12,746 research outputs found
Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide
variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable,
measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of
estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a
beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in
the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and
potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these
design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly
searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are
optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally
expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer
that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us
to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the
joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and
settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high
localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
Performance Limits and Geometric Properties of Array Localization
Location-aware networks are of great importance and interest in both civil
and military applications. This paper determines the localization accuracy of
an agent, which is equipped with an antenna array and localizes itself using
wireless measurements with anchor nodes, in a far-field environment. In view of
the Cram\'er-Rao bound, we first derive the localization information for static
scenarios and demonstrate that such information is a weighed sum of Fisher
information matrices from each anchor-antenna measurement pair. Each matrix can
be further decomposed into two parts: a distance part with intensity
proportional to the squared baseband effective bandwidth of the transmitted
signal and a direction part with intensity associated with the normalized
anchor-antenna visual angle. Moreover, in dynamic scenarios, we show that the
Doppler shift contributes additional direction information, with intensity
determined by the agent velocity and the root mean squared time duration of the
transmitted signal. In addition, two measures are proposed to evaluate the
localization performance of wireless networks with different anchor-agent and
array-antenna geometries, and both formulae and simulations are provided for
typical anchor deployments and antenna arrays.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Learning to Look Around: Intelligently Exploring Unseen Environments for Unknown Tasks
It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs
(e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good
observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to
look around: if a visual agent has the ability to voluntarily acquire new views
to observe its environment, how can it learn efficient exploratory behaviors to
acquire informative observations? We propose a reinforcement learning solution,
where the agent is rewarded for actions that reduce its uncertainty about the
unobserved portions of its environment. Based on this principle, we develop a
recurrent neural network-based approach to perform active completion of
panoramic natural scenes and 3D object shapes. Crucially, the learned policies
are not tied to any recognition task nor to the particular semantic content
seen during training. As a result, 1) the learned "look around" behavior is
relevant even for new tasks in unseen environments, and 2) training data
acquisition involves no manual labeling. Through tests in diverse settings, we
demonstrate that our approach learns useful generic policies that transfer to
new unseen tasks and environments. Completion episodes are shown at
https://goo.gl/BgWX3W
Collaborative signal and information processing for target detection with heterogeneous sensor networks
In this paper, an approach for target detection and acquisition with heterogeneous sensor networks through strategic resource allocation and coordination is presented. Based on sensor management and collaborative signal and information processing, low-capacity low-cost sensors are strategically deployed to guide and cue scarce high performance sensors in the network to improve the data quality, with which the mission is eventually completed more efficiently with lower cost. We focus on the problem of designing such a network system in which issues of resource selection and allocation, system behaviour and capacity, target behaviour and patterns, the environment, and multiple constraints such as the cost must be addressed simultaneously. Simulation results offer significant insight into sensor selection and network operation, and demonstrate the great benefits introduced by guided search in an application of hunting down and capturing hostile vehicles on the battlefield
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
- …