We present Kalman-Filter Assisted Reinforcement Learner (KARL) for dynamic object tracking and grasping over eye-on-hand (EoH) systems, significantly expanding such systems’ capabilities in challenging, realistic environments. In comparison to the previous state-of-the-art, KARL (1) incorporates a novel six-stage RL curriculum that doubles the system’s motion range, thereby greatly enhancing the system’s grasping performance, (2) integrates a robust Kalman filter layer between the perception and reinforcement learning (RL) control modules, enabling the system to maintain an uncertain but continuous 6D pose estimate even when the target object temporarily exits the camera’s field-of-view or undergoes rapid, unpredictable motion, and (3) introduces mechanisms to allow retries to gracefully recover from unavoidable policy execution failures. Extensive evaluations conducted in both simulation and real-world experiments qualitatively and quantitatively corroborate KARL’s advantage over earlier systems, achieving higher grasp success rates and faster robot execution speed. Source code and supplementary materials for KARL will be made available at: https://github.com/arc-l/karl.

Solving storage problems—where objects must be accurately placed into containers with precise orientations and positions—presents a distinct challenge that extends beyond traditional rearrangement tasks. These challenges are primarily due to the need for fine-grained 6D manipulation and the inherent multi-modality of solution spaces, where multiple viable goal configurations exist for the same storage container. We present a novel Diffusion-based Affordance Prediction (DAP) pipeline for the multi-modal object storage problem. DAP leverages a two-step approach, initially identifying a placeable region on the container and then precisely computing the relative pose between the object and that region. Existing methods either struggle with multi-modality issues or computation-intensive training. Our experiments demonstrate DAP’s superior performance and training efficiency over the current state-of-the-art RPDiff, achieving remarkable results on the RPDiff benchmark. Additionally, our experiments showcase DAP’s data efficiency in real-world applications, an advancement over existing simulation-driven approaches. Our contribution fills a gap in robotic manipulation research by offering a solution that is both computationally efficient and capable of handling real-world variability. Code and supplementary material can be found at: https://github.com/changhaonan/DPS.git.

We present LGMCTS, a framework that uniquely combines language guidance with geometrically informed sampling distributions to effectively rearrange objects according to geometric patterns dictated by natural language descriptions. LGMCTS uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to create feasible action plans that ensure executable semantic object rearrangement. We present a comprehensive comparison with leading approaches that use language to generate goal rearrangements independently of actionable planning, including Structformer, StructDiffusion, and Code as policies. We also present a new benchmark, the Executable Language Guided Rearrangement (ELGR) Bench, containing tasks involving intricate geometry. With the ELGR bench, we show limitations of task and motion planning (TAMP) solutions that are purely based on Large Language Models (LLM) such as Code as Policies and Progprompt on such tasks. Our findings advocate for using LLMs to generate intermediary representations rather than direct action planning in geometrically complex rearrangement scenarios, aligning with perspectives from recent literature. Our code and supplementary materials are accessible at https://lgmcts.github.io/.

Given the drastic rise of repositories on GitHub, it is often hard for developers to find relevant projects meeting their requirements as analyzing source code and other artifacts is effort-intensive. In our prior work, we proposed Repo Reaper (or simply Reaper) that assesses GitHub projects based on seven metrics spanning across project collaboration, quality, and maintenance. Reaper identified 1.4 million projects out of nearly 1.8 million projects to have no purpose for collaboration or software development by classifying them into ‘engineered’ and ‘non-engineered’ software projects. While Reaper can be used to assess millions of repositories based on GHTorrent, it is not designed to be used by developers for standalone repositories on local machines and is dependent on GHTorrent. Hence, in this paper, we propose a re-engineered and extended command-line tool named RepoQuester that aims to assist developers in evaluating GitHub projects on their local machines. RepoQuester computes metrics for projects and does not classify projects into ‘engineered’ and ‘non-engineered’ ones. However, to demonstrate the correctness of metric scores produced by RepoQuester, we have performed the project classification on the Reaper’s training and validation datasets by updating them with the latest metric scores (as reported by RepoQuester). These datasets have their ground truth manually established. During the analysis, we observed that the machine learning classifiers built on the updated datasets produced an F1 score of 72%. During the evaluation, for each project, we found that RepoQuester can analyze metric scores in less than 10 seconds. A demo video explaining the tool highlights and usage is available at https://youtu.be/Q8OdmNzUfN0, and source code at https://github.com/Kowndinya2000/Repoquester.

GitHub hosts millions of software repositories, facilitating developers to contribute to many projects in multiple ways. Most of the information about the repositories is text-based in the form of stars, forks, commits, and so on. However, developers willing to contribute to projects on GitHub often find it challenging to select appropriate projects to contribute to or reuse due to the large number of repositories present on GitHub. Further, obtaining this required information often becomes a tedious process, as one has to carefully mine information hidden inside the repository. To alleviate the effort intensive mining procedures, researchers have proposed npm-badges to outline information relating to build status of a project. However, these badges are static and limit their usage to package dependency and build details. Adding visual cues such as badges, (see PDF) to the repositories might reduce the search space for developers. Hence, we present GitQ, to automatically augment GitHub repositories with badges representing information about source code and project maintenance. Presenting GitQ as a browser plugin to GitHub could make it easily accessible to developers using GitHub. GitQ is evaluated with 15 developers based on the UTAUT model to understand developer perception towards its usefulness. We observed that 11 out of 15 developers perceived GitQ to be useful in identifying the right set of repositories using visual cues such as (see PDF) generated by GitQ. The source code and tool are available for download on GitHub at https://github.com/gitq-for-github/plugin, and the demo can be found at https://youtu.be/c0yohmIat3A.

Given the limited tool support for energy-saving strategies during the design phase of android applications, developing battery-aware, location-based android applications is a non-trivial task for developers. To this end, we propose eGEN, consisting of (1) a Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) and (2) a code generator to specify and create native battery-aware, location-based mobile applications. We evaluated eGEN by instrumenting the generated battery-aware code in five location-based, open-source android applications and compared the energy consumption with non-eGEN versions. The experimental results show 188 mA (8.34% of battery per hour) of average reduction in battery consumption while showing only 97 meters of degradation in location accuracy over three kilometers of a cycling path. Hence, we see this tool as a first step in helping developers write battery-aware code in location-based android applications. The GitHub repository with source code and all artifacts is available at https://github.com/Kowndinya2000/egen, and the tool demo video at https://youtu.be/Iadfh4cCw8I.