Robotic hand tool use has garnered significant attention from robotics researchers, because it enhances dexterity beyond the limitations imposed by manipulators with fixed tool configurations and human-involved manual tool changes. Despite extensive research, current methodologies predominantly focus on imitating human hand trajectories, often neglecting the pivotal role of tool-environment interaction. This study addresses this gap by exploring the task of cucumber peeling as a case study to implement contact-based demonstration strategies in robotic tool use. Our approach concentrates on the subtle tool contact behaviors that manifest through contact dynamics. Specifically, we select appropriate tool stiffness for the peeling tasks, which is captured via a handheld teaching device equipped with optical tactile sensors. Subsequently, object-level stiffness control strategies are employed to emulate these behaviors using a three-fingered robotic hand. Experimental results from real-world cucumber peeling trials substantiate our methodology, illustrating that the robotic hand can adjust contact through finger movements, thereby achieving humanlike peeling efficiency without necessitating alterations to the tool structure. This study not only demonstrates the feasibility of sophisticated tool use by robotic hands, but also highlights the critical importance of integrating tactile feedback to refine interaction with the environment.

Gaussian splatting has demonstrated excellent performance for view synthesis and scene reconstruction. The representation achieves photorealistic quality by optimizing the position, scale, color, and opacity of thousands to millions of 2D or 3D Gaussian primitives within a scene. However, since each Gaussian primitive encodes both appearance and geometry, these attributes are strongly coupled-thus, high-fidelity appearance modeling requires a large number of Gaussian primitives, even when the scene geometry is simple (e.g., for a textured planar surface). We propose to texture each 2D Gaussian primitive so that even a single Gaussian can be used to capture appearance details. By employing per-primitive texturing, our appearance representation is agnostic to the topology and complexity of the scene's geometry. We show that our approach, GStex, yields improved visual quality over prior work in texturing Gaussian splats. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our decoupling enables improved novel view synthesis performance compared to 2D Gaussian splatting when reducing the number of Gaussian primitives, and that GStex can be used for scene appearance editing and re-texturing.

In drone racing, the time-minimum trajectory is affected by the drone’s capabilities, the layout of the race track, and the configurations of the gates (e.g., their shapes and sizes). However, previous studies neglect the configuration of the gates, simply rendering drone racing a waypoint-passing task. This formulation often leads to a conservative choice of paths through the gates, as the spatial potential of the gates is not fully utilized. To address this issue, we present a time-optimal planner that can faithfully model gate constraints with various configurations and thereby generate a more time-efficient trajectory while considering the single-rotor-thrust limits. Our approach excels in computational efficiency which only takes a few seconds to compute the full state and control trajectories of the drone through tracks with dozens of different gates. Extensive simulations and experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, showing that the lap time can be further reduced by taking into account the gate’s configuration. We validate our planner in real-world flights and demonstrate super-extreme flight trajectory through race tracks.

Abstract When describing an image, people can rapidly extract the topic from the image and find the main object, generating sentences that match the main idea of the image. However, most of the scene graph generation methods do not emphasise the importance of the topic of the image. Consequently, the captions generated by the scene graph‐based image captioning models cannot reflect the topic in the image then expressing the central idea of the image. In this paper, we propose a method for image captioning based on topic scene graphs (TSG). Firstly, we propose the structure of topic scene graphs that express images' topics and the relationships between objects. Then, combined with the topic scene graph, we utilise the salient object detection to generate the topic scene graph highlighting the salient objects of the image. Note that our framework is agnostic to any scene graph‐based image captioning model and thus can be widely applied in the community which seeks salient object predictions. We compare the performance of our topic scene graph with the state‐of‐the‐art scene graph generation models and mainstream image captioning models on MSCOCO and Visual Genome datasets, both achieving better performance.

Decision tree algorithms are very popular in the field of data mining. This paper proposes a distributed decision tree algorithm and shows examples of its implementation on big data platforms. The major contribution of this paper is the novel KS-Tree algorithm which builds a decision tree in a distributed environment. KS-Tree is applied to some real world data mining problems and compared with state-of-the-art decision tree techniques that are implemented in R and Apache Spark. The results show that KS-Tree can achieve better results, especially with large data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that KS-Tree can be applied to various data mining tasks, such as variable selection.

This paper describes an effective motion estimation algorithm for panoramic video. According to the characteristics of the block motion in panoramic video, the proposed algorithm extends the reference frames and constructs search lines for the line search. With the constructed search lines, the line search estimates the motion of the corresponding macro block. It starts at the block matched by the line search and estimates the motion of adjacent blocks. Experiment results show that the algorithm can estimate the motion of macro blocks in cubic panoramic video effectively. It is also shown that the algorithm improves the search speed with effective motion estimation.