Maximum Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation: Robustness to Outliers

We benchmark the robustness of maximum likelihood based uncertainty estimation methods to outliers in training data for regression tasks. Outliers or noisy labels in training data results in degraded performances as well as incorrect estimation of uncertainty. We propose the use of a heavy-tailed distribution (Laplace distribution) to improve the robustness to outliers. This property is evaluated using standard regression benchmarks and on a high-dimensional regression task of monocular depth estimation, both containing outliers. In particular, heavy-tailed distribution based maximum likelihood provides better uncertainty estimates, better separation in uncertainty for out-of-distribution data, as well as better detection of adversarial attacks in the presence of outliers

Maximum Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation: Robustness to Outliers

We benchmark the robustness of maximum likelihood based uncertainty estimation methods to outliers in training data for regression tasks. Outliers or noisy labels in training data results in degraded performances as well as incorrect estimation of uncertainty. We propose the use of a heavy-tailed distribution (Laplace distribution) to improve the robustness to outliers. This property is evaluated using standard regression benchmarks and on a high-dimensional regression task of monocular depth estimation, both containing outliers. In particular, heavy-tailed distribution based maximum likelihood provides better uncertainty estimates, better separation in uncertainty for out-of-distribution data, as well as better detection of adversarial attacks in the presence of outliers

Perspective Chapter: European Robotics League – Benchmarking through Smart City Robot Competitions

The SciRoc project, started in 2018, is an EU-H2020 funded project supporting the European Robotics League (ERL) and builds on the success of the EU-FP7/H2020 projects RoCKIn, euRathlon, EuRoC and ROCKEU2. The ERL is a framework for robot competitions currently consisting of three challenges: ERL Consumer, ERL Professional and ERL Emergency. These three challenge scenarios are set up in urban environments and converge every two years under one major tournament: the ERL Smart Cities Challenge. Smart cities are a new urban innovation paradigm promoting the use of advanced technologies to improve citizens’ quality of life. A key novelty of the SciRoc project is the ERL Smart Cities Challenge, which aims to show how robots will integrate into the cities of the future as physical agents. The SciRoc Project ran two such ERL Smart Cities Challenges, the first in Milton Keynes, UK (2019) and the second in Bologna, Italy (2021). In this chapter we evaluate the three challenges of the ERL, explain why the SciRoc project introduced a fourth challenge to bring robot benchmarking to Smart Cities and outline the process in conducting a Smart City event under the ERL umbrella. These innovations may pave the way for easier robotic benchmarking in the future

Performance Evaluation of Low-Cost Machine Vision Cameras for Image-Based Grasp Verification

Grasp verification is advantageous for autonomous manipulation robots as they provide the feedback required for higher level planning components about successful task completion. However, a major obstacle in doing grasp verification is sensor selection. In this paper, we propose a vision based grasp verification system using machine vision cameras, with the verification problem formulated as an image classification task. Machine vision cameras consist of a camera and a processing unit capable of on-board deep learning inference. The inference in these low-power hardware are done near the data source, reducing the robot's dependence on a centralized server, leading to reduced latency, and improved reliability. Machine vision cameras provide the deep learning inference capabilities using different neural accelerators. Although, it is not clear from the documentation of these cameras what is the effect of these neural accelerators on performance metrics such as latency and throughput. To systematically benchmark these machine vision cameras, we propose a parameterized model generator that generates end to end models of Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN). Using these generated models we benchmark latency and throughput of two machine vision cameras, JeVois A33 and Sipeed Maix Bit. Our experiments demonstrate that the selected machine vision camera and the deep learning models can robustly verify grasp with 97% per frame accuracy

Comparative Evaluation of Pretrained Transfer Learning Models on Automatic Short Answer Grading

Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) is the process of grading the student answers by computational approaches given a question and the desired answer. Previous works implemented the methods of concept mapping, facet mapping, and some used the conventional word embeddings for extracting semantic features. They extracted multiple features manually to train on the corresponding datasets. We use pretrained embeddings of the transfer learning models, ELMo, BERT, GPT, and GPT-2 to assess their efficiency on this task. We train with a single feature, cosine similarity, extracted from the embeddings of these models. We compare the RMSE scores and correlation measurements of the four models with previous works on Mohler dataset. Our work demonstrates that ELMo outperformed the other three models. We also, briefly describe the four transfer learning models and conclude with the possible causes of poor results of transfer learning models

Using Active Learning for Assisted Short Answer Grading

Efficient and comprehensive assessment of students knowledge is an imperative task in any learning process. Short answer grading is one of the most successful methods in assessing the knowledge of students. Many supervised learning and deep learning approaches have been used to automate the task of short answer grading in the past. We investigate why assistive grading with active learning would be the next logical step in this task as there is no absolute ground truth answer for any question and the task is very subjective in nature. We present a fast and easy method to harness the power of active learning and natural language processing in assisting the task of grading short answer questions. A webbased GUI is designed and implemented to incorporate an interactive short answer grading system. The experiments show that active learning saves the time and effort of graders in assessment and reaches the performance of supervised learning with less amount of graded answers for training

b-it-bots RoboCup@Work Team Description Paper

This paper presents the b-it-bots RoboCup@Work team and its current hardware and functional architecture for the KUKA youBot robot. We describe the underlying software framework and the developed capabilities required for operating in industrial environments including features such as reliable and precise navigation, flexible manipulation and robust object recognition