17,401 research outputs found
Towards Autonomous Selective Harvesting: A Review of Robot Perception, Robot Design, Motion Planning and Control
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
Towards Advantages of Parameterized Quantum Pulses
The advantages of quantum pulses over quantum gates have attracted increasing
attention from researchers. Quantum pulses offer benefits such as flexibility,
high fidelity, scalability, and real-time tuning. However, while there are
established workflows and processes to evaluate the performance of quantum
gates, there has been limited research on profiling parameterized pulses and
providing guidance for pulse circuit design. To address this gap, our study
proposes a set of design spaces for parameterized pulses, evaluating these
pulses based on metrics such as expressivity, entanglement capability, and
effective parameter dimension. Using these design spaces, we demonstrate the
advantages of parameterized pulses over gate circuits in the aspect of duration
and performance at the same time thus enabling high-performance quantum
computing. Our proposed design space for parameterized pulse circuits has shown
promising results in quantum chemistry benchmarks.Comment: 11 Figures, 4 Table
Fast Charging of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Deep Bayesian Optimization with Recurrent Neural Network
Fast charging has attracted increasing attention from the battery community
for electrical vehicles (EVs) to alleviate range anxiety and reduce charging
time for EVs. However, inappropriate charging strategies would cause severe
degradation of batteries or even hazardous accidents. To optimize fast-charging
strategies under various constraints, particularly safety limits, we propose a
novel deep Bayesian optimization (BO) approach that utilizes Bayesian recurrent
neural network (BRNN) as the surrogate model, given its capability in handling
sequential data. In addition, a combined acquisition function of expected
improvement (EI) and upper confidence bound (UCB) is developed to better
balance the exploitation and exploration. The effectiveness of the proposed
approach is demonstrated on the PETLION, a porous electrode theory-based
battery simulator. Our method is also compared with the state-of-the-art BO
methods that use Gaussian process (GP) and non-recurrent network as surrogate
models. The results verify the superior performance of the proposed fast
charging approaches, which mainly results from that: (i) the BRNN-based
surrogate model provides a more precise prediction of battery lifetime than
that based on GP or non-recurrent network; and (ii) the combined acquisition
function outperforms traditional EI or UCB criteria in exploring the optimal
charging protocol that maintains the longest battery lifetime
Learning Over All Contracting and Lipschitz Closed-Loops for Partially-Observed Nonlinear Systems
This paper presents a policy parameterization for learning-based control on
nonlinear, partially-observed dynamical systems. The parameterization is based
on a nonlinear version of the Youla parameterization and the recently proposed
Recurrent Equilibrium Network (REN) class of models. We prove that the
resulting Youla-REN parameterization automatically satisfies stability
(contraction) and user-tunable robustness (Lipschitz) conditions on the
closed-loop system. This means it can be used for safe learning-based control
with no additional constraints or projections required to enforce stability or
robustness. We test the new policy class in simulation on two reinforcement
learning tasks: 1) magnetic suspension, and 2) inverting a rotary-arm pendulum.
We find that the Youla-REN performs similarly to existing learning-based and
optimal control methods while also ensuring stability and exhibiting improved
robustness to adversarial disturbances
Accurate and Interpretable Solution of the Inverse Rig for Realistic Blendshape Models with Quadratic Corrective Terms
We propose a new model-based algorithm solving the inverse rig problem in
facial animation retargeting, exhibiting higher accuracy of the fit and
sparser, more interpretable weight vector compared to SOTA. The proposed method
targets a specific subdomain of human face animation - highly-realistic
blendshape models used in the production of movies and video games. In this
paper, we formulate an optimization problem that takes into account all the
requirements of targeted models. Our objective goes beyond a linear blendshape
model and employs the quadratic corrective terms necessary for correctly
fitting fine details of the mesh. We show that the solution to the proposed
problem yields highly accurate mesh reconstruction even when general-purpose
solvers, like SQP, are used. The results obtained using SQP are highly accurate
in the mesh space but do not exhibit favorable qualities in terms of weight
sparsity and smoothness, and for this reason, we further propose a novel
algorithm relying on a MM technique. The algorithm is specifically suited for
solving the proposed objective, yielding a high-accuracy mesh fit while
respecting the constraints and producing a sparse and smooth set of weights
easy to manipulate and interpret by artists. Our algorithm is benchmarked with
SOTA approaches, and shows an overall superiority of the results, yielding a
smooth animation reconstruction with a relative improvement up to 45 percent in
root mean squared mesh error while keeping the cardinality comparable with
benchmark methods. This paper gives a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics
that cover different aspects of the solution, including mesh accuracy, sparsity
of the weights, and smoothness of the animation curves, as well as the
appearance of the produced animation, which human experts evaluated
Safe Zeroth-Order Optimization Using Quadratic Local Approximations
This paper addresses black-box smooth optimization problems, where the
objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be queried.
The main goal of this work is to generate a sequence of feasible points
converging towards a KKT primal-dual pair. Assuming to have prior knowledge on
the smoothness of the unknown objective and constraints, we propose a novel
zeroth-order method that iteratively computes quadratic approximations of the
constraint functions, constructs local feasible sets and optimizes over them.
Under some mild assumptions, we prove that this method returns an -KKT
pair (a property reflecting how close a primal-dual pair is to the exact KKT
condition) within iterations. Moreover, we numerically show
that our method can achieve faster convergence compared with some
state-of-the-art zeroth-order approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed
approach is also illustrated by applying it to nonconvex optimization problems
in optimal control and power system operation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.0264
Path integrals and stochastic calculus
Path integrals are a ubiquitous tool in theoretical physics. However, their
use is sometimes hindered by the lack of control on various manipulations --
such as performing a change of the integration path -- one would like to carry
out in the light-hearted fashion that physicists enjoy. Similar issues arise in
the field of stochastic calculus, which we review to prepare the ground for a
proper construction of path integrals. At the level of path integration, and in
arbitrary space dimension, we not only report on existing Riemannian
geometry-based approaches that render path integrals amenable to the standard
rules of calculus, but also bring forth new routes, based on a fully
time-discretized approach, that achieve the same goal. We illustrate these
various definitions of path integration on simple examples such as the
diffusion of a particle on a sphere.Comment: 96 pages, 4 figures. New title, expanded introduction and additional
references. Version accepted in Advandes in Physic
Inferring networks from time series: a neural approach
Network structures underlie the dynamics of many complex phenomena, from gene
regulation and foodwebs to power grids and social media. Yet, as they often
cannot be observed directly, their connectivities must be inferred from
observations of their emergent dynamics. In this work we present a powerful and
fast computational method to infer large network adjacency matrices from time
series data using a neural network. Using a neural network provides uncertainty
quantification on the prediction in a manner that reflects both the
non-convexity of the inference problem as well as the noise on the data. This
is useful since network inference problems are typically underdetermined, and a
feature that has hitherto been lacking from network inference methods. We
demonstrate our method's capabilities by inferring line failure locations in
the British power grid from observations of its response to a power cut. Since
the problem is underdetermined, many classical statistical tools (e.g.
regression) will not be straightforwardly applicable. Our method, in contrast,
provides probability densities on each edge, allowing the use of hypothesis
testing to make meaningful probabilistic statements about the location of the
power cut. We also demonstrate our method's ability to learn an entire cost
matrix for a non-linear model from a dataset of economic activity in Greater
London. Our method outperforms OLS regression on noisy data in terms of both
speed and prediction accuracy, and scales as where OLS is cubic. Since
our technique is not specifically engineered for network inference, it
represents a general parameter estimation scheme that is applicable to any
parameter dimension
Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching
Solving transport problems, i.e. finding a map transporting one given
distribution to another, has numerous applications in machine learning. Novel
mass transport methods motivated by generative modeling have recently been
proposed, e.g. Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs) and Flow Matching Models
(FMMs) implement such a transport through a Stochastic Differential Equation
(SDE) or an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). However, while it is
desirable in many applications to approximate the deterministic dynamic Optimal
Transport (OT) map which admits attractive properties, DDMs and FMMs are not
guaranteed to provide transports close to the OT map. In contrast,
Schr\"odinger bridges (SBs) compute stochastic dynamic mappings which recover
entropy-regularized versions of OT. Unfortunately, existing numerical methods
approximating SBs either scale poorly with dimension or accumulate errors
across iterations. In this work, we introduce Iterative Markovian Fitting, a
new methodology for solving SB problems, and Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge
Matching (DSBM), a novel numerical algorithm for computing IMF iterates. DSBM
significantly improves over previous SB numerics and recovers as
special/limiting cases various recent transport methods. We demonstrate the
performance of DSBM on a variety of problems
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