Dense Visual Representations and More for Robotics

 Quite an interesting podcast I am about to listen to  ...   ideal applications?.

ACM OPINION

Dense Visual Representations, NeRFs, and LLMs for Robotics

By The Gradient, January 5, 2023

Google Research Scientist Pete Florence.

Pete Florence is a research scientist at Google Research on the Robotics at Google team inside Brain Team in Google Research.

As a Google research scientist, Pete Florence focuses on topics in robotics, computer vision, and natural language, including 3D learning, self-supervised learning, and policy learning in robotics. In an interview, Florence discusses his start in artificial intelligence, Ph.D. work with quadcopters, dense visual representations, NeRFs for robotics, language models for robotics, talking to robots in real time, and more.

From The Gradient

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Driverless Cars Building Virtual Cities

Virtual city models developed from car imaging to create  tests, training from virtual models. 

Google, Waymo Used Driverless Cars to Make Virtual San Francisco

By New Scientist, February 24, 2022

Researchers at driverless car company Waymo and Google Research used self-driving vehicles to create a virtual model of San Francisco from photos processed by Block-NeRF software.

The software is based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), a tool that builds three-dimensional (3D) models of small objects from a collection of stills that are viewable from all angles, even those that have no existing photos.

The method uses artificial intelligence trained to generate accurate 3D models from large image sets, which includes data on the exact location from which each image was captured.

Block-NeRF weaves together models of city blocks photographed by the driverless cars to keep the size of the overall model sufficiently small to run on modest hardware ...

Block-NeRF, created by researchers at driverless car company Waymo and Google Research, uses vast numbers of photos taken by cameras mounted atop Waymo’s autonomous cars to build small 3D models, each covering just over one city block. These models... 

From New Scientist   View Full Article