Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Affordance detection is a challenging problem with a wide variety of robotic applications. Traditional affordance detection methods are limited to a predefined set of affordance labels, hence potentially restricting the adaptability of intelligent robots in complex and dynamic environments. In this paper, we present the Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection (OpenAD) method, which is capable of detecting an unbounded number of affordances in 3D point clouds. By simultaneously learning the affordance text and the point feature, OpenAD successfully exploits the semantic relationships between affordances. Therefore, our proposed method enables zero-shot detection and can be able to detect previously unseen affordances without a single annotation example. Intensive experimental results show that OpenAD works effectively on a wide range of affordance detection setups and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we demonstrate the practicality of the proposed OpenAD in real-world robotic applications with a fast inference speed (~100ms). Our project is available at https://openad2023.github.io.Comment: Accepted to The 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023

Prospects for Food Fermentation in South-East Asia, Topics From the Tropical Fermentation and Biotechnology Network at the End of the AsiFood Erasmus+Project

Fermentation has been used for centuries to produce food in South-East Asia and some foods of this region are famous in the whole world. However, in the twenty first century, issues like food safety and quality must be addressed in a world changing from local business to globalization. In Western countries, the answer to these questions has been made through hygienisation, generalization of the use of starters, specialization of agriculture and use of long-distance transportation. This may have resulted in a loss in the taste and typicity of the products, in an extensive use of antibiotics and other chemicals and eventually, in a loss in the confidence of consumers to the products. The challenges awaiting fermentation in South-East Asia are thus to improve safety and quality in a sustainable system producing tasty and typical fermented products and valorising by-products. At the end of the “AsiFood Erasmus+ project” (www.asifood.org), the goal of this paper is to present and discuss these challenges as addressed by the Tropical Fermentation Network, a group of researchers from universities, research centers and companies in Asia and Europe. This paper presents current actions and prospects on hygienic, environmental, sensorial and nutritional qualities of traditional fermented food including screening of functional bacteria and starters, food safety strategies, research for new antimicrobial compounds, development of more sustainable fermentations and valorisation of by-products. A specificity of this network is also the multidisciplinary approach dealing with microbiology, food, chemical, sensorial, and genetic analyses, biotechnology, food supply chain, consumers and ethnology

The roles of change agents and opinion leaders in the diffusion of agricultural technologies in Vietnam: a case study of ACIAR–World Vision collaborative adaptive research projects

Diffusion of innovation in agriculture is a complex process. The success of this process is governed by the various factors—technology characteristics, sociocultural factors, participation of stakeholders, and environment—that enable\ud and sustain effective interaction between these stakeholders. Previous studies in technology diffusion in agriculture indicate that not all technologies that have\ud their advantages over others and are compatible to users’ setting and simple and testable are adopted by end-users. When a technology is tested, the trial process\ud also requires effective facilitation of change agents and opinion leaders combined with sufficient timing and financial support before the technology is eventually\ud owned and adopted by the target users. In this chapter, using the theory of diffusion of innovation, we reviewed the success of two projects implemented by World Vision International in Vietnam under an adaptive research program\ud funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. With the presence of a 10-year development program (namely, the Area Development\ud Program), we argued that the likelihood for success in the diffusion of innovation is more likely for adoption when the trial of the introduced technology has sufficient time, financing, and a commitment by all stakeholders

Fig. 2 in Two additional records of megophryid frogs, Leptobrachium masatakasatoi Matsui, 2013 and Leptolalax minimus (Taylor, 1962), for the herpetofauna of Vietnam

Fig. 2. Leptobrachium masatakasatoi from Son La Province, Vietnam (TBU PAE.365, adult male). (a) dorsolateral view. (b) Ventral view. Photos A.V. Pham

Self-Tuning Fuzzy PI-Type Controller in Z-Source Inverter for Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This paper presents new algorithms to control speed induction motor (SIM) and the peak dc-link voltage (PDV) across the inverter bridge in z-source inverters (ZSI) by applying self-tuning fuzzy PI controller (SFP) with robust structure and non-linear characteristic. In particular, this so-called SFP based control algorithm (SFPA) is applied to a closed loop speed controlsystem of induction motor, which relies on direct torque controlscheme combined with modified space vector modulation (DTCMSVM) control strategy with so many exceptional features (e.g. fast torque response, low steady state torque ripple, and high accurate). Additionally, SFPA is used to control SIM and PDV are more adaptive to the sudden change of parameters such as load torque, stator resistance and dc input voltage (DIV), respectively. The transient response of SIM and PDV are thus improved with less over shoot, short rise time, small steady-state error and fast settling time, with low disturbance for output voltage stabilization in the inverter bridge. As a result, we achieve higher accuracy and robustness of SIM control system. Our new SFPA is verified in both simulation and experimental implementation using MATLAB and dSPACE DS1103, respectively.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijpeds.v2i4.57

Compact Hash Code Learning with Binary Deep Neural Network

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval problem using deep neural networks has recently attracted increasing attention. However, training deep hashing networks is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes. In this paper, we propose deep network models and learning algorithms for learning binary hash codes given image representations under both unsupervised and supervised manners. The novelty of our network design is that we constrain one hidden layer to directly output the binary codes. This design has overcome a challenging problem in some previous works: optimizing non-smooth objective functions because of binarization. In addition, we propose to incorporate independence and balance properties in the direct and strict forms into the learning schemes. We also include a similarity preserving property in our objective functions. The resulting optimizations involving these binary, independence, and balance constraints are difficult to solve. To tackle this difficulty, we propose to learn the networks with alternating optimization and careful relaxation. Furthermore, by leveraging the powerful capacity of convolutional neural networks, we propose an end-to-end architecture that jointly learns to extract visual features and produce binary hash codes. Experimental results for the benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods compare favorably or outperform the state of the art

New provincial records of skinks (Squamata: Scincidae) from northwestern Vietnam.

We report six new records of skinks from northwestern Vietnam: Eutropis macularius, Scincelladevorator , S.monticola, S.ochracea, Sphenomorphuscryptotis and S.indicus. Our new findings increase the species number of skinks (Scincidae) to nine in Dien Bien Province and to 14 in Son La Province. We also provide additional natural history data of aforementioned species