AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles

Developing and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles in real world is an expensive and time consuming process. Also, in order to utilize recent advances in machine intelligence and deep learning we need to collect a large amount of annotated training data in a variety of conditions and environments. We present a new simulator built on Unreal Engine that offers physically and visually realistic simulations for both of these goals. Our simulator includes a physics engine that can operate at a high frequency for real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations with support for popular protocols (e.g. MavLink). The simulator is designed from the ground up to be extensible to accommodate new types of vehicles, hardware platforms and software protocols. In addition, the modular design enables various components to be easily usable independently in other projects. We demonstrate the simulator by first implementing a quadrotor as an autonomous vehicle and then experimentally comparing the software components with real-world flights.Comment: Accepted for Field and Service Robotics conference 2017 (FSR 2017

Adaptive Information Gathering via Imitation Learning

In the adaptive information gathering problem, a policy is required to select an informative sensing location using the history of measurements acquired thus far. While there is an extensive amount of prior work investigating effective practical approximations using variants of Shannon's entropy, the efficacy of such policies heavily depends on the geometric distribution of objects in the world. On the other hand, the principled approach of employing online POMDP solvers is rendered impractical by the need to explicitly sample online from a posterior distribution of world maps. We present a novel data-driven imitation learning framework to efficiently train information gathering policies. The policy imitates a clairvoyant oracle - an oracle that at train time has full knowledge about the world map and can compute maximally informative sensing locations. We analyze the learnt policy by showing that offline imitation of a clairvoyant oracle is implicitly equivalent to online oracle execution in conjunction with posterior sampling. This observation allows us to obtain powerful near-optimality guarantees for information gathering problems possessing an adaptive sub-modularity property. As demonstrated on a spectrum of 2D and 3D exploration problems, the trained policies enjoy the best of both worlds - they adapt to different world map distributions while being computationally inexpensive to evaluate.Comment: Robotics Science and Systems, 201

A holistic approach to eye care for older people

Many eye diseases, such as cataract and age-related macular degeneration, occur more frequently as we advance in years. As a consequence, eye care workers are likely to encounter older people more frequently than any other group.The holistic approach to treating an older person involves considering the complete person, both physically and psychologically. You should consider every aspect of that person that has an impact on their health and wellbeing. This will greatly improve the outcome of the consultation and any subsequent treatment, both for the older patient and for the eye care worker.It is equally important to treat every older person who seeks care with respect, in a way that preserves his or her dignity and autonomy

Cryptogenic hepatic insult, failing heart and advancing age: a case report

Introduction: we have tested the hypothesis that the co-occurrence of common impairments (motor and cognitive impairments, vision and hearing loss, depressive symptoms) of later life have exacerbating effects on disability [activities and instrumental activities of daily living, social and role function, (in)activity]. Method: data were drawn from a community-based sample of 624 people aged 57 and older. Results: motor impairments and depressive symptoms were associated with all disability measures, even when the effects of other impairments, age and gender were controlled. This indicates independent, predominant effects of motor impairments and depressive symptoms. Although several significant first-order interaction effects (indicating exacerbation) of impairments on disability were found, they were not very strong, but vision and hearing losses exacerbate the impact of the other impairments on disability. Conclusions: impairments, particularly motor impairments and depressive symptoms, largely act 'solo', by main effects on disability. Only a few combinations including vision or hearing loss further exacerbate the effects of other impairments on disability