47,049 research outputs found
Robust nonlinear control of vectored thrust aircraft
An interdisciplinary program in robust control for nonlinear systems with applications to a variety of engineering problems is outlined. Major emphasis will be placed on flight control, with both experimental and analytical studies. This program builds on recent new results in control theory for stability, stabilization, robust stability, robust performance, synthesis, and model reduction in a unified framework using Linear Fractional Transformations (LFT's), Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI's), and the structured singular value micron. Most of these new advances have been accomplished by the Caltech controls group independently or in collaboration with researchers in other institutions. These recent results offer a new and remarkably unified framework for all aspects of robust control, but what is particularly important for this program is that they also have important implications for system identification and control of nonlinear systems. This combines well with Caltech's expertise in nonlinear control theory, both in geometric methods and methods for systems with constraints and saturations
Understanding and Diagnosing Visual Tracking Systems
Several benchmark datasets for visual tracking research have been proposed in
recent years. Despite their usefulness, whether they are sufficient for
understanding and diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of different trackers
remains questionable. To address this issue, we propose a framework by breaking
a tracker down into five constituent parts, namely, motion model, feature
extractor, observation model, model updater, and ensemble post-processor. We
then conduct ablative experiments on each component to study how it affects the
overall result. Surprisingly, our findings are discrepant with some common
beliefs in the visual tracking research community. We find that the feature
extractor plays the most important role in a tracker. On the other hand,
although the observation model is the focus of many studies, we find that it
often brings no significant improvement. Moreover, the motion model and model
updater contain many details that could affect the result. Also, the ensemble
post-processor can improve the result substantially when the constituent
trackers have high diversity. Based on our findings, we put together some very
elementary building blocks to give a basic tracker which is competitive in
performance to the state-of-the-art trackers. We believe our framework can
provide a solid baseline when conducting controlled experiments for visual
tracking research
Measuring and Managing Answer Quality for Online Data-Intensive Services
Online data-intensive services parallelize query execution across distributed
software components. Interactive response time is a priority, so online query
executions return answers without waiting for slow running components to
finish. However, data from these slow components could lead to better answers.
We propose Ubora, an approach to measure the effect of slow running components
on the quality of answers. Ubora randomly samples online queries and executes
them twice. The first execution elides data from slow components and provides
fast online answers; the second execution waits for all components to complete.
Ubora uses memoization to speed up mature executions by replaying network
messages exchanged between components. Our systems-level implementation works
for a wide range of platforms, including Hadoop/Yarn, Apache Lucene, the
EasyRec Recommendation Engine, and the OpenEphyra question answering system.
Ubora computes answer quality much faster than competing approaches that do not
use memoization. With Ubora, we show that answer quality can and should be used
to guide online admission control. Our adaptive controller processed 37% more
queries than a competing controller guided by the rate of timeouts.Comment: Technical Repor
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