Vision and Learning for Deliberative Monocular Cluttered Flight

Cameras provide a rich source of information while being passive, cheap and lightweight for small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work we present the first implementation of receding horizon control, which is widely used in ground vehicles, with monocular vision as the only sensing mode for autonomous UAV flight in dense clutter. We make it feasible on UAVs via a number of contributions: novel coupling of perception and control via relevant and diverse, multiple interpretations of the scene around the robot, leveraging recent advances in machine learning to showcase anytime budgeted cost-sensitive feature selection, and fast non-linear regression for monocular depth prediction. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our novel pipeline via real world experiments of more than 2 kms through dense trees with a quadrotor built from off-the-shelf parts. Moreover our pipeline is designed to combine information from other modalities like stereo and lidar as well if available

Spartan Daily, August 27, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6776/thumbnail.jp

The Heavy Photon Search Experiment

Interest in new physics models including so-called hidden sectors has increased in recent years as a result of anomalies from astrophysical observations. The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment proposed at Jefferson Lab will look for a mediator of a new force, a GeV-scale massive U(1) vector boson, the Heavy Photon, which acquires a weak coupling to electrically charged matter through kinetic mixing. The HPS detector, a large acceptance forward spectrometer based on a dipole magnet, consists of a silicon tracker-vertexer, a lead-tungstate electromagnetic calorimeter, and a muon detector. HPS will search for the e+e- or mu+mu- decay of the Heavy Photon produced in the interaction of high energy electrons with a high Z target, possibly with a displaced decay vertex. In this article, the description of the detector and its sensitivity are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contributed to the 8th Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs, Chicago, July 18-22, 201