Software assembly and open standards for driving simulation

International audienceDriving simulation systems involve a combination of different computation codes. Although some of these modules are application-specific, their majority is reusable and state-of-the-art implementations are readily available in the open source community. This study investigates whether these open source libraries can combine to build a driving simulation application with reasonable performance. To this end, a component-oriented architecture is proposed, in which modules encapsulate relevant libraries behind a standard interface and exchange simulation data through a message passing interface. By integrating a render engine, a physics library and a simple vehicle dynamics model, we were able to rapidly build a functional minimal simulation application supporting distributed execution over a cluster of computers. As this architecture allows the transparent modification of module code and simplifies the addition of new modules, this kernel represents the foundations of an extensible and reconfigurable open source system dedicated to driving simulation. Details on this kernel application and ongoing development of this platform can found at http://open-s.sourceforge.net.Les logiciels de simulation de conduite reposent sur une combinaison de différents codes de calculs. Bien qu’une partie de ces modules soit extrêmement dépendante d’un usage particulier, leur majorité est réutilisable et certaines implémentations de pointe sont disponibles dans la communauté du logiciel libre. Cette étude vise à déterminer s’il est possible de combiner ces bibliothèques libres afin de construire une application de simulation de conduite atteignant de raisonnables performances. A cette fin, nous proposons une architecture orientée composant, selon laquelle ces bibliothèques sont encapsulées dans des modules s’échangeant des données relatives à la simulation au travers d’une interface d’échange de messages. En intégrant à cette architecture un moteur graphique, une bibliothèque de simulation de physique et un simple modèle de dynamique de véhicule, nous avons pu rapidement mettre en place une application de simulation minimale, pouvant s’exécuter de manière distribuée sur un cluster d’ordinateurs. Cette architecture permettant de modifier le code d’un module de manière transparente et simplifiant l’ajout de nouveaux modules, ce noyau constitue la base d’un logiciel libre extensible et polymorphique dédié à la simulation de conduite dont les détails peuvent être consultés sur le site : http://open-s.sourceforge.net

Software assembly and open standards for driving simulation

Driving simulation systems involve a combination of different computation codes. Although some of these modules are application-specific, their majority is reusable and state-of-the-art implementations are readily available in the open source community. This study investigates whether these open source libraries can combine to build a driving simulation application with reasonable performance. To this end, a component-oriented architecture is proposed, in which modules encapsulate relevant libraries behind a standard interface and exchange simulation data through a message passing interface. By integrating a render engine, a physics library and a simple vehicle dynamics model, we were able to rapidly build a functional minimal simulation application supporting distributed execution over a cluster of computers. As this architecture allows the transparent modification of module code and simplifies the addition of new modules, this kernel represents the foundations of an extensible and reconfigurable open source system dedicated to driving simulation. Details on this kernel application and ongoing development of this platform can found at http://open-s.sourceforge.net.Les logiciels de simulation de conduite reposent sur une combinaison de différents codes de calculs. Bien qu’une partie de ces modules soit extrêmement dépendante d’un usage particulier, leur majorité est réutilisable et certaines implémentations de pointe sont disponibles dans la communauté du logiciel libre. Cette étude vise à déterminer s’il est possible de combiner ces bibliothèques libres afin de construire une application de simulation de conduite atteignant de raisonnables performances. A cette fin, nous proposons une architecture orientée composant, selon laquelle ces bibliothèques sont encapsulées dans des modules s’échangeant des données relatives à la simulation au travers d’une interface d’échange de messages. En intégrant à cette architecture un moteur graphique, une bibliothèque de simulation de physique et un simple modèle de dynamique de véhicule, nous avons pu rapidement mettre en place une application de simulation minimale, pouvant s’exécuter de manière distribuée sur un cluster d’ordinateurs. Cette architecture permettant de modifier le code d’un module de manière transparente et simplifiant l’ajout de nouveaux modules, ce noyau constitue la base d’un logiciel libre extensible et polymorphique dédié à la simulation de conduite dont les détails peuvent être consultés sur le site : http://open-s.sourceforge.net

Virtualising visualisation: A distributed service based approach to visualisation on the Grid

Context: Current visualisation systems are not designed to work with the large quantities of data produced by scientists today, they rely on the abilities of a single resource to perform all of the processing and visualisation of data which limits the problem size that they can investigate. Objectives: The objectives of this research are to address the issues encountered by scientists with current visualisation systems and the deficiencies highlighted in current visualisation systems. The research then addresses the question:” How do you design the ideal service oriented architecture for visualisation that meets the needs of scientists?” Method: A new design for a visualisation system based upon a Service Oriented Architecture is proposed to address the issues identified, the architecture is implemented using Java and web service technology. The implementation of the architecture also realised several case study scenarios as demonstrators. Evaluation: Evaluation was performed using case study scenarios of scientific problems and performance data was conducted through experimentation. The scenarios were assessed against the requirements for the architecture and the performance data against a base case simulating a single resource implementation. Conclusion: The virtualised visualisation architecture shows promise for applications where visualisation can be performed in a highly parallel manner and where the problem can be easily sub-divided into chunks for distributed processing

Percepción basada en visión estereoscópica, planificación de trayectorias y estrategias de navegación para exploración robótica autónoma

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia artificial, leída el 13-05-2015En esta tesis se trata el desarrollo de una estrategia de navegación autónoma basada en visión artificial para exploración robótica autónoma de superficies planetarias. Se han desarrollado una serie de subsistemas, módulos y software específicos para la investigación desarrollada en este trabajo, ya que la mayoría de las herramientas existentes para este dominio son propiedad de agencias espaciales nacionales, no accesibles a la comunidad científica. Se ha diseñado una arquitectura software modular multi-capa con varios niveles jerárquicos para albergar el conjunto de algoritmos que implementan la estrategia de navegación autónoma y garantizar la portabilidad del software, su reutilización e independencia del hardware. Se incluye también el diseño de un entorno de trabajo destinado a dar soporte al desarrollo de las estrategias de navegación. Éste se basa parcialmente en herramientas de código abierto al alcance de cualquier investigador o institución, con las necesarias adaptaciones y extensiones, e incluye capacidades de simulación 3D, modelos de vehículos robóticos, sensores, y entornos operacionales, emulando superficies planetarias como Marte, para el análisis y validación a nivel funcional de las estrategias de navegación desarrolladas. Este entorno también ofrece capacidades de depuración y monitorización.La presente tesis se compone de dos partes principales. En la primera se aborda el diseño y desarrollo de las capacidades de autonomía de alto nivel de un rover, centrándose en la navegación autónoma, con el soporte de las capacidades de simulación y monitorización del entorno de trabajo previo. Se han llevado a cabo un conjunto de experimentos de campo, con un robot y hardware real, detallándose resultados, tiempo de procesamiento de algoritmos, así como el comportamiento y rendimiento del sistema en general. Como resultado, se ha identificado al sistema de percepción como un componente crucial dentro de la estrategia de navegación y, por tanto, el foco principal de potenciales optimizaciones y mejoras del sistema. Como consecuencia, en la segunda parte de este trabajo, se afronta el problema de la correspondencia en imágenes estéreo y reconstrucción 3D de entornos naturales no estructurados. Se han analizado una serie de algoritmos de correspondencia, procesos de imagen y filtros. Generalmente se asume que las intensidades de puntos correspondientes en imágenes del mismo par estéreo es la misma. Sin embargo, se ha comprobado que esta suposición es a menudo falsa, a pesar de que ambas se adquieren con un sistema de visión compuesto de dos cámaras idénticas. En consecuencia, se propone un sistema experto para la corrección automática de intensidades en pares de imágenes estéreo y reconstrucción 3D del entorno basado en procesos de imagen no aplicados hasta ahora en el campo de la visión estéreo. Éstos son el filtrado homomórfico y la correspondencia de histogramas, que han sido diseñados para corregir intensidades coordinadamente, ajustando una imagen en función de la otra. Los resultados se han podido optimizar adicionalmente gracias al diseño de un proceso de agrupación basado en el principio de continuidad espacial para eliminar falsos positivos y correspondencias erróneas. Se han estudiado los efectos de la aplicación de dichos filtros, en etapas previas y posteriores al proceso de correspondencia, con eficiencia verificada favorablemente. Su aplicación ha permitido la obtención de un mayor número de correspondencias válidas en comparación con los resultados obtenidos sin la aplicación de los mismos, consiguiendo mejoras significativas en los mapas de disparidad y, por lo tanto, en los procesos globales de percepción y reconstrucción 3D.Depto. de Ingeniería de Software e Inteligencia Artificial (ISIA)Fac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

Algorithms for a multi-projector CAVE system

With regards to facilitating development of VR applications, the main pur- pose of ALIVE is to reduce the amount of attention that the application developer has to dedicate to the issues that were described previously. In this project we aim to abstract the user from dealing with: Input devices. Display number and layout. De nition of the virtual cameras. Synchronization issues between cluster nodes. Notably missing from the list are 3D sound rendering and synchroniza- tion for non-deterministic algorithms. These problems are out of the scope of this project and will be addressed in the future. Summarizing the objectives of this project, we list: Provide an abstraction API, that facilitates development and deploy- ment of VR applications. Create a polygon renderer application based on the proposed API

MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning

Driving safely requires multiple capabilities from human and intelligent agents, such as the generalizability to unseen environments, the safety awareness of the surrounding traffic, and the decision-making in complex multi-agent settings. Despite the great success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), most of the RL research works investigate each capability separately due to the lack of integrated environments. In this work, we develop a new driving simulation platform called MetaDrive to support the research of generalizable reinforcement learning algorithms for machine autonomy. MetaDrive is highly compositional, which can generate an infinite number of diverse driving scenarios from both the procedural generation and the real data importing. Based on MetaDrive, we construct a variety of RL tasks and baselines in both single-agent and multi-agent settings, including benchmarking generalizability across unseen scenes, safe exploration, and learning multi-agent traffic. The generalization experiments conducted on both procedurally generated scenarios and real-world scenarios show that increasing the diversity and the size of the training set leads to the improvement of the generalizability of the RL agents. We further evaluate various safe reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms in MetaDrive environments and provide the benchmarks. Source code, documentation, and demo video are available at https://metadriverse.github.io/metadrive . More research projects based on MetaDrive simulator are listed at https://metadriverse.github.ioComment: Source code, documentation, and demo video are available at https://metadriverse.github.io/metadrive . More research projects based on MetaDrive simulator are listed at https://metadriverse.github.i

GPU Computing for Cognitive Robotics

This thesis presents the first investigation of the impact of GPU computing on cognitive robotics by providing a series of novel experiments in the area of action and language acquisition in humanoid robots and computer vision. Cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments. Reaching the ultimate goal of developing cognitive robots will require tremendous amounts of computational power, which was until recently provided mostly by standard CPU processors. CPU cores are optimised for serial code execution at the expense of parallel execution, which renders them relatively inefficient when it comes to high-performance computing applications. The ever-increasing market demand for high-performance, real-time 3D graphics has evolved the GPU into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor extraordinary computational power and very high memory bandwidth. These vast computational resources of modern GPUs can now be used by the most of the cognitive robotics models as they tend to be inherently parallel. Various interesting and insightful cognitive models were developed and addressed important scientific questions concerning action-language acquisition and computer vision. While they have provided us with important scientific insights, their complexity and application has not improved much over the last years. The experimental tasks as well as the scale of these models are often minimised to avoid excessive training times that grow exponentially with the number of neurons and the training data. This impedes further progress and development of complex neurocontrollers that would be able to take the cognitive robotics research a step closer to reaching the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines. This thesis presents several cases where the application of the GPU computing on cognitive robotics algorithms resulted in the development of large-scale neurocontrollers of previously unseen complexity enabling the conducting of the novel experiments described herein.European Commission Seventh Framework Programm