1,873 research outputs found
Object and Landscape
In several recent projects we have been inspired by an investigation into the roots of the quintessential American building pattern of placing pavilions in the landscape. This pattern, which has dominated American home building
Comparing Computing Platforms for Deep Learning on a Humanoid Robot
The goal of this study is to test two different computing platforms with
respect to their suitability for running deep networks as part of a humanoid
robot software system. One of the platforms is the CPU-centered Intel NUC7i7BNH
and the other is a NVIDIA Jetson TX2 system that puts more emphasis on GPU
processing. The experiments addressed a number of benchmarking tasks including
pedestrian detection using deep neural networks. Some of the results were
unexpected but demonstrate that platforms exhibit both advantages and
disadvantages when taking computational performance and electrical power
requirements of such a system into account.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
Effective free energy for pinned membranes
We consider membranes adhered through specific receptor-ligand bonds. Thermal
undulations of the membrane induce effective interactions between adhesion
sites. We derive an upper bound to the free energy that is independent of
interaction details. To lowest order in a systematic expansion we obtain
two-body interactions which allow to map the free energy onto a lattice gas
with constant density. The induced interactions alone are not strong enough to
lead to a condensation of individual adhesion sites. A measure of the thermal
roughness is shown to depend on the inverse square root of the density of
adhesion sites, which is in good agreement with previous computer simulations.Comment: to appear as a Rapid Communication in Phys. Rev.
Mobility and Diffusion of a Tagged Particle in a Driven Colloidal Suspension
We study numerically the influence of density and strain rate on the
diffusion and mobility of a single tagged particle in a sheared colloidal
suspension. We determine independently the time-dependent velocity
autocorrelation functions and, through a novel method, the response functions
with respect to a small force. While both the diffusion coefficient and the
mobility depend on the strain rate the latter exhibits a rather weak
dependency. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the initial decay of response
and correlation functions coincide, allowing for an interpretation in terms of
an 'effective temperature'. Such a phenomenological effective temperature
recovers the Einstein relation in nonequilibrium. We show that our data is well
described by two expansions to lowest order in the strain rate.Comment: submitted to EP
Linear response theory and transient fluctuation theorems for diffusion processes: a backward point of view
On the basis of perturbed Kolmogorov backward equations and path integral
representation, we unify the derivations of the linear response theory and
transient fluctuation theorems for continuous diffusion processes from a
backward point of view. We find that a variety of transient fluctuation
theorems could be interpreted as a consequence of a generalized
Chapman-Kolmogorov equation, which intrinsically arises from the Markovian
characteristic of diffusion processes
Current-Induced Spin Polarization in Gallium Nitride
Electrically generated spin polarization is probed directly in bulk GaN using
Kerr rotation spectroscopy. A series of n-type GaN epilayers are grown in the
wurtzite phase both by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and metalorganic chemical
vapor deposition (MOCVD) with a variety of doping densities chosen to broadly
modulate the transverse spin lifetime, T2*. The spin polarization is
characterized as a function of electrical excitation energy over a range of
temperatures. Despite weak spin-orbit interactions in GaN, a current-induced
spin polarization (CISP) is observed in the material at temperatures of up to
200 K.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure
Random pinning limits the size of membrane adhesion domains
Theoretical models describing specific adhesion of membranes predict (for
certain parameters) a macroscopic phase separation of bonds into adhesion
domains. We show that this behavior is fundamentally altered if the membrane is
pinned randomly due to, e.g., proteins that anchor the membrane to the
cytoskeleton. Perturbations which locally restrict membrane height fluctuations
induce quenched disorder of the random-field type. This rigorously prevents the
formation of macroscopic adhesion domains following the Imry-Ma argument [Y.
Imry and S. K. Ma, Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1399 (1975)]. Our prediction of
random-field disorder follows from analytical calculations, and is strikingly
confirmed in large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. These simulations are based
on an efficient composite Monte Carlo move, whereby membrane height and bond
degrees of freedom are updated simultaneously in a single move. The application
of this move should prove rewarding for other systems also.Comment: revised and extended versio
On Silicon Carbide Grains as the Carrier of the 21 Micron Emission Feature in Post-Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars
The mysterious 21mu emission feature seen in 12 proto-planetary nebulae
(PPNe) remains unidentified since its first detection in 1989. Over a dozen of
candidate materials have been proposed within the past decade, but none of them
has received general acceptance. Very recently, silicon carbide (SiC) grains
with impurities were suggested to be the carrier of this enigmatic feature,
based on recent laboratory data that doped SiC grains exhibit a resonance at
\~21mu. This proposal gains strength from the fact that SiC is a common dust
species in carbon-rich circumstellar envelopes. However, SiC dust has a strong
vibrational band at ~11.3mu. We show in this Letter that in order to be
consistent with the observed flux ratios of the 11.3mu feature to the 21mu
feature, the band strength of the 21mu resonance has to be very strong, too
strong to be consistent with current laboratory measurements. But this does not
yet readily rule out the SiC hypothesis since recent experimental results have
demonstrated that the 21mu resonance of doped SiC becomes stronger as the C
impurity increases. Further laboratory measurements of SiC dust with high
fractions of C impurity are urgently needed to test the hypothesis of SiC as
the carrier of the 21mu feature.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ
A Real-Time Ball Detection Approach Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Ball detection is one of the most important tasks in the context of soccer-playing robots. The ball is a small moving object which can be blurred and occluded in many situations. Several neural network based methods with different architectures are proposed to deal with the ball detection. However, they are either neglecting to consider the computationally low resources of humanoid robots or highly depend on manually-tuned heuristic methods to extract the ball candidates. In this paper, we propose a new ball detection method for low-cost humanoid robots that can detect most soccer balls with a high accuracy rate of up to 97.17%. The proposed method is divided into two steps. First, some coarse regions that may contain a full ball are extracted using an iterative method employing an efficient integral image based feature. Then they are fed to a light-weight convolutional neural network to finalize the bounding box of a ball. We have evaluated the proposed approach using a comprehensive dataset and the experimental results show the efficiency of our method
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