Michael C. Welle

Robotics and Representation Learning

I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Danica Kragic, at the Robotics, Perception and Learning Lab (RPL), EECS, at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden. Where I also did my PhD under Danica Kragics supervission as well as co-supervision of Anastasiia Varava, and Hang Yin.

I'm working on learning representations for rigid and deformable objects manipulation. My work includes partial caging as well as working with highly deformable objects (clothing).

My CV can be found here (not neccesary up to date).

Recent Work

Ensemble Latent Space Roadmap for Improved Robustness in Visual Action Planning
Michael C. Welle*, Martina Lippi*, Andrea Gasparri, Danica Kragic

Abstract Planning in learned latent spaces helps to decrease the dimensionality of raw observations. In this work, we propose to leverage the ensemble paradigm to enhance the robustness of latent planning systems. We rely on our Latent Space Roadmap (LSR) framework, which builds a graph in a learned structured latent space to perform planning. Given multiple LSR framework instances, that differ either on their latent spaces or on the parameters for constructing the graph, we use the action information as well as the embedded nodes of the produced plans to define similarity measures. These are then utilized to select the most promising plans. We validate the performance of our Ensemble LSR (ENS-LSR) on simulated box stacking and grape harvesting tasks as well as on a real-world robotic T-shirt folding experiment.

Submitted to IROS 2023

Enabling Robot Manipulation of Soft and Rigid Objects with Vision-based Tactile Sensors
Michael C. Welle*, Martina Lippi*, Haofei Lu, Jens Lundell, Andrea Gasparri, Danica Kragic

Abstract Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost vision-based tactile sensors and propose a manipulation algorithm that adapts to both rigid and soft objects without requiring any knowledge of their properties. The algorithm relies on a touch and slip detection method, which considers the variation in the tactile images with respect to reference ones. We validate the approach on seven different objects, with different properties in terms of rigidity and fragility, to perform unplugging and lifting tasks. Furthermore, to enhance applicability, we combine the manipulation algorithm with a grasp sampler for the task of finding and picking a grape from a bunch without damaging it.

Submitted to CASE 2023

A Virtual Reality Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration in Cloth Folding
Marco Moletta, Maciej K. Wozniak, Michael C. Welle, and Danica Kragic

Abstract We present a virtual reality (VR) framework to automate the data collection process in cloth folding tasks. The framework uses skeleton representations to help the user define the folding plans for different classes of garments, allowing for replicating the folding on unseen items of the same class. We evaluate the framework in the context of automating garment folding tasks. A quantitative analysis is performed on 3 classes of garments, demonstrating that the framework reduces the need for intervention by the user. We also compare skeleton representations with RGB and binary images in a classification task on a large dataset of clothing items, motivating the use of the framework for other classes of garments.

Submitted to Ro-man 2023

Publications

Journal Papers:


Enabling Visual Action Planning for Object Manipulation through Latent Space Roadmap

Martina Lippi*, Petra Poklukar*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasia Varava, Hang Yin, Alessandro Marino, and Danica Kragic
Accepted in Transactions on Robotics (TRO), 2022

Partial Caging: A Clearance-Based Definition, Datasets and Deep Learning

Michael Welle, Anastasiia Varava, Jeffrey Mahler, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic, and Florian T. Pokorny
Published in Autonomous Robots, Special Issue Topological Methods in Robotics 2021

Benchmarking Bimanual Cloth Manipulation

Irene Garcia-Camacho*, Martina Lippi*, Michael C. Welle, Hang Yin, Rika Antonova, Anastasiia Varava, Júlia Borràs, Carme Torras, Alessandro Marino, Guillem Alenyà, Danica Kragic
Puplished in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 5.2 (2020)

From Visual Understanding to Complex Object Manipulation

Judith Butepage, Silvia Cruciani, Mia Kokic, Michael Welle, and Danica Kragic
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems (2019)


Conference Papers:


EDO-Net: Learning Elastic Properties of Deformable Objects from Graph Dynamics

Alberta Longhini, Marco Moletta, Alfredo Reichlin, Michael C Welle, David Held, Zackory Erickson, Danica Kragic
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

Elastic Context: Encoding Elasticity for Data-driven Models of Textiles

Alberta Longhini, Marco Moletta, Alfredo Reichlin, Michael C Welle, Alexander Kravberg, Yufei Wang, David Held, Zackory Erickson, Danica Kragic
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

Augment-Connect-Explore: a Paradigm for Visual Action Planning with Data Scarcity

Martina Lippi*, Michael C. Welle*, Petra Poklukar, Alessandro Marino and Danica Kragic
Accepted in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2022)

Embedding Koopman Optimal Control in Robot Policy Learning

Hang Yin, Michael C. Welle and Danica Kragic
Accepted in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2022)

Comparing Reconstruction- and Contrastive-based Models for Visual Task Planning

Constantinos Chamzas*, Martina Lippi*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasia Varava, Lydia E. Kavraki, and Danica Kragic
Accepted in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2022)

Textile Taxonomy and Classification Using Pulling and Twisting

Alberta Longhini, Michael C. Welle, Ioanna Mitsioni and Danica Kragic
Accepted in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2021)

Learning Task Constraints in Visual-Action Planning from Demonstrations

Francesco Esposito, Christian Pek, Michael C. Welle and Danica Kragic
Puplished in IEEE Int. Conf. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN2021)

Latent Space Roadmap for Visual Action Planning of Deformable and Rigid Object Manipulation

Martina Lippi*, Petra Poklukar*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasiia Varava, Hang Yin, Alessandro Marino, and Danica Kragic
Puplished in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2020)

Fashion Landmark Detection and Category Classification for Robotics

Thomas Ziegler, Judith Butepage, Michael C. Welle, Anastasiia Varava, Tonci Novkovic and Danica Kragic
Published in IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC2020)

Partial Caging: A Clearance-Based Definition and Deep Learning

Anastasiia Varava*, Michael Welle*, Jeffrey Mahler, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic, and Florian T. Pokorny
Published in International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019)

On the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Autonomous Object Modeling

Michael Welle, Ludvig Ericson, Rares Ambrus, Patric Jensfelt
Published in European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR2017)



Workshops and Projects

Organisation:

Transferability in Robotics Workshop @ ICRA2023

Michael C. Welle, Andrej Gams, Ahalya Prabhakar,Rainer Kartmann, Daniel Leidner, Danica Kragic
Workshop held at ICRA2023

3nd Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects @ ICRA2023

Martina Lippi*, Daniel Seita*, Michael C. Welle*, Fangyi Zhang*, Hang Yin, Danica Kragic, Alessandro Marino, David Held, Peter Corke
Workshop held at ICRA2023

2nd Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects @ ICRA2022

Martina Lippi*, Daniel Seita*, Michael C. Welle*, Hang Yin, Danica Kragic, David Held, Yiannis Karayiannidis
Workshop held at ICRA2022

Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects Workshop @ ICRA2021

Martina Lippi*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasiia Varava*, Hang Yin, Rika Antonova, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic, Yiannis Karayiannidis, Ville Kyrki, Alessandro Marino, Julia Borras, Guillem Alenya, Carme Torras
Workshop held at ICRA2021



Contributions:

Batch Curation for Unsupervised Contrastive Representation Learning

Michael C. Welle*, Petra Poklukar*, and Danica Kragic
Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning for Reasoning and Perception, Workshop at International Conference on Machine Learning 2021

State Representations in Robotics: Identifying Relevant Factors of Variation using Weak Supervision

Constantinos Chamzas*, Martina Lippi*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasiia Varava, Lydia Kavraki, and Alessandro Marino, and Danica Kragic
NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Robot Learning

Latent Space Roadmap for Visual Action Planning

Martina Lippi*, Petra Poklukar*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasiia Varava, Hang Yin, Alessandro Marino, and Danica Kragic
RSS 2020 Workshop - Visual Learning and Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation

Analyzing Representations through Interventions

Petra Poklukar*, Michael C. Welle*, Anastasiia Varava and Danica Kragic
32nd annual workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS)

Projects:

Baxter plays Tic-Tac-Toe while shopping with Simtrack

Summer Internship at HKUST, HongKong, Supervisors: Michael Wang, Hang Kaiyu

Talks

Talking Robotics #40

27.04.2022 Talk information

Ph.D. defense

(As the official defense recording had technical difficulties it is a test recording of my thesis presentation)

Thesis title: Learning structured Representations for ridgid and deformable Object Manipulation

Teaching

PhD student Supervision

Co-supervising Alberta Longhini

Co-supervising Marco Moletta

Co-supervising Peiyang "Yonk" Shi

Master Thesis Supervision

Nils Ingelhag - Ongoing

Mohammed Al-Jaff - Ongoing

Ioannis Iakovidis - Ongoing

Erik Zetterström - Ongoing

Tommy Walling; Structural Comparison of Data Representations Obtained from Deep Learning Models

David Norrman; Impact of Semantic Segmentation on OOD Detection Performance for VAEs and Normalizing Flow Models

Samuel Norling; Probabilistic Forecasting through Reformer Conditioned Normalizing Flows

Simon Westberg; Investigating the Learning Behavior of Generative Adversarial Networks

Joakim Dahl; Analysis of the effect of Latent Dimensions on Disentagement in Variational Autoencoders

Alberta Longhini; Fabric Material Classification by Combining Force and Vision;

Nik Vaessen; Training Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks with Disjoint Datasets

Georgios Deligiorgis; Context-Aware Graph Convolutional Network with Multi-Clusters Mini-Batch for Link Prediction

Ching-An Wu; Investigation of Different Observation and Action Spaces for Reinforcement Learning on Reaching Tasks

Courses

Fall 2021: TA in Introduction to Robotics (Msc)

Fall 2020: TA in Introduction to Robotics (Msc)

Fall 2020: Teacher in Project Course in Data Science (Msc)

Fall 2019: TA in Introduction to Robotics (Msc)

Fall 2019: Teacher in Project Course in Data Science (Msc)

Fall 2018: TA in Introduction to Robotics (Msc)

Fall 2018: TA in Artificial Intelligence (Msc)

Fall 2018: Teacher in Project Course in Data Science (Msc)

Fall 2017: TA in Artificial Intelligence (Msc)

Fall 2016: TA in Artificial Intelligence (Msc)

Open Master Theses

There are currently no open Theses.