22,089 research outputs found
A Transfer Operator Methodology for Optimal Sensor Placement Accounting for Uncertainty
Sensors in buildings are used for a wide variety of applications such as
monitoring air quality, contaminants, indoor temperature, and relative
humidity. These are used for accessing and ensuring indoor air quality, and
also for ensuring safety in the event of chemical and biological attacks. It
follows that optimal placement of sensors become important to accurately
monitor contaminant levels in the indoor environment. However, contaminant
transport inside the indoor environment is governed by the indoor flow
conditions which are affected by various uncertainties associated with the
building systems including occupancy and boundary fluxes. Therefore, it is
important to account for all associated uncertainties while designing the
sensor layout. The transfer operator based framework provides an effective way
to identify optimal placement of sensors. Previous work has been limited to
sensor placements under deterministic scenarios. In this work we extend the
transfer operator based approach for optimal sensor placement while accounting
for building systems uncertainties. The methodology provides a probabilistic
metric to gauge coverage under uncertain conditions. We illustrate the
capabilities of the framework with examples exhibiting boundary flux
uncertainty
Coverage Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: Review and Future Directions
The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be generally
defined as a measure of how effectively a network field is monitored by its
sensor nodes. This problem has attracted a lot of interest over the years and
as a result, many coverage protocols were proposed. In this survey, we first
propose a taxonomy for classifying coverage protocols in WSNs. Then, we
classify the coverage protocols into three categories (i.e. coverage aware
deployment protocols, sleep scheduling protocols for flat networks, and
cluster-based sleep scheduling protocols) based on the network stage where the
coverage is optimized. For each category, relevant protocols are thoroughly
reviewed and classified based on the adopted coverage techniques. Finally, we
discuss open issues (and recommend future directions to resolve them)
associated with the design of realistic coverage protocols. Issues such as
realistic sensing models, realistic energy consumption models, realistic
connectivity models and sensor localization are covered
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
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