531 research outputs found
Active Classification: Theory and Application to Underwater Inspection
We discuss the problem in which an autonomous vehicle must classify an object
based on multiple views. We focus on the active classification setting, where
the vehicle controls which views to select to best perform the classification.
The problem is formulated as an extension to Bayesian active learning, and we
show connections to recent theoretical guarantees in this area. We formally
analyze the benefit of acting adaptively as new information becomes available.
The analysis leads to a probabilistic algorithm for determining the best views
to observe based on information theoretic costs. We validate our approach in
two ways, both related to underwater inspection: 3D polyhedra recognition in
synthetic depth maps and ship hull inspection with imaging sonar. These tasks
encompass both the planning and recognition aspects of the active
classification problem. The results demonstrate that actively planning for
informative views can reduce the number of necessary views by up to 80% when
compared to passive methods.Comment: 16 page
A Discrete Geometric Optimal Control Framework for Systems with Symmetries
This paper studies the optimal motion control of
mechanical systems through a discrete geometric approach. At
the core of our formulation is a discrete Lagrange-d’Alembert-
Pontryagin variational principle, from which are derived discrete
equations of motion that serve as constraints in our optimization
framework. We apply this discrete mechanical approach to
holonomic systems with symmetries and, as a result, geometric
structure and motion invariants are preserved. We illustrate our
method by computing optimal trajectories for a simple model of
an air vehicle flying through a digital terrain elevation map, and
point out some of the numerical benefits that ensue
Multi-Modal Imitation Learning from Unstructured Demonstrations using Generative Adversarial Nets
Imitation learning has traditionally been applied to learn a single task from
demonstrations thereof. The requirement of structured and isolated
demonstrations limits the scalability of imitation learning approaches as they
are difficult to apply to real-world scenarios, where robots have to be able to
execute a multitude of tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal imitation
learning framework that is able to segment and imitate skills from unlabelled
and unstructured demonstrations by learning skill segmentation and imitation
learning jointly. The extensive simulation results indicate that our method can
efficiently separate the demonstrations into individual skills and learn to
imitate them using a single multi-modal policy. The video of our experiments is
available at http://sites.google.com/view/nips17intentionganComment: Paper accepted to NIPS 201
Downwash-Aware Trajectory Planning for Large Quadrotor Teams
We describe a method for formation-change trajectory planning for large
quadrotor teams in obstacle-rich environments. Our method decomposes the
planning problem into two stages: a discrete planner operating on a graph
representation of the workspace, and a continuous refinement that converts the
non-smooth graph plan into a set of C^k-continuous trajectories, locally
optimizing an integral-squared-derivative cost. We account for the downwash
effect, allowing safe flight in dense formations. We demonstrate the
computational efficiency in simulation with up to 200 robots and the physical
plausibility with an experiment with 32 nano-quadrotors. Our approach can
compute safe and smooth trajectories for hundreds of quadrotors in dense
environments with obstacles in a few minutes.Comment: 8 page
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