7,624 research outputs found
Receding Horizon Planning with Rule Hierarchies for Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles must often contend with conflicting planning
requirements, e.g., safety and comfort could be at odds with each other if
avoiding a collision calls for slamming the brakes. To resolve such conflicts,
assigning importance ranking to rules (i.e., imposing a rule hierarchy) has
been proposed, which, in turn, induces rankings on trajectories based on the
importance of the rules they satisfy. On one hand, imposing rule hierarchies
can enhance interpretability, but introduce combinatorial complexity to
planning; while on the other hand, differentiable reward structures can be
leveraged by modern gradient-based optimization tools, but are less
interpretable and unintuitive to tune. In this paper, we present an approach to
equivalently express rule hierarchies as differentiable reward structures
amenable to modern gradient-based optimizers, thereby, achieving the best of
both worlds. We achieve this by formulating rank-preserving reward functions
that are monotonic in the rank of the trajectories induced by the rule
hierarchy; i.e., higher ranked trajectories receive higher reward. Equipped
with a rule hierarchy and its corresponding rank-preserving reward function, we
develop a two-stage planner that can efficiently resolve conflicting planning
requirements. We demonstrate that our approach can generate motion plans in
~7-10 Hz for various challenging road navigation and intersection negotiation
scenarios
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The societal embedding of sustainable Product-Service Systems: Looking for synergies between strategic design and transition studies
Copyright @ 2014 Greenleaf Publishing.Eco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion is hindered by several cultural, corporate and regulative barriers. Hence, an important challenge is not only to conceive sustainable PSS concepts, but also to understand how to manage, support and orient the introduction and diffusion of these concepts. Building upon recent advances in the innovation studies field (in particular the contributions from transition studies) this chapter puts forward a conceptual framework for the introduction and scaling-up of eco-efficient PSSs. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments: protected spaces where radical innovations can be tested, become more mature, and potentially challenge and change dominant socio-technical practices, habits and institutions. Starting from these considerations this chapter investigates the potential contribution that a strategic design approach can make to stimulating and supporting the societal embedding of eco-efficient PSS innovations. A new strategic design role thus emerges, a role in which the ideation and development of sustainable PSS concepts is coupled with the designing of appropriate transition paths to gradually incubate, introduce and diffuse these concepts. Starting from these considerations the chapter outlines and discusses the new design approach and capabilities required by strategic designers
Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent Techniques for Concurrent Reinforcement Learning of Negotiation Dialogue Policies
Abstract We use single-agent and multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) for learning dialogue policies in a resource allocation negotiation scenario. Two agents learn concurrently by interacting with each other without any need for simulated users (SUs) to train against or corpora to learn from. In particular, we compare the Qlearning, Policy Hill-Climbing (PHC) and Win or Learn Fast Policy Hill-Climbing (PHC-WoLF) algorithms, varying the scenario complexity (state space size), the number of training episodes, the learning rate, and the exploration rate. Our results show that generally Q-learning fails to converge whereas PHC and PHC-WoLF always converge and perform similarly. We also show that very high gradually decreasing exploration rates are required for convergence. We conclude that multiagent RL of dialogue policies is a promising alternative to using single-agent RL and SUs or learning directly from corpora
New ways of working in acute inpatient care: a case for change
This position paper focuses on the current tensions
and challenges of aligning inpatient care with
innovations in mental health services. It argues that a
cultural shift is required within inpatient services.
Obstacles to change including traditional perceptions
of the role and responsibilities of the psychiatrist are
discussed. The paper urges all staff working in acute
care to reflect on the service that they provide, and
to consider how the adoption of new ways of
working might revolutionise the organisational
culture. This cultural shift offers inpatient staff the
opportunity to fully utilise their expertise. New ways
of working may be perceived as a threat to existing
roles and responsibilities or as an exciting opportunity
for professional development with increased job
satisfaction. Above all, the move to new ways of
working, which is gathering pace throughout the UK,
could offer service users1 a quality of care that meets
their needs and expectations
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