73 research outputs found
Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide
variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable,
measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of
estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a
beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in
the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and
potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these
design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly
searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are
optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally
expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer
that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us
to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the
joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and
settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high
localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS
N-LIMB: Neural Limb Optimization for Efficient Morphological Design
A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical
design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding
control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of
links, their type, and how they are connected results in a combinatorial design
space, and the evaluation of any design in that space requires deriving its
optimal controller. In this work, we present N-LIMB, an efficient approach to
optimizing the design and control of a robot over large sets of morphologies.
Central to our framework is a universal, design-conditioned control policy
capable of controlling a diverse sets of designs. This policy greatly improves
the sample efficiency of our approach by allowing the transfer of experience
across designs and reducing the cost to evaluate new designs. We train this
policy to maximize expected return over a distribution of designs, which is
simultaneously updated towards higher performing designs under the universal
policy. In this way, our approach converges towards a design distribution
peaked around high-performing designs and a controller that is effectively
fine-tuned for those designs. We demonstrate the potential of our approach on a
series of locomotion tasks across varying terrains and show the discovery novel
and high-performing design-control pairs.Comment: For code and videos, see https://sites.google.com/ttic.edu/nlim
Jointly Learning to Construct and Control Agents using Deep Reinforcement Learning
The physical design of a robot and the policy that controls its motion are
inherently coupled, and should be determined according to the task and
environment. In an increasing number of applications, data-driven and
learning-based approaches, such as deep reinforcement learning, have proven
effective at designing control policies. For most tasks, the only way to
evaluate a physical design with respect to such control policies is
empirical--i.e., by picking a design and training a control policy for it.
Since training these policies is time-consuming, it is computationally
infeasible to train separate policies for all possible designs as a means to
identify the best one. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing
a method that performs simultaneous joint optimization of the physical design
and control network. Our approach maintains a distribution over designs and
uses reinforcement learning to optimize a control policy to maximize expected
reward over the design distribution. We give the controller access to design
parameters to allow it to tailor its policy to each design in the distribution.
Throughout training, we shift the distribution towards higher-performing
designs, eventually converging to a design and control policy that are jointly
optimal. We evaluate our approach in the context of legged locomotion, and
demonstrate that it discovers novel designs and walking gaits, outperforming
baselines in both performance and efficiency
An ovary transcriptome for all maturational stages of the striped bass (Morone saxatilis), a highly advanced perciform fish
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The striped bass and its relatives (genus <it>Morone</it>) are important fisheries and aquaculture species native to estuaries and rivers of the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico in North America. To open avenues of gene expression research on reproduction and breeding of striped bass, we generated a collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a complementary DNA (cDNA) library representative of their ovarian transcriptome.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Sequences of a total of 230,151 ESTs (51,259,448 bp) were acquired by Roche 454 pyrosequencing of cDNA pooled from ovarian tissues obtained at all stages of oocyte growth, at ovulation (eggs), and during preovulatory atresia. Quality filtering of ESTs allowed assembly of 11,208 high-quality contigs ≥ 100 bp, including 2,984 contigs 500 bp or longer (average length 895 bp). Blastx comparisons revealed 5,482 gene orthologues (E-value < 10<sup>-3</sup>), of which 4,120 (36.7% of total contigs) were annotated with Gene Ontology terms (E-value < 10<sup>-6</sup>). There were 5,726 remaining unknown unique sequences (51.1% of total contigs). All of the high-quality EST sequences are available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Short Read Archive (GenBank: <ext-link ext-link-id="SRX007394" ext-link-type="gen">SRX007394</ext-link>). Informative contigs were considered to be abundant if they were assembled from groups of ESTs comprising ≥ 0.15% of the total short read sequences (≥ 345 reads/contig). Approximately 52.5% of these abundant contigs were predicted to have predominant ovary expression through digital differential display <it>in silico </it>comparisons to zebrafish (<it>Danio rerio</it>) UniGene orthologues. Over 1,300 Gene Ontology terms from Biological Process classes of Reproduction, Reproductive process, and Developmental process were assigned to this collection of annotated contigs.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This first large reference sequence database available for the ecologically and economically important temperate basses (genus <it>Morone</it>) provides a foundation for gene expression studies in these species. The predicted predominance of ovary gene expression and assignment of directly relevant Gene Ontology classes suggests a powerful utility of this dataset for analysis of ovarian gene expression related to fundamental questions of oogenesis. Additionally, a high definition Agilent 60-mer oligo ovary 'UniClone' microarray with 8 × 15,000 probe format has been designed based on this striped bass transcriptome (eArray Group: Striper Group, Design ID: 029004).</p
Aortic valve replacement in patients aged 50 to 70 years: Improved outcome with mechanical versus biologic prostheses
ObjectiveImproved durability of bioprostheses has led some surgeons to recommend biologic rather than mechanical prostheses for patients younger than 65 years. We compared late results of contemporary bioprostheses and bileaflet mechanical prostheses in patients who underwent aortic valve replacement between 50 and 70 years old.MethodsIn this retrospective study, patients received either St Jude bileaflet valves or Carpentier–Edwards bioprostheses. Operations were performed between January 1991 and December 2000, and groups were matched one-to-one according to age, sex, need for coronary artery bypass grafting, and valve size.ResultsFour hundred forty patients were matched, and follow-up was 92% complete, with median durations of 9.1 years for patients who received mechanical valves and 6.2 years for patients who received bioprostheses. The 5- and 10-year unadjusted survivals were 87% and 68% for mechanical valves and 72% and 50% for bioprostheses, respectively (P < .01). Freedoms from reoperation at 10 years were 98% for mechanical valves and 91% for bioprostheses (P = .06). Rates of late stroke or other embolic events and of endocarditis were similar between groups. Hemorrhagic complications necessitating hospitalization occurred in 15% of patients with mechanical valves and 7% of patients with bioprostheses (P = .01). Notably, 19% of patients with bioprostheses were receiving warfarin sodium at last follow-up. After adjustment for unmatched variables, including diabetes, renal failure, lung disease, New York Heart Association functional class, ejection fraction, and stroke, the use of a mechanical valve was protective against late mortality (hazard ratio 0.46, P < .01).ConclusionIn this study, patients aged 50 to 70 years who underwent aortic valve replacement with mechanical valves had a survival advantage relative to matched patients who received bioprostheses. These findings question recommendations of bioprostheses for younger patients and suggest that a randomized trial may be warranted
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