Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2207.02792

RoVaR: Robust Multi-agent Tracking through Dual-layer Diversity in Visual and RF Sensor Fusion

Abstract

The plethora of sensors in our commodity devices provides a rich substrate for sensor-fused tracking. Yet, today's solutions are unable to deliver robust and high tracking accuracies across multiple agents in practical, everyday environments - a feature central to the future of immersive and collaborative applications. This can be attributed to the limited scope of diversity leveraged by these fusion solutions, preventing them from catering to the multiple dimensions of accuracy, robustness (diverse environmental conditions) and scalability (multiple agents) simultaneously. In this work, we take an important step towards this goal by introducing the notion of dual-layer diversity to the problem of sensor fusion in multi-agent tracking. We demonstrate that the fusion of complementary tracking modalities, - passive/relative (e.g., visual odometry) and active/absolute tracking (e.g., infrastructure-assisted RF localization) offer a key first layer of diversity that brings scalability while the second layer of diversity lies in the methodology of fusion, where we bring together the complementary strengths of algorithmic (for robustness) and data-driven (for accuracy) approaches. RoVaR is an embodiment of such a dual-layer diversity approach that intelligently attends to cross-modal information using algorithmic and data-driven techniques that jointly share the burden of accurately tracking multiple agents in the wild. Extensive evaluations reveal RoVaR's multi-dimensional benefits in terms of tracking accuracy (median of 15cm), robustness (in unseen environments), light weight (runs in real-time on mobile platforms such as Jetson Nano/TX2), to enable practical multi-agent immersive applications in everyday environments.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Mallesham Dasari, Ramanujan K Sheshadri, Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Samir R. Das. 2022-07-06. RoVaR: Robust Multi-agent Tracking through Dual-layer Diversity in Visual and RF Sensor Fusion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02792

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Robotic Tele-Operation for Upper Aerodigestive Tract Microsurgery: System Design and Validation

Upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) treatments frequently employ transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) for procedures such as the removal of tumors or polyps. In TLM, a laser beam is used to cut target tissue, while forceps are employed to grasp, manipulate, and stabilize tissue within the UADT. Although TLM systems may rely on different technologies and interfaces, forceps manipulation is still predominantly performed manually, introducing limitations in ergonomics, precision, and controllability. This paper proposes a novel robotic system for tissue manipulation in UADT procedures, based on a novel end-effector designed for forceps control. The system is integrated within a teleoperation framework that employs a robotic manipulator with a programmed remote center of motion (RCM), enabling precise and constrained instrument motion while improving surgeon ergonomics. The proposed approach is validated through two experimental studies and a dedicated usability evaluation, demonstrating its effectiveness and suitability for UADT surgical applications.

cs.RO

HERMES: A Holistic End-to-End Risk-Aware Multimodal Embodied System with Vision-Language Models for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models increasingly benefit from large vision-language models for semantic understanding, yet safe and reliable planning under long-tail conditions remains challenging, particularly in mixed-traffic environments involving heterogeneous road users and rare safety-critical interactions. This paper proposes HERMES, a holistic risk-aware end-to-end multimodal driving framework that explicitly incorporates long-tail semantic knowledge into trajectory planning. HERMES employs a foundation-model-assisted annotation pipeline to construct structured Long-Tail Scene Context and Long-Tail Planning Context, capturing hazard-centric scene information, maneuver intent, and risk-aware planning guidance. A Tri-Modal Driving Module then integrates multi-view visual observations, historical ego-motion, and long-tail semantic instructions through intent- and risk-aware conditioning for trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world long-tail driving benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over representative recent baselines in overall planning performance and across diverse safety-critical scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and complementary roles of the major components within HERMES.

cs.RO

EgoPush: Egocentric Multi-Object Rearrangement for Mobile Robots via Constrained Teacher Observability

Humans rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, actively moving to keep task-relevant spatial cues in view. Mobile robots have not matched this: rearrangement is usually built on a global pose estimate or a map, which is exactly what a robot carrying one camera lacks, while pushing keeps changing the scene it would have to be built from. We present EgoPush, which pushes objects into anchor-relative formations from onboard RGB-D alone, with no global localization, external tracking, or map at deployment, and transfers zero-shot to a TurtleBot in controlled and visually cluttered scenes. What makes this learnable turns out to be a property of the teacher rather than of the student: three privileged teachers trained with identical rewards, architecture, and hyperparameters all exceed $98\%$ success, yet their distilled egocentric students reach $0\%$, $54.8\%$, and $87.3\%$, the only variable being the teacher's observation function. EgoPush therefore trains the teacher under egocentric observability constraints, restricting it to visibility-limited cues and revealing target references only when the anchor is centrally visible, so that its supervision is recoverable by a depth-based student distilled online. Making the teacher trainable in the first place needs two further pieces: a role-grouped object-centric interface shared by teacher and student, and stage-wise temporally decayed rewards for long-horizon credit assignment. Videos, the playable task, and code are available at https://ai4ce.github.io/EgoPush/.

cs.RO