99,351 research outputs found
The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms
Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Knowledge Transfer Between Robots with Similar Dynamics for High-Accuracy Impromptu Trajectory Tracking
In this paper, we propose an online learning approach that enables the
inverse dynamics model learned for a source robot to be transferred to a target
robot (e.g., from one quadrotor to another quadrotor with different mass or
aerodynamic properties). The goal is to leverage knowledge from the source
robot such that the target robot achieves high-accuracy trajectory tracking on
arbitrary trajectories from the first attempt with minimal data recollection
and training. Most existing approaches for multi-robot knowledge transfer are
based on post-analysis of datasets collected from both robots. In this work, we
study the feasibility of impromptu transfer of models across robots by learning
an error prediction module online. In particular, we analytically derive the
form of the mapping to be learned by the online module for exact tracking,
propose an approach for characterizing similarity between robots, and use these
results to analyze the stability of the overall system. The proposed approach
is illustrated in simulation and verified experimentally on two different
quadrotors performing impromptu trajectory tracking tasks, where the quadrotors
are required to accurately track arbitrary hand-drawn trajectories from the
first attempt.Comment: European Control Conference (ECC) 201
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