerbating the risks for the wider participation actors and the emergence of new business models.

cs.CR

Privacy-Preserving Self-Taught Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Data

Many application scenarios call for training a machine learning model among multiple participants. Federated learning (FL) was proposed to enable joint training of a deep learning model using the local data in each party without revealing the data to others. Among various types of FL methods, vertical FL is a category to handle data sources with the same ID space and different feature spaces. However, existing vertical FL methods suffer from limitations such as restrictive neural network structure, slow training speed, and often lack the ability to take advantage of data with unmatched IDs. In this work, we propose an FL method called self-taught federated learning to address the aforementioned issues, which uses unsupervised feature extraction techniques for distributed supervised deep learning tasks. In this method, only latent variables are transmitted to other parties for model training, while privacy is preserved by storing the data and parameters of activations, weights, and biases locally. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate and demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.

cs.LG