27,554 research outputs found

    Towards Autonomous Selective Harvesting: A Review of Robot Perception, Robot Design, Motion Planning and Control

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    This paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in selective harvesting robots (SHRs) and their potential for addressing the challenges of global food production. SHRs have the potential to increase productivity, reduce labour costs, and minimise food waste by selectively harvesting only ripe fruits and vegetables. The paper discusses the main components of SHRs, including perception, grasping, cutting, motion planning, and control. It also highlights the challenges in developing SHR technologies, particularly in the areas of robot design, motion planning and control. The paper also discusses the potential benefits of integrating AI and soft robots and data-driven methods to enhance the performance and robustness of SHR systems. Finally, the paper identifies several open research questions in the field and highlights the need for further research and development efforts to advance SHR technologies to meet the challenges of global food production. Overall, this paper provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in developing SHRs and highlights the need for more research in this field.Comment: Preprint: to be appeared in Journal of Field Robotic

    Satellite Image Based Cross-view Localization for Autonomous Vehicle

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    Existing spatial localization techniques for autonomous vehicles mostly use a pre-built 3D-HD map, often constructed using a survey-grade 3D mapping vehicle, which is not only expensive but also laborious. This paper shows that by using an off-the-shelf high-definition satellite image as a ready-to-use map, we are able to achieve cross-view vehicle localization up to a satisfactory accuracy, providing a cheaper and more practical way for localization. While the utilization of satellite imagery for cross-view localization is an established concept, the conventional methodology focuses primarily on image retrieval. This paper introduces a novel approach to cross-view localization that departs from the conventional image retrieval method. Specifically, our method develops (1) a Geometric-align Feature Extractor (GaFE) that leverages measured 3D points to bridge the geometric gap between ground and overhead views, (2) a Pose Aware Branch (PAB) adopting a triplet loss to encourage pose-aware feature extraction, and (3) a Recursive Pose Refine Branch (RPRB) using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm to align the initial pose towards the true vehicle pose iteratively. Our method is validated on KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets as ground view and Google Maps as the satellite view. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in cross-view localization with median spatial and angular errors within 11 meter and 1∘1^\circ, respectively.Comment: Accepted by ICRA202

    H-TSP: Hierarchically Solving the Large-Scale Travelling Salesman Problem

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    We propose an end-to-end learning framework based on hierarchical reinforcement learning, called H-TSP, for addressing the large-scale Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed H-TSP constructs a solution of a TSP instance starting from the scratch relying on two components: the upper-level policy chooses a small subset of nodes (up to 200 in our experiment) from all nodes that are to be traversed, while the lower-level policy takes the chosen nodes as input and outputs a tour connecting them to the existing partial route (initially only containing the depot). After jointly training the upper-level and lower-level policies, our approach can directly generate solutions for the given TSP instances without relying on any time-consuming search procedures. To demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have conducted extensive experiments on randomly generated TSP instances with different numbers of nodes. We show that H-TSP can achieve comparable results (gap 3.42% vs. 7.32%) as SOTA search-based approaches, and more importantly, we reduce the time consumption up to two orders of magnitude (3.32s vs. 395.85s). To the best of our knowledge, H-TSP is the first end-to-end deep reinforcement learning approach that can scale to TSP instances of up to 10000 nodes. Although there are still gaps to SOTA results with respect to solution quality, we believe that H-TSP will be useful for practical applications, particularly those that are time-sensitive e.g., on-call routing and ride hailing service.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2023, February 202

    Formation control of robots in nonlinear two-dimensional potential

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    The formation control of multi-agent systems has garnered significant research attention in both theoretical and practical aspects over the past two decades. Despite this, the examination of how external environments impact swarm formation dynamics and the design of formation control algorithms for multi-agent systems in nonlinear external potentials have not been thoroughly explored. In this paper, we apply our theoretical formulation of the formation control algorithm to mobile robots operating in nonlinear external potentials. To validate the algorithm's effectiveness, we conducted experiments using real mobile robots. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of Dynamic Mode Decomposition in predicting the velocity of robots in unknown environments

    Efficient simulations of ionized ISM emission lines: A detailed comparison between the FIRE high-redshift suite and observations

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    The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the sub-millimeter and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the infrared have achieved robust spectroscopic detections of emission lines from the interstellar medium (ISM) in some of the first galaxies. These unprecedented measurements provide valuable information regarding the ISM properties, stellar populations, galaxy morphologies, and kinematics in these high-redshift galaxies and, in principle, offer powerful tests of state-of-the-art galaxy formation models, as implemented in hydrodynamical simulations. To facilitate direct comparisons between simulations and observations, we develop a fast post-processing pipeline for predicting the line emission from the HII regions around simulated star particles, accounting for spatial variations in the surrounding gas density, metallicity, temperature, and incident radiation spectrum. Our ISM line emission model currently captures Hα\alpha, Hβ\beta, and all of the [OIII] and [OII] lines targeted by ALMA and the JWST at z>6z>6. We illustrate the power of this approach by applying our line emission model to the publicly available FIRE high-zz simulation suite and perform a detailed comparison with current observations. We show that the FIRE mass--metallicity relation is in 1σ1\sigma agreement with ALMA/JWST measurements after accounting for the inhomogeneities in ISM properties. We also quantitatively validate the one-zone model description, which is widely used for interpreting [OIII] and Hβ\beta line luminosity measurements. This model is publicly available and can be implemented on top of a broad range of galaxy formation simulations for comparison with JWST and ALMA measurements.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure

    An iterative warping and clustering algorithm to estimate multiple wave-shape functions from a nonstationary oscillatory signal

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    Nonsinusoidal oscillatory signals are everywhere. In practice, the nonsinusoidal oscillatory pattern, modeled as a 1-periodic wave-shape function (WSF), might vary from cycle to cycle. When there are finite different WSFs, s1,…,sKs_1,\ldots,s_K, so that the WSF jumps from one to another suddenly, the different WSFs and jumps encode useful information. We present an iterative warping and clustering algorithm to estimate s1,…,sKs_1,\ldots,s_K from a nonstationary oscillatory signal with time-varying amplitude and frequency, and hence the change points of the WSFs. The algorithm is a novel combination of time-frequency analysis, singular value decomposition entropy and vector spectral clustering. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm with simulated and real signals, including the voice signal, arterial blood pressure, electrocardiogram and accelerometer signal. Moreover, we provide a mathematical justification of the algorithm under the assumption that the amplitude and frequency of the signal are slowly time-varying and there are finite change points that model sudden changes from one wave-shape function to another one.Comment: 39 pages, 11 figure

    ShakingBot: Dynamic Manipulation for Bagging

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    Bag manipulation through robots is complex and challenging due to the deformability of the bag. Based on dynamic manipulation strategy, we propose a new framework, ShakingBot, for the bagging tasks. ShakingBot utilizes a perception module to identify the key region of the plastic bag from arbitrary initial configurations. According to the segmentation, ShakingBot iteratively executes a novel set of actions, including Bag Adjustment, Dual-arm Shaking, and One-arm Holding, to open the bag. The dynamic action, Dual-arm Shaking, can effectively open the bag without the need to account for the crumpled configuration.Then, we insert the items and lift the bag for transport. We perform our method on a dual-arm robot and achieve a success rate of 21/33 for inserting at least one item across various initial bag configurations. In this work, we demonstrate the performance of dynamic shaking actions compared to the quasi-static manipulation in the bagging task. We also show that our method generalizes to variations despite the bag's size, pattern, and color.Comment: Manipulating bag through robots to baggin

    Enhancing Low-resolution Face Recognition with Feature Similarity Knowledge Distillation

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    In this study, we introduce a feature knowledge distillation framework to improve low-resolution (LR) face recognition performance using knowledge obtained from high-resolution (HR) images. The proposed framework transfers informative features from an HR-trained network to an LR-trained network by reducing the distance between them. A cosine similarity measure was employed as a distance metric to effectively align the HR and LR features. This approach differs from conventional knowledge distillation frameworks, which use the L_p distance metrics and offer the advantage of converging well when reducing the distance between features of different resolutions. Our framework achieved a 3% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art method on the AgeDB-30 benchmark without bells and whistles, while maintaining a strong performance on HR images. The effectiveness of cosine similarity as a distance metric was validated through statistical analysis, making our approach a promising solution for real-world applications in which LR images are frequently encountered. The code and pretrained models are publicly available on https://github.com/gist-ailab/feature-similarity-KD

    Event-based tracking of human hands

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    This paper proposes a novel method for human hands tracking using data from an event camera. The event camera detects changes in brightness, measuring motion, with low latency, no motion blur, low power consumption and high dynamic range. Captured frames are analysed using lightweight algorithms reporting 3D hand position data. The chosen pick-and-place scenario serves as an example input for collaborative human-robot interactions and in obstacle avoidance for human-robot safety applications. Events data are pre-processed into intensity frames. The regions of interest (ROI) are defined through object edge event activity, reducing noise. ROI features are extracted for use in-depth perception. Event-based tracking of human hand demonstrated feasible, in real time and at a low computational cost. The proposed ROI-finding method reduces noise from intensity images, achieving up to 89% of data reduction in relation to the original, while preserving the features. The depth estimation error in relation to ground truth (measured with wearables), measured using dynamic time warping and using a single event camera, is from 15 to 30 millimetres, depending on the plane it is measured. Tracking of human hands in 3D space using a single event camera data and lightweight algorithms to define ROI features (hands tracking in space)

    Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems

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    Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art. In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too. We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them. We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions. Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems. Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants
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