Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced machines' ability to understand and follow human instructions. In many tasks, LLMs have demonstrated performance that rivals human-level common sense. However, directly applying LLMs to domain-specific use cases, such as robotic pick-and-place, remains a challenge. Tasks that are intuitive for humans, who rely on prior knowledge and skills, become complex for robots. Industrial robotic applications like pick-and-place require a high degree of accuracy, often exceeding 90 %. In response to these challenges in domain-specific applications, we propose IntelliRMS, a novel system-oriented architecture for instruction-following robotic manipulation. The IntelliRMS synergizes the linguistic and open-vocabulary visual capabilities of foundational models to arrive at an accurate, robust and scalable system. Further, we demonstrate the effectiveness of IntelliRMS in a real-world industrial Bin-picking scenario within the retail sector, validating its performance with a comprehensive dataset.

The employment of large language models (LLMs) for task planning and reasoning has emerged as a focal point of interest within the robotics research community. However, directly applying LLMs, even with large token-sized prompts, does not achieve the task planning performance required for an industrial-grade domain-specific use-case (DSU). This work aims to overcome the obstacles of a robotic task planner for DSUs by introducing a novel planning framework, LLM-RSPF (Large Language Model-based Robotic System Planning Framework). Central to the LLM-RSPF is a novel robotic system ontology that organizes the components of the robotic system in a coherent and a systematic manner. The ontology empowers the LLM-RSP F to efficiently capture a contextual representation of the DSU using the LLMs. Subsequently, the research introduces a LLM-tuning regimen referred as chain of hierarchical thought (CoHT), specifically crafted to complement the proposed system ontology. Integrating these two components, the LLM-RSPF aims to enhance the accuracy, robustness, and throughput of a robotic system in a cost-effective manner. In addition, the research presents an empirical methodology to generate the LLM-tuning dataset size for a guaranteed performance. The LLM-RSPF is validated on a retail order-fulfillment use-case thereby, illustrating the efficacy of the framework. Through rigorous evaluation, the LLM-RSPF demonstrates exceptional performance on the generated dataset, effectively meeting the DSU objectives.

In this article, we propose a novel stochastic event-driven near-optimal sliding-mode controller design for addressing the consensus of a multiagent system in a network. The system is prone to external disturbances and network uncertainties, such as losses and delays of data packets. The randomness of network uncertainties introduces stochasticity in the system. The design starts with the formulation of control-affine dynamics based on a single integrator robot model, formation error, and sliding surface dynamics. An event-triggering condition is then derived for an update of control input for each agent. These input updates guarantee desired consensus in finite time with reaching time of each agent's sliding surface having an upper bound. The admissibility of event-driven near-optimal control updates is also ensured for each agent. The near-optimal control design for each agent has achieved through neural-network-based actor-critic architecture. The implementation of Pioneer P3-DX mobile robots illustrates threefold efficacy of the proposed design: 1) advantages of event-driven approach and higher order sliding mode controller; 2) robustness to network uncertainties; and 3) near-optimality in system performance.

Picking unseen objects from clutter is a difficult problem because of the variability in objects (shape, size, and material) and occlusion due to clutter. As a result, it becomes difficult for grasping methods to segment the objects properly and they fail to singulate the object to be picked. This may result in grasp failure or picking of multiple objects together in a single attempt. A push-to-move action by the robot will be beneficial to disperse the objects in the workspace and thus assist the grasping and vision algorithm. We propose a disperse and pick method for domain-independent robotic grasping in a highly cluttered heap of objects. The novel contribution of our framework is the introduction of a heuristic clutter removal method that does not require deep learning and can work on unseen objects. At each iteration of the algorithm, the robot either performs a push-to-move action or a grasp action based on the estimated clutter profile. For grasp planning, we present an improved and adaptive version of a recent domain-independent grasping method. The efficacy of the integrated system is demonstrated in simulation as well as in the real-world.

Capsule Network (CapsNet) has motivated researchers to work on it due to its distinct capability of retaining spatial correlations between image features. However, its applicability is still limited because of its intensive computational cost, memory usage and bandwidth requirement. This paper proposes a computationally efficient, lightweight CapsNet which paves its way forward for deployment in constrained edge devices as well as in web based applications. The proposed framework consists of Capsule layers and a deep feature representation layer as an input for capsules. The deep feature representation layer comprises of a series of feature blocks, containing convolution with a 3 × 3 kernel followed by batch normalization and convolution with a 1 × 1 kernel. The deeper or better represented input features help to improve recognition performance even with lesser number of capsules, making the network computationally more efficient. The efficacy of the proposed framework is validated by performing rigorous experimental studies on different datasets, such as CIFAR-10, FMNIST, MNIST and SVHN which include images of object classes as well as text characters. A comparative analysis has also been done with the state-of-the-art technique CapsNet. The comparison with recognition accuracy ensures that, the proposed architecture with deep input features provides more efficient routing between the capsules as compared to CapsNet. The proposed lightweight network has scaled down the number of parameters up to 60% of CapsNet, which is another significant contribution. This is achieved by collaborative effect of deep feature generation module and parametric changes performed in the primary capsule layer.

Collaborative software development models, inspired by the open source community, are also being considered for development and deployment of business applications. We describe current work and future directions towards a hosted model to support collaboration during software development. We submit that such a platform can enable rapid application development, facilitate globally located virtual teams spanning locations to work as a single unit, and also encourage re-use, especially of technical frameworks. Going forward, we foresee extending such environments to providing an end-to-end development process accessible to globally distributed virtual teams.