An architectural approach to create self organizing control systems for practical autonomous robots

For practical industrial applications, the development of trainable robots is an important and immediate objective. Therefore, the developing of flexible intelligence directly applicable to training is emphasized. It is generally agreed upon by the AI community that the fusion of expert systems, neural networks, and conventionally programmed modules (e.g., a trajectory generator) is promising in the quest for autonomous robotic intelligence. Autonomous robot development is hindered by integration and architectural problems. Some obstacles towards the construction of more general robot control systems are as follows: (1) Growth problem; (2) Software generation; (3) Interaction with environment; (4) Reliability; and (5) Resource limitation. Neural networks can be successfully applied to some of these problems. However, current implementations of neural networks are hampered by the resource limitation problem and must be trained extensively to produce computationally accurate output. A generalization of conventional neural nets is proposed, and an architecture is offered in an attempt to address the above problems

Fine-grained Discriminative Localization via Saliency-guided Faster R-CNN

Discriminative localization is essential for fine-grained image classification task, which devotes to recognizing hundreds of subcategories in the same basic-level category. Reflecting on discriminative regions of objects, key differences among different subcategories are subtle and local. Existing methods generally adopt a two-stage learning framework: The first stage is to localize the discriminative regions of objects, and the second is to encode the discriminative features for training classifiers. However, these methods generally have two limitations: (1) Separation of the two-stage learning is time-consuming. (2) Dependence on object and parts annotations for discriminative localization learning leads to heavily labor-consuming labeling. It is highly challenging to address these two important limitations simultaneously. Existing methods only focus on one of them. Therefore, this paper proposes the discriminative localization approach via saliency-guided Faster R-CNN to address the above two limitations at the same time, and our main novelties and advantages are: (1) End-to-end network based on Faster R-CNN is designed to simultaneously localize discriminative regions and encode discriminative features, which accelerates classification speed. (2) Saliency-guided localization learning is proposed to localize the discriminative region automatically, avoiding labor-consuming labeling. Both are jointly employed to simultaneously accelerate classification speed and eliminate dependence on object and parts annotations. Comparing with the state-of-the-art methods on the widely-used CUB-200-2011 dataset, our approach achieves both the best classification accuracy and efficiency.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in ACM MM 201

Multi-set canonical correlation analysis for 3D abnormal gait behaviour recognition based on virtual sample generation

Small sample dataset and two-dimensional (2D) approach are challenges to vision-based abnormal gait behaviour recognition (AGBR). The lack of three-dimensional (3D) structure of the human body causes 2D based methods to be limited in abnormal gait virtual sample generation (VSG). In this paper, 3D AGBR based on VSG and multi-set canonical correlation analysis (3D-AGRBMCCA) is proposed. First, the unstructured point cloud data of gait are obtained by using a structured light sensor. A 3D parametric body model is then deformed to fit the point cloud data, both in shape and posture. The features of point cloud data are then converted to a high-level structured representation of the body. The parametric body model is used for VSG based on the estimated body pose and shape data. Symmetry virtual samples, pose-perturbation virtual samples and various body-shape virtual samples with multi-views are generated to extend the training samples. The spatial-temporal features of the abnormal gait behaviour from different views, body pose and shape parameters are then extracted by convolutional neural network based Long Short-Term Memory model network. These are projected onto a uniform pattern space using deep learning based multi-set canonical correlation analysis. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show the proposed system performs well under various conditions

Consistency Index-Based Sensor Fault Detection System for Nuclear Power Plant Emergency Situations Using an LSTM Network

A nuclear power plant (NPP) consists of an enormous number of components with complex interconnections. Various techniques to detect sensor errors have been developed to monitor the state of the sensors during normal NPP operation, but not for emergency situations. In an emergency situation with a reactor trip, all the plant parameters undergo drastic changes following the sudden decrease in core reactivity. In this paper, a machine learning model adopting a consistency index is suggested for sensor error detection during NPP emergency situations. The proposed consistency index refers to the soundness of the sensors based on their measurement accuracy. The application of consistency index labeling makes it possible to detect sensor error immediately and specify the particular sensor where the error occurred. From a compact nuclear simulator, selected plant parameters were extracted during typical emergency situations, and artificial sensor errors were injected into the raw data. The trained system successfully generated output that gave both sensor error states and error-free states

Learning to Run challenge solutions: Adapting reinforcement learning methods for neuromusculoskeletal environments

In the NIPS 2017 Learning to Run challenge, participants were tasked with building a controller for a musculoskeletal model to make it run as fast as possible through an obstacle course. Top participants were invited to describe their algorithms. In this work, we present eight solutions that used deep reinforcement learning approaches, based on algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, Proximal Policy Optimization, and Trust Region Policy Optimization. Many solutions use similar relaxations and heuristics, such as reward shaping, frame skipping, discretization of the action space, symmetry, and policy blending. However, each of the eight teams implemented different modifications of the known algorithms.Comment: 27 pages, 17 figure

Anatomical Region Recognition and Real-time Bone Tracking Methods by Dynamically Decoding A-Mode Ultrasound Signals

Accurate bone tracking is crucial for kinematic analysis in orthopedic surgery and prosthetic robotics. Traditional methods (e.g., skin markers) are subject to soft tissue artifacts, and the bone pins used in surgery introduce the risk of additional trauma and infection. For electromyography (EMG), its inability to directly measure joint angles requires complex algorithms for kinematic estimation. To address these issues, A-mode ultrasound-based tracking has been proposed as a non-invasive and safe alternative. However, this approach suffers from limited accuracy in peak detection when processing received ultrasound signals. To build a precise and real-time bone tracking approach, this paper introduces a deep learning-based method for anatomical region recognition and bone tracking using A-mode ultrasound signals, specifically focused on the knee joint. The algorithm is capable of simultaneously performing bone tracking and identifying the anatomical region where the A-mode ultrasound transducer is placed. It contains the fully connection between all encoding and decoding layers of the cascaded U-Nets to focus only on the signal region that is most likely to have the bone peak, thus pinpointing the exact location of the peak and classifying the anatomical region of the signal. The experiment showed a 97% accuracy in the classification of the anatomical regions and a precision of around 0.5$\pm$1mm under dynamic tracking conditions for various anatomical areas surrounding the knee joint. In general, this approach shows great potential beyond the traditional method, in terms of the accuracy achieved and the recognition of the anatomical region where the ultrasound has been attached as an additional functionality