Biologically Inspired Event-Based Perception and Sample-Efficient Learning for High-Speed Table Tennis Robots
Perception and decision-making in high-speed dynamic scenarios remain challenging for current robots. In contrast, humans and animals can rapidly perceive and make decisions in such environments. Taking table tennis as a typical example, conventional frame-based vision sensors suffer from motion blur, high latency and data redundancy, which can hardly meet real-time, accurate perception requirements. Inspired by the human visual system, event-based perception methods address these limitations through asynchronous sensing, high temporal resolution, and inherently sparse data representations. However, current event-based methods are still restricted to simplified, unrealistic ball-only scenarios. Meanwhile, existing decision-making approaches typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to converge, resulting in significant computational costs. In this work, we present a biologically inspired approach for high-speed table tennis robots, combining event-based perception with sample-efficient learning. On the perception side, we propose an event-based ball detection method that leverages motion cues and geometric consistency, operating directly on asynchronous event streams without frame reconstruction, to achieve robust and efficient detection in real-world rallies. On the decision-making side, we introduce a human-inspired, sample-efficient training strategy that first trains policies in low-speed scenarios, progressively acquiring skills from basic to advanced, and then adapts them to high-speed scenarios, guided by a case-dependent temporally adaptive reward and a reward-threshold mechanism. With the same training episodes, our method improves return-to-target accuracy by 35.8%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of biologically inspired perception and decision-making for high-speed robotic systems.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Double-Helix Vision (DH-V2): A Geometry-Based Visual Sampler for Bandwidth-Constrained Perception
We present Double-Helix Vision (DH), a geometry-based visual sampler that compresses 2D images into compact 1D signals using paired golden-ratio-inspired spiral trajectories. Rather than processing every pixel uniformly,…
Disparity EstimationBeyond Domain Randomization: Event-Inspired Perception for Visually Robust Adversarial Imitation from Videos
Imitation from videos often fails when expert demonstrations and learner environments exhibit domain shifts, such as discrepancies in lighting, color, or texture. While visual randomization partially addresses this probl…
Data AugmentationTOFFE -- Temporally-binned Object Flow from Events for High-speed and Energy-Efficient Object Detection and Tracking
Object detection and tracking is an essential perception task for enabling fully autonomous navigation in robotic systems. Edge robot systems such as small drones need to execute complex maneuvers at high-speeds with lim…
Autonomous NavigationGPUMotion EstimationObject+2Egocentric Event-Based Vision for Ping Pong Ball Trajectory Prediction
In this paper, we present a real-time egocentric trajectory prediction system for table tennis using event cameras. Unlike standard cameras, which suffer from high latency and motion blur at fast ball speeds, event camer…
Event-based visionTrajectory ForecastingTrajectory PredictionA Bio-Plausible Visual Neural Network for Locust-Inspired Collision Perception
Locust visual systems have long served as an important biological paradigm for studying looming perception and collision avoidance. Numerous computational models have successfully reproduced the selective responses of Lo…
Computational EfficiencyCollision Avoidance