8,344 research outputs found
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Towards MKM in the Large: Modular Representation and Scalable Software Architecture
MKM has been defined as the quest for technologies to manage mathematical
knowledge. MKM "in the small" is well-studied, so the real problem is to scale
up to large, highly interconnected corpora: "MKM in the large". We contend that
advances in two areas are needed to reach this goal. We need representation
languages that support incremental processing of all primitive MKM operations,
and we need software architectures and implementations that implement these
operations scalably on large knowledge bases.
We present instances of both in this paper: the MMT framework for modular
theory-graphs that integrates meta-logical foundations, which forms the base of
the next OMDoc version; and TNTBase, a versioned storage system for XML-based
document formats. TNTBase becomes an MMT database by instantiating it with
special MKM operations for MMT.Comment: To appear in The 9th International Conference on Mathematical
Knowledge Management: MKM 201
Spatial Aggregation: Theory and Applications
Visual thinking plays an important role in scientific reasoning. Based on the
research in automating diverse reasoning tasks about dynamical systems,
nonlinear controllers, kinematic mechanisms, and fluid motion, we have
identified a style of visual thinking, imagistic reasoning. Imagistic reasoning
organizes computations around image-like, analogue representations so that
perceptual and symbolic operations can be brought to bear to infer structure
and behavior. Programs incorporating imagistic reasoning have been shown to
perform at an expert level in domains that defy current analytic or numerical
methods. We have developed a computational paradigm, spatial aggregation, to
unify the description of a class of imagistic problem solvers. A program
written in this paradigm has the following properties. It takes a continuous
field and optional objective functions as input, and produces high-level
descriptions of structure, behavior, or control actions. It computes a
multi-layer of intermediate representations, called spatial aggregates, by
forming equivalence classes and adjacency relations. It employs a small set of
generic operators such as aggregation, classification, and localization to
perform bidirectional mapping between the information-rich field and
successively more abstract spatial aggregates. It uses a data structure, the
neighborhood graph, as a common interface to modularize computations. To
illustrate our theory, we describe the computational structure of three
implemented problem solvers -- KAM, MAPS, and HIPAIR --- in terms of the
spatial aggregation generic operators by mixing and matching a library of
commonly used routines.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
Fast k-means based on KNN Graph
In the era of big data, k-means clustering has been widely adopted as a basic
processing tool in various contexts. However, its computational cost could be
prohibitively high as the data size and the cluster number are large. It is
well known that the processing bottleneck of k-means lies in the operation of
seeking closest centroid in each iteration. In this paper, a novel solution
towards the scalability issue of k-means is presented. In the proposal, k-means
is supported by an approximate k-nearest neighbors graph. In the k-means
iteration, each data sample is only compared to clusters that its nearest
neighbors reside. Since the number of nearest neighbors we consider is much
less than k, the processing cost in this step becomes minor and irrelevant to
k. The processing bottleneck is therefore overcome. The most interesting thing
is that k-nearest neighbor graph is constructed by iteratively calling the fast
-means itself. Comparing with existing fast k-means variants, the proposed
algorithm achieves hundreds to thousands times speed-up while maintaining high
clustering quality. As it is tested on 10 million 512-dimensional data, it
takes only 5.2 hours to produce 1 million clusters. In contrast, to fulfill the
same scale of clustering, it would take 3 years for traditional k-means
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