Tata Consultancy Services Limited

Ruddra Dev Roychoudhury

Brojeshwar Bhowmick

Abhijan Bhattacharyya

Chayan Sarkar

Snehasis Banerjee

Ashis Sau

Sayan Paul

Pradip Pramanick

Arpan Pal

Balamuralidhar Purushothaman

Sanjana Sinha

Madhurima Ganguly

Sandika Biswas

Hrishav Bakul Barua

Kritika Anand

Gulshan Kumar

Sai Shankar Narasimhan

Madhava Krishna Krishnan

Himansu Didwania

A system and method for navigation of a robot from a first area to a second area in a facility is provided. The present disclosure is providing robot navigation using the 'Areagoal' Navigation technique. ‘Areagoal’ class of problem is divided into two subtasks: identifying the area; and navigation from one area to another. The robot starts in first location and goes out of the current area if it is not in the target area. If there are multiple openings from the first area, it needs to select the most statistically close one to the target area and go there. If the target area is not reached, it backtracks to an earlier viable branch position to continue the target area search. The system takes input from RGB-D camera and odometer, while the output is action space (left, right, forward) with goal of moving to target area.

Method and system for navigation of robot from one area to another area

This disclosure relates generally to systems and methods for object detection using a geometric semantic map based robot navigation using an architecture to empower a robot to navigate an indoor environment with logical decision making at each intermediate stage. The decision making is further enhanced by knowledge on actuation capability of the robots and that of scenes, objects and their relations maintained in an ontological form. The robot navigates based on a Geometric Semantic map which is a relational combination of geometric and semantic map. In comparison to traditional approaches, the robot's primary task here is not to map the environment, but to reach a target object. Thus, a goal given to the robot is to find an object in an unknown environment with no navigational map and only egocentric RGB camera perception.

Systems and methods for object detection using a geometric semantic map based robot navigation

This disclosure addresses the unresolved problems of tackling object disambiguation task for an embodied agent. The embodiments of present disclosure provide a method and system for disambiguation of referred objects for embodied agents. With a phrase-to-graph network disclosed in the system of the present disclosure, any natural language object description indicating the object disambiguation task can be converted into a semantic graph representation. This not only provides a formal representation of the referred object and object instances but also helps to find an ambiguity in disambiguating the referred object using a real-time multi-view aggregation algorithm. The real-time multi-view aggregation algorithm processes multiple observations from an environment and finds the unique instances of the referred object. The method of the present disclosure demonstrates significant improvement in qualifying ambiguity detection with accurate, context-specific information so that it is sufficient for a user to come up with a reply towards disambiguation.

Methods and systems for disambiguation of referred objects for embodied agents

The embodiments of present disclosure herein address unresolved problem of cognitive navigation strategies for a telepresence robotic system. This includes giving instruction remotely over network to go to a point in an indoor space, to go an area, to go to an object. Also, human robot interaction to give and understand interaction is not integrated in a common telepresence framework. The embodiments herein provide a telepresence robotic system empowered with a smart navigation which is based on in situ intelligent visual semantic mapping of the live scene captured by a robot. It further presents an edge-centric software architecture of a teledrive comprising a speech recognition based HRI, a navigation module and a real-time WebRTC based communication framework that holds the entire telepresence robotic system together. Additionally, the disclosure provides a robot independent API calls via device driver ROS, making the offering hardware independent and capable of running in any robot.

Telepresence robots having cognitive navigation capability

In state of the art methods for object goal navigation, scene understanding is implicit in their goal oriented exploration policies. Implicit scene understanding coupled with navigation is shown to be specific to tasks for which training is done and not generalizable to new tasks. Thus, embodiments of present disclosure propose a method of goal-conditioned exploration wherein scene understanding is decoupled from the exploration policies. Here, the scene understanding required for navigation is provided by a region classification network that is trained using semantic graphs representing the scene and agent can be navigated towards the goal either by using any state of the art pure exploration policies or by traversing through potential sub-goals identified based on a Co-occurrence Likelihood score calculated by using predictions from the region classification network. Hence, the method of present disclosure can be easily generalized to new tasks and new environments.

Methods and system for goal-conditioned exploration for object goal navigation

This disclosure relates generally to navigation of a tele-robot in dynamic environment using in-situ intelligence. Tele-robotics is the area of robotics concerned with the control of robots (tele-robots) in a remote environment from a distance. In reality the remote environment where the tele robot navigates may be dynamic in nature with unpredictable movements, making the navigation extremely challenging. The disclosure proposes an in-situ intelligent navigation of a tele-robot in a dynamic environment. The disclosed in-situ intelligence enables the tele-robot to understand the dynamic environment by identification and estimation of future location of objects based on a generating/training a motion model. Further the disclosed techniques also enable communication between a master and the tele-robot (whenever necessary) based on an application layer communication semantic.

Navigation of tele-robot in dynamic environment using in-situ intelligence

Robotic platform for tele-presence applications has gained paramount importance, such as for remote meetings, group discussions, and the like and has sought much attention. There exist some robotic platforms for such tele-presence applications, these lack efficacy in communication and interaction between remote person and avatar robot deployed in another geographic location thus adding network overhead. Embodiments of the present disclosure for edge centric communication protocol for remotely maneuvering tele-presence robot in geographically distributed environment. More specifically, edge-centric tele-presence robot architecture is provided for maneuvering tele-presence robot in distributed geographical environment, wherein the architecture provides a framework that implements both cloud and edge-centric systems together with a first communication protocol for communication between a master device and an edge device and a second communication protocol different from the first communication protocol for communication between the edge device and the tele-presence robot to improve robustness and efficacy in communication.

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Kolkata, India

Ruddra Dev Roychoudhury