Monocular SLAM Supported Object Recognition

In this work, we develop a monocular SLAM-aware object recognition system that is able to achieve considerably stronger recognition performance, as compared to classical object recognition systems that function on a frame-by-frame basis. By incorporating several key ideas including multi-view object proposals and efficient feature encoding methods, our proposed system is able to detect and robustly recognize objects in its environment using a single RGB camera in near-constant time. Through experiments, we illustrate the utility of using such a system to effectively detect and recognize objects, incorporating multiple object viewpoint detections into a unified prediction hypothesis. The performance of the proposed recognition system is evaluated on the UW RGB-D Dataset, showing strong recognition performance and scalable run-time performance compared to current state-of-the-art recognition systems.Comment: Accepted to appear at Robotics: Science and Systems 2015, Rome, Ital

Towards Visual Ego-motion Learning in Robots

Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform these tasks, in a minimally supervised setting, as they gain more experience. To this end, we propose a fully trainable solution to visual ego-motion estimation for varied camera optics. We propose a visual ego-motion learning architecture that maps observed optical flow vectors to an ego-motion density estimate via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). By modeling the architecture as a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE), our model is able to provide introspective reasoning and prediction for ego-motion induced scene-flow. Additionally, our proposed model is especially amenable to bootstrapped ego-motion learning in robots where the supervision in ego-motion estimation for a particular camera sensor can be obtained from standard navigation-based sensor fusion strategies (GPS/INS and wheel-odometry fusion). Through experiments, we show the utility of our proposed approach in enabling the concept of self-supervised learning for visual ego-motion estimation in autonomous robots.Comment: Conference paper; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2017, Vancouver CA; 8 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

The generation of side force by distributed suction

This report provides an approximate analysis of the generation of side force on a cylinder placed horizontal to the flow direction by the application of distributed suction on the rearward side of the cylinder. Relationships are derived between the side force coefficients and the required suction coefficients necessary to maintain attached flow on one side of the cylinder, thereby inducing circulation around the cylinder and a corresponding side force

The Anthropometric History of Native Americans, c. 1820 - 1890

The trend of the height of Indian scouts in the U.S. Army born between ca. 1825 and 1875 is analyzed. Their average height of ca. 170 cm (67 in.) confirms that natives were tall compared to Europeans but were nearly the shortest among the rural populations in the New World. The trend in their height describes a slightly inverted ”U” shape with an increase between those born 1820-34 and 1835-39 of ca. 1.8 cm (0.7 in.) (p=0.000) and a subsequent slight decline after the Civil War. This implies that they were able to maintain and perhaps even improve their nutritional status through the Civil War, though harder times followed for those born thereafter. We also recalculate the heights of Native Americans in the Boas sample and find that the Plains Indians were shorter than most rural Americans. The trend in the height of Indians in the Boas sample is similar to that of the Scouts.native Americans, Indians, anthropometric history, height, physical stature, biological standard of living

Invasion of the Giant Gravitons from Anti-de Sitter Space

It has been known for some time that the AdS/CFT correspondence predicts a limit on the number of single particle states propagating on the compact spherical component of the AdS-times-sphere geometry. The limit is called the stringy exclusion principle. The physical origin of this effect has been obscure but it is usually thought of as a feature of very small distance physics. In this paper we will show that the stringy exclusion principle is due to a surprising large distance phenomenon. The massless single particle states become progressively less and less point-like as their angular momentum increases. In fact they blow up into spherical branes of increasing size. The exclusion principle is simply understood as the condition that the particle should not be bigger than the sphere that contains it.Comment: 13 pages, latex; v2: spelled correctly the name of an eminent relativist; v3: comments about AdS_3 corrected, analysis of spherical branes improved, references added; v4: JHEP versio

Ownership of companies in Scotland

In the August 2004 Quarterly Economic Commentary Brian Ashcroft raised important questions about corporate structure in Scotland and how far it can be characterised as unduly dominated by a few very large firms. This claim, advanced in the Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) study Wealth Creation in Scotland (May 2004), rested on calculations that allocated to value added within Scotland all income from employment and profits generated by companies that were registered or headquartered in Scotland. In fact, as Ashcroft argues, Scotland's largest companies tend to have a majority of their workforce employed outside Scotland. Recalculating value added in Scotland to take account of this produces a significantly different picture. With the giant firms cut down to size – particularly the two big banks and the energy companies – Scotland's corporate profile falls more into line with that of other smaller European countries. This paper seeks to raise, in an explorative way, questions about another aspect of the Royal Bank argument: the assumption that all these firms can be treated as "Scottish" and their performance – compared with that of firms in Finland or Belgium - used as the key indicator of the health and competitiveness of an entity described as the "Scottish economy"