Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.

One of today's goals for industrial robot systems is to allow fast and easy provisioning for new tasks. Skill-based systems that use planning and knowledge representation have long been one possible answer to this. However, especially with contact-rich robot tasks that need careful parameter settings, such reasoning techniques can fall short if the required knowledge not adequately modeled. We show an approach that provides a combination of task-level planning and reasoning with targeted learning of skill parameters for a task at hand. Starting from a task goal formulated in PDDL, the learnable parameters in the plan are identified and an operator can choose reward functions and parameters for the learning process. A tight integration with a knowledge framework allows to form a prior for learning and the usage of multi-objective Bayesian optimization eases to balance aspects such as safety and task performance that can often affect each other. We demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of our approach by learning skill parameters for two different contact-rich tasks and show their successful execution on a real 7-DOF KUKA-iiwa.

机器人技能系统旨在减少机器人设置时间的新制造任务。但是，对于灵巧，接触术的任务，通常很难找到正确的技能参数。一种策略是通过允许机器人系统直接学习任务来学习这些参数。对于学习问题，机器人操作员通常可以指定参数值的类型和范围。然而，鉴于他们先前的经验，机器人操作员应该能够通过提供有关在参数空间中找到最佳解决方案的知识猜测，从而进一步帮助学习过程。有趣的是，当前的机器人学习框架中没有利用这种先验知识。我们介绍了一种结合用户先验和贝叶斯优化的方法，以便在机器人部署时间快速优化机器人工业任务。我们在模拟中学习的三个任务以及直接在真实机器人系统上学习的两个任务中学习了我们的方法。此外，我们通过自动从良好表现的配置中自动构造先验来从相应的仿真任务中转移知识，以在真实系统上学习。为了处理潜在的任务目标，任务被建模为多目标问题。我们的结果表明，操作员的先验是用户指定和转移的，大大加快了富丽堂皇的阵线的发现，并且通常产生的最终性能远远超过了拟议的基线。

增强学习（RL）是一个强大的数学框架，可让机器人通过反复试验学习复杂的技能。尽管在许多应用中取得了许多成功，但RL算法仍然需要数千个试验才能融合到高性能的政策，可以在学习时产生危险的行为，并且优化的政策（通常为神经网络建模）几乎可以在无法执行的解释时给出零的解释。任务。由于这些原因，在工业环境中采用RL并不常见。另一方面，行为树（BTS）可以提供一个策略表示，a）支持模块化和可综合的技能，b）允许轻松解释机器人动作，c）提供了有利的低维参数空间。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的算法，该算法可以学习模拟中BT策略的参数，然后在没有任何其他培训的情况下将其推广到物理机器人。我们利用了使用数字化工作站的物理模拟器，并使用黑盒优化器优化相关参数。我们在包括避免障碍物和富含接触的插入（孔洞）的任务中，通过7道型kuka-iiwa操纵器展示了我们方法的功效，其中我们的方法优于基准。

With the advent of Neural Style Transfer (NST), stylizing an image has become quite popular. A convenient way for extending stylization techniques to videos is by applying them on a per-frame basis. However, such per-frame application usually lacks temporal-consistency expressed by undesirable flickering artifacts. Most of the existing approaches for enforcing temporal-consistency suffers from one or more of the following drawbacks. They (1) are only suitable for a limited range of stylization techniques, (2) can only be applied in an offline fashion requiring the complete video as input, (3) cannot provide consistency for the task of stylization, or (4) do not provide interactive consistency-control. Note that existing consistent video-filtering approaches aim to completely remove flickering artifacts and thus do not respect any specific consistency-control aspect. For stylization tasks, however, consistency-control is an essential requirement where a certain amount of flickering can add to the artistic look and feel. Moreover, making this control interactive is paramount from a usability perspective. To achieve the above requirements, we propose an approach that can stylize video streams while providing interactive consistency-control. Apart from stylization, our approach also supports various other image processing filters. For achieving interactive performance, we develop a lite optical-flow network that operates at 80 Frames per second (FPS) on desktop systems with sufficient accuracy. We show that the final consistent video-output using our flow network is comparable to that being obtained using state-of-the-art optical-flow network. Further, we employ an adaptive combination of local and global consistent features and enable interactive selection between the two. By objective and subjective evaluation, we show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches.

Vision transformers have emerged as powerful tools for many computer vision tasks. It has been shown that their features and class tokens can be used for salient object segmentation. However, the properties of segmentation transformers remain largely unstudied. In this work we conduct an in-depth study of the spatial attentions of different backbone layers of semantic segmentation transformers and uncover interesting properties. The spatial attentions of a patch intersecting with an object tend to concentrate within the object, whereas the attentions of larger, more uniform image areas rather follow a diffusive behavior. In other words, vision transformers trained to segment a fixed set of object classes generalize to objects well beyond this set. We exploit this by extracting heatmaps that can be used to segment unknown objects within diverse backgrounds, such as obstacles in traffic scenes. Our method is training-free and its computational overhead negligible. We use off-the-shelf transformers trained for street-scene segmentation to process other scene types.

The problem of generating an optimal coalition structure for a given coalition game of rational agents is to find a partition that maximizes their social welfare and is known to be NP-hard. This paper proposes GCS-Q, a novel quantum-supported solution for Induced Subgraph Games (ISGs) in coalition structure generation. GCS-Q starts by considering the grand coalition as initial coalition structure and proceeds by iteratively splitting the coalitions into two nonempty subsets to obtain a coalition structure with a higher coalition value. In particular, given an $n$-agent ISG, the GCS-Q solves the optimal split problem $\mathcal{O} (n)$ times using a quantum annealing device, exploring $\mathcal{O}(2^n)$ partitions at each step. We show that GCS-Q outperforms the currently best classical solvers with its runtime in the order of $n^2$ and an expected worst-case approximation ratio of $93\%$ on standard benchmark datasets.

Active learning as a paradigm in deep learning is especially important in applications involving intricate perception tasks such as object detection where labels are difficult and expensive to acquire. Development of active learning methods in such fields is highly computationally expensive and time consuming which obstructs the progression of research and leads to a lack of comparability between methods. In this work, we propose and investigate a sandbox setup for rapid development and transparent evaluation of active learning in deep object detection. Our experiments with commonly used configurations of datasets and detection architectures found in the literature show that results obtained in our sandbox environment are representative of results on standard configurations. The total compute time to obtain results and assess the learning behavior can thereby be reduced by factors of up to 14 when comparing with Pascal VOC and up to 32 when comparing with BDD100k. This allows for testing and evaluating data acquisition and labeling strategies in under half a day and contributes to the transparency and development speed in the field of active learning for object detection.

Using robots in educational contexts has already shown to be beneficial for a student's learning and social behaviour. For levitating them to the next level of providing more effective and human-like tutoring, the ability to adapt to the user and to express proactivity is fundamental. By acting proactively, intelligent robotic tutors anticipate possible situations where problems for the student may arise and act in advance for preventing negative outcomes. Still, the decisions of when and how to behave proactively are open questions. Therefore, this paper deals with the investigation of how the student's cognitive-affective states can be used by a robotic tutor for triggering proactive tutoring dialogue. In doing so, it is aimed to improve the learning experience. For this reason, a concept learning task scenario was observed where a robotic assistant proactively helped when negative user states were detected. In a learning task, the user's states of frustration and confusion were deemed to have negative effects on the outcome of the task and were used to trigger proactive behaviour. In an empirical user study with 40 undergraduate and doctoral students, we studied whether the initiation of proactive behaviour after the detection of signs of confusion and frustration improves the student's concentration and trust in the agent. Additionally, we investigated which level of proactive dialogue is useful for promoting the student's concentration and trust. The results show that high proactive behaviour harms trust, especially when triggered during negative cognitive-affective states but contributes to keeping the student focused on the task when triggered in these states. Based on our study results, we further discuss future steps for improving the proactive assistance of robotic tutoring systems.

Self-training has been shown to be helpful in addressing data scarcity for many domains, including vision, speech, and language. Specifically, self-training, or pseudo-labeling, labels unsupervised data and adds that to the training pool. In this work, we investigate and use pseudo-labeling for a recently proposed novel setup: joint transcription and translation of speech, which suffers from an absence of sufficient data resources. We show that under such data-deficient circumstances, the unlabeled data can significantly vary in domain from the supervised data, which results in pseudo-label quality degradation. We investigate two categories of remedies that require no additional supervision and target the domain mismatch: pseudo-label filtering and data augmentation. We show that pseudo-label analysis and processing as such results in additional gains on top of the vanilla pseudo-labeling setup resulting in total improvements of up to 0.6% absolute WER and 2.2 BLEU points.