Author name cluster

Xuning Yang

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

6 papers

1 author row

ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Inference-Time Policy Steering Through Human Interactions

Yanwei Wang
Lirui Wang
Yilun Du
Balakumar Sundaralingam
Xuning Yang
Yu-Wei Chao
Claudia Pérez-D'Arpino
Dieter Fox

Generative policies trained with human demonstrations can autonomously accomplish multimodal, longhorizon tasks. However, during inference, humans are often removed from the policy execution loop, limiting the ability to guide a pre-trained policy towards a specific sub-goal or trajectory shape among multiple predictions. Naive human intervention may inadvertently exacerbate distribution shift, leading to constraint violations or execution failures. To better align policy output with human intent without inducing out-of-distribution errors, we propose an Inference-Time Policy Steering (ITPS) framework that leverages human interactions to bias the generative sampling process, rather than finetuning the policy on interaction data. We evaluate ITPS across three simulated and real-world benchmarks, testing three forms of human interaction and associated alignment distance metrics. Among six sampling strategies, our proposed stochastic sampling with diffusion policy achieves the best trade-off between alignment and distribution shift. Videos are available at https://yanweiw.github.io/itps/.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Fast Explicit-Input Assistance for Teleoperation in Clutter

Nick Walker 0001
Xuning Yang
Animesh Garg
Maya Cakmak
Dieter Fox
Claudia Pérez-D'Arpino

The performance of prediction-based assistance for robot teleoperation degrades in unseen or goal-rich environments due to incorrect or quickly-changing intent inferences. Poor predictions can confuse operators or cause them to change their control input to implicitly signal their goal. We present a new assistance interface for robotic manipulation where an operator can explicitly communicate a manipulation goal by pointing the end-effector. The pointing target specifies a region for local pose generation and optimization, providing interactive control over grasp and placement pose candidates. We evaluate this explicit pointing interface against an implicit inference-based assistance scheme and an unassisted control condition in a within-subjects user study (N=20), where participants teleoperate a simulated robot to complete a multi-step singulation and stacking task in cluttered environments. We find that operators prefer the explicit interface, experience fewer pick failures and report lower cognitive workload. Our code is available at: github.com/NVlabs/fast-explicit-teleop.

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ICRA Conference 2021 Conference Paper

An Intention Guided Hierarchical Framework for Trajectory-based Teleoperation of Mobile Robots

Xuning Yang
Jasmine Cheng
Nathan Michael

In human-in-the-loop navigation, the operator’s intention is to locally avoid obstacles while planning long-horizon paths in order to complete the navigation task. We propose a hierarchical teleoperation framework that captures these characteristics of intention, and generates trajectories that are locally safe and follow the operator’s global plan. The hierarchical teleoperation framework consists of 1) a global path which encapsulates the intended direction of the operator, 2) local trajectories that circumvent obstacles near the vehicle’s vicinity while following the global path, and 3) safety monitoring to avoid possible imminent collisions. By removing the operator from providing dynamic-level control inputs and instead having inputs inform trajectory generation, we show a significant reduction of the operator’s engagement while maintaining smooth performance. We showcase hierarchical teleoperation in navigation tasks in a random forest environment and a high-clutter warehouse characterized by narrow gaps and dense obstacles. With our method, we maintain consistent high speed throughout the task with smooth jerk profiles, decreased time to completion, and significantly reduced operator engagement.

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IROS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Assisted Mobile Robot Teleoperation with Intent-aligned Trajectories via Biased Incremental Action Sampling

Xuning Yang
Nathan Michael

We present a method to assist the operator in teleoperation of mobile robots by generating trajectories such that the vehicle completes the desired task with ease in unstructured environments. Traditional assisted teleoperation methods have focused on reactive methods to avoid collisions, but neglect the operator's intention in doing so. Instead, we generate long horizon, smooth trajectories that follow the operator's intended direction while circumventing obstacles for a seamless teleoperation experience. For mobile robot teleoperation, an explicit goal in the state space is often unclear in cases such as exploration or navigation. Therefore, we model the intent as a direction and encode it as a cost function. As trajectories of various lengths can satisfy the same directional objective, we iteratively construct a tree of sequential actions that form multiple trajectories along the intended direction. We show our algorithm on a real-time teleoperation task of a simulated hexarotor vehicle in a dense random forest environment. By doing so, our approach allows operator to achieve the navigation task while requiring less effort than reactive methods.

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IROS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Reactive Collision Avoidance Using Real-Time Local Gaussian Mixture Model Maps

Aditya Dhawale
Xuning Yang
Nathan Michael

In unknown, cluttered environments, robots require online real-time mapping and collision checking in order to navigate robustly. Discrete map representations are inefficient for collision checking as they are expensive in terms of memory and computation. This paper takes a probabilistic approach to local mapping by representing the environment as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and leverages its geometric properties to enable efficient collision checking given a time-parameterized trajectory. In contrast to current discretization-based methods, a GMM preserves geometric coverage of the environment without losing representation accuracy with varying map resolutions. We introduce a novel GMM local mapping algorithm that can be used with a single depth camera processed on a single CPU, and provide algorithms for collision avoidance given arbitrary trajectory representations. Finally, we provide experimentation results demonstrating safety, efficiency, and data coverage for real-time collision avoidance with a quadrotor navigating in a cluttered environment.

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ICRA Conference 2017 Conference Paper

A framework for efficient teleoperation via online adaptation

Xuning Yang
Koushil Sreenath
Nathan Michael

We propose a task-independent adaptive teleoperation methodology that seeks to improve operator performance and efficiency by concurrently modeling user intent and adapting the set of available actions according to the predicted intent. User input selects a robot motion from a finite set of dynamically feasible and safe motions, represented as a motion primitive library. User intent is modeled as a probabilistic distribution with respect to future actions that represents the likelihood of action selection given recent user input, which can be formulated independent of task, environment, or user. As the intent model becomes increasingly confident, the action set is adapted in order to reduce the error between the intended and actual performance. Experimental evaluation of teleoperating a quadrotor for nonaggressive, single-intent maneuvers such as following a racetrack and conducting a free-hand helix motion shows improved performance, validating that the approach provides efficient adaptation towards achieving the user intent.

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