Testing volume independence of SU(N) pure gauge theories at large N

In this paper we present our results concerning the dependence of Wilson loop expectation values on the size of the lattice and the rank of the SU(N) gauge group. This allows to test the claims about volume independence in the large N limit, and the crucial dependence on boundary conditions. Our highly precise results provide strong support for the validity of the twisted reduction mechanism and the TEK model, provided the fluxes are chosen within the appropriate domain.Comment: 33 pages, latex, 10 figure

Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots

J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012 Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within a known environment

A sustainable management model based on business excellence as applied to mining companies

The success of a sustainable business project depends on different factors but there is no doubt that the excellence of business management is the single most critical factor, because of it is what connects all the others. In a constantly changing world, a new way of doing things will be proposed setting criteria for taking decisions that create value today and in the future. Professional ethics and transparency must be applied to employees, suppliers, customers and shareholders. A change organizational culture is necessary to respect social and environmental concerns, avoiding erroneous business decisions that endanger the well-being of future generations. In this paper, a model based on excellence and sustainability is proposed, which is based on a diagnostics tool to determine defects and problems, where the areas for improvement are identified and defined both qualitatively and quantitatively, so an action plan could be designed. Subsequently, both solutions and the right tools are applied to move progressively toward our proposed model. The model proposed in this paper represents a new approach to sustainable business management based on excellence, is applied specifically to mining companies

Convex Global 3D Registration with Lagrangian Duality

The registration of 3D models by a Euclidean transformation is a fundamental task at the core of many application in computer vision. This problem is non-convex due to the presence of rotational constraints, making traditional local optimization methods prone to getting stuck in local minima. This paper addresses finding the globally optimal transformation in various 3D registration problems by a unified formulation that integrates common geometric registration modalities (namely point-to-point, point-to-line and point-to-plane). This formulation renders the optimization problem independent of both the number and nature of the correspondences. The main novelty of our proposal is the introduction of a strengthened Lagrangian dual relaxation for this problem, which surpasses previous similar approaches [32] in effectiveness. In fact, even though with no theoretical guarantees, exhaustive empirical evaluation in both synthetic and real experiments always resulted on a tight relaxation that allowed to recover a guaranteed globally optimal solution by exploiting duality theory. Thus, our approach allows for effectively solving the 3D registration with global optimality guarantees while running at a fraction of the time for the state-of-the-art alternative [34], based on a more computationally intensive Branch and Bound method.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Initialization of 3D Pose Graph Optimization using Lagrangian duality

Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) is the de facto choice to solve the trajectory of an agent in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for PGO is a non-convex problem for which no known technique is able to guarantee a globally optimal solution under general conditions. In recent years, Lagrangian duality has proved suitable to provide good, frequently tight relaxations of the hard PGO problem through convex Semidefinite Programming (SDP). In this work, we build from the state-of-the-art Lagrangian relaxation [1] and contribute a complete recovery procedure that, given the (tractable) optimal solution of the relaxation, provides either the optimal MLE solution if the relaxation is tight, or a remarkably good feasible guess if the relaxation is non-tight, which occurs in specially challenging PGO problems (very noisy observations, low graph connectivity, etc.). In the latter case, when used for initialization of local iterative methods, our approach outperforms other state-ofthe- art approaches converging to better solutions. We support our claims with extensive experiments.University of Malaga travel grant, the Spanish grant program FPU14/06098 and the project PROMOVE (DPI2014-55826-R), funded by the Spanish Government and the "European Regional Development Fund". Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech