Ensuring safe and efficient navigation in crowded environments is a critical goal for assistive robots. Recent studies have emphasized the potential of deep reinforcement learning techniques to enhance robots’ navigation capabilities in the presence of crowds. However, current deep reinforcement learning methods often face the challenge of robots freezing as crowd density increases. To address this issue, a novel risk-aware deep reinforcement learning approach is proposed in this paper. The proposed method integrates a risk function to assess the probability of collision between the robot and pedestrians, enabling the robot to proactively prioritize pedestrians with a higher risk of collision. Furthermore, the model dynamically adjusts the fusion strategy of learning-based and risk-aware-based features, thereby improving the robustness of robot navigation. Evaluations were conducted to determine the effectiveness of the proposed method in both low- and high-crowd density settings. The results exhibited remarkable navigation success rates of 98.0% and 93.2% in environments with 10 and 20 pedestrians, respectively. These findings emphasize the robust performance of the proposed method in successfully navigating through crowded spaces. Additionally, the approach achieves navigation times comparable to those of state-of-the-art methods, confirming its efficiency in accomplishing navigation tasks. The generalization capability of the method was also rigorously assessed by subjecting it to testing in crowd environments exceeding the training density. Notably, the proposed method attains an impressive navigation success rate of 90.0% in 25-person environments, surpassing the performance of existing approaches and establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution. This result highlights the versatility and effectiveness of the proposed method in adapting to various crowd densities and further reinforces its applicability in real-world scenarios.

Accurately detecting suitable grasp areas for unknown objects through visual information remains a challenging task. Drawing inspiration from the success of the Vision Transformer in vision detection, the hybrid Transformer-CNN architecture for robotic grasp detection, known as HTC-Grasp, is developed to improve the accuracy of grasping unknown objects. The architecture employs an external attention-based hierarchical Transformer as an encoder to effectively capture global context and correlation features across the entire dataset. Furthermore, a channel-wise attention-based CNN decoder is presented to adaptively adjust the weight of the channels in the approach, resulting in more efficient feature aggregation. The proposed method is validated on the Cornell and the Jacquard dataset, achieving an image-wise detection accuracy of 98.3% and 95.8% on each dataset, respectively. Additionally, the object-wise detection accuracy of 96.9% and 92.4% on the same datasets are achieved based on this method. A physical experiment is also performed using the Elite 6Dof robot, with a grasping accuracy rate of 93.3%, demonstrating the proposed method’s ability to grasp unknown objects in real scenarios. The results of this study indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Task-oriented grasping (TOG) aims to predict the appropriate pose for grasping based on a specific task. While recent approaches have incorporated semantic knowledge into TOG models to enable robots to understand linguistic commands, they lack the ability to leverage relevant information from vision, language, and action. To address this problem, we propose a novel multimodal fusion grasping framework called VLA-Grasp. VLA-Grasp utilizes prompted large language model for task inference, and multi-channel multimodal encoders and cross-attention modules are proposed to capture the intrinsic links between vision-language-action, thus improving the generalization ability of the model. In addition, we introduce a multiple grasping decision method that can provide multiple feasible grasping actions. We experimentally evaluate our approach on a publicly available dataset and compare it to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we experimentally validate our model in a real-world scenario to evaluate its performance. The results show that our method provides a reliable and efficient solution for the TOG task. The code is available at https://github.com/Jianwei915/VLA-Grasp.

To address the time-optimal trajectory planning (TOTP) problem with joint jerk constraints in a Cartesian coordinate system, we propose a time-optimal path-parameterization (TOPP) algorithm based on nonlinear optimization. The key insight of our approach is the presentation of a comprehensive and effective iterative optimization framework for solving the optimal control problem (OCP) formulation of the TOTP problem in the $(s,\dot{s})$-phase plane. In particular, we identify two major difficulties: establishing TOPP in Cartesian space satisfying third-order constraints in joint space, and finding an efficient computational solution to TOPP, which includes nonlinear constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective solution for time-optimal trajectory planning with joint jerk limits, and can be applied to a wide range of robotic systems.

Recently, applying the utilization of RGB-D data for robot perception tasks has garnered significant attention in domains like robotics and autonomous driving. However, a prominent challenge in this field lies in the substantial impact of feature robustness on both segmentation and pose estimation tasks. To tackle this challenge, we proposed a pioneering two-stage hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, which connects segmentation and pose estimation in tandem. Specifically, we developed Cross-Modal (CM) and Cross-Layer (CL) modules to exploit the complementary information from RGB and depth modalities, as well as the hierarchical features from diverse layers of the network. The CM and CL integration strategy significantly enhanced the segmentation accuracy by effectively capturing spatial and contextual information. Furthermore, we introduced the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), which dynamically recalibrated the feature maps, enabling the network to focus on informative regions and channels, thereby enhancing the overall performance of the pose estimation task. We conducted extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to evaluate the proposed method and achieved exceptional target pose estimation results, with an average accuracy of 94.5% using the ADD-S AUC metric and 97.6% of ADD-S smaller than 2 cm. These results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

In recent years, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made significant strides in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, existing models often encounter information redundancy and feature mismatch during feature fusion, and they struggle with small-scale refined features. To address these issues, we propose DCG-Net, an innovative classification network integrating CNN and GCN architectures. Our approach includes the development of a double-branch expanding network (E-Net) to enhance spectral features and efficiently extract high-level features. Additionally, we incorporate a GCN with an attention mechanism to facilitate the integration of multi-space scale superpixel-level and pixel-level features. To further improve feature fusion, we introduce a feature aggregation module (FAM) that adaptively learns channel features, enhancing classification robustness and accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on three widely used datasets show that DCG-Net achieves superior classification results compared to other state-of-the-art methods.