Percepción Activa multi-robot para la cobertura rápida y eficiente de escenas.

The efficiency of path-planning in robot navigation is crucial in tasks, such as search-and-rescue and disaster surveying, but this is emphasised even more when considering multi-rotor aerial robots due to the limited battery and flight time. In this spirit, this Master Thesis proposes an efficient, hierarchical planner to achieve a comprehensive visual coverage of large-scale outdoor scenarios for small drones. Following an initial reconnaissance flight, a coarse map of the scene gets built in real-time. Then, regions of the map that were not appropriately observed are identified and grouped by a novel perception-aware clustering process that enables the generation of continuous trajectories (sweeps) to cover them efficiently. Thanks to this partitioning of the map in a set of tasks, we are able to generalize the planning to an arbitrary number of drones and perform a well-balanced workload distribution among them. We compare our approach to an alternative state-of-the-art method for exploration and show the advantages of our pipeline in terms of efficiency for obtaining coverage in large environments.<br /

Multi-robot active perception for fast andefficient scene reconstruction.

The efficiency of path-planning in robot navigation is crucial in tasks, such as search-and-rescue and disaster surveying, but this is emphasised even more when considering multi-rotor aerial robots due to the limited battery and flight time. In this spirit, this Master Thesis proposes an efficient, hierarchical planner to achieve a comprehensive visual coverage of large-scale outdoor scenarios for small drones. Following an initial reconnaissance flight, a coarse map of the scene gets built in real-time. Then, regions of the map that were not appropriately observed are identified and grouped by a novel perception-aware clustering process that enables the generation of continuous trajectories (sweeps) to cover them efficiently. Thanks to this partitioning of the map in a set of tasks, we are able to generalize the planning to an arbitrary number of drones and perform a well-balanced workload distribution among them. We compare our approach to an alternative state-of-the-art method for exploration and show the advantages of our pipeline in terms of efficiency for obtaining coverage in large environments.<br /

Perceptual Factors for Environmental Modeling in Robotic Active Perception

Accurately assessing the potential value of new sensor observations is a critical aspect of planning for active perception. This task is particularly challenging when reasoning about high-level scene understanding using measurements from vision-based neural networks. Due to appearance-based reasoning, the measurements are susceptible to several environmental effects such as the presence of occluders, variations in lighting conditions, and redundancy of information due to similarity in appearance between nearby viewpoints. To address this, we propose a new active perception framework incorporating an arbitrary number of perceptual effects in planning and fusion. Our method models the correlation with the environment by a set of general functions termed perceptual factors to construct a perceptual map, which quantifies the aggregated influence of the environment on candidate viewpoints. This information is seamlessly incorporated into the planning and fusion processes by adjusting the uncertainty associated with measurements to weigh their contributions. We evaluate our perceptual maps in a simulated environment that reproduces environmental conditions common in robotics applications. Our results show that, by accounting for environmental effects within our perceptual maps, we improve in the state estimation by correctly selecting the viewpoints and considering the measurement noise correctly when affected by environmental factors. We furthermore deploy our approach on a ground robot to showcase its applicability for real-world active perception missions.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, under review for IEEE ICRA 202

Robust Fusion for Bayesian Semantic Mapping

The integration of semantic information in a map allows robots to understand better their environment and make high-level decisions. In the last few years, neural networks have shown enormous progress in their perception capabilities. However, when fusing multiple observations from a neural network in a semantic map, its inherent overconfidence with unknown data gives too much weight to the outliers and decreases the robustness of the resulting map. In this work, we propose a novel robust fusion method to combine multiple Bayesian semantic predictions. Our method uses the uncertainty estimation provided by a Bayesian neural network to calibrate the way in which the measurements are fused. This is done by regularizing the observations to mitigate the problem of overconfident outlier predictions and using the epistemic uncertainty to weigh their influence in the fusion, resulting in a different formulation of the probability distributions. We validate our robust fusion strategy by performing experiments on photo-realistic simulated environments and real scenes. In both cases, we use a network trained on different data to expose the model to varying data distributions. The results show that considering the model's uncertainty and regularizing the probability distribution of the observations distribution results in a better semantic segmentation performance and more robustness to outliers, compared with other methods.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, under review at IEEE IROS 202

Clonal chromosomal mosaicism and loss of chromosome Y in elderly men increase vulnerability for SARS-CoV-2

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) had an estimated overall case fatality ratio of 1.38% (pre-vaccination), being 53% higher in males and increasing exponentially with age. Among 9578 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in the SCOURGE study, we found 133 cases (1.42%) with detectable clonal mosaicism for chromosome alterations (mCA) and 226 males (5.08%) with acquired loss of chromosome Y (LOY). Individuals with clonal mosaic events (mCA and/or LOY) showed a 54% increase in the risk of COVID-19 lethality. LOY is associated with transcriptomic biomarkers of immune dysfunction, pro-coagulation activity and cardiovascular risk. Interferon-induced genes involved in the initial immune response to SARS-CoV-2 are also down-regulated in LOY. Thus, mCA and LOY underlie at least part of the sex-biased severity and mortality of COVID-19 in aging patients. Given its potential therapeutic and prognostic relevance, evaluation of clonal mosaicism should be implemented as biomarker of COVID-19 severity in elderly people. Among 9578 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in the SCOURGE study, individuals with clonal mosaic events (clonal mosaicism for chromosome alterations and/or loss of chromosome Y) showed an increased risk of COVID-19 lethality

Vision Based Control for Industrial Robots : Research and implementation

The automation revolution already helps in many tasks that are now performed by robots.  Increases in the complexity of problems regarding robot manipulators require new approaches or alternatives in order to solve them. This project comprises a research in different available software for implementing easy and fast visual servoing tasks controlling a robot manipulator. It focuses on out-of-the-box solutions. Then, the tools found are applied to implement a solution for controlling an arm from Universal Robots. The task is to follow a moving object on a plane with the robot manipulator. The research compares the most popular software, the state-of-the-art alternatives, especially in computer vision and also robot control. The implementation aims to be a proof of concept of a system divided by each functionality (computer vision, path generation and robot control) in order to allow software modularity and exchangeability. The results show various options for each system to take into consideration. The implementation is successfully completed, showing the efficiency of the alternatives examined. The chosen software is MATLAB and Simulink for computer vision and trajectory calculation interfacing with Robotic Operating System (ROS). ROS is used for controlling a UR3 arm using ros_control and ur_modern_driver packages.  Both the research and the implementation present a first approach for further applications and understanding over the current technologies for visual servoing tasks. These alternatives offer different easy, fast, and flexible methods to confront complex computer vision and robot control problems

Sweep-Your-Map: Efficient Coverage Planning for Aerial Teams in Large-Scale Environments

The efficiency of path-planning in robot navigation is crucial in tasks such as search-and-rescue and disaster surveying, but this is emphasized even more when considering multi-rotor aerial robots due to the limited battery and flight time. In this spirit, this work proposes an efficient, hierarchical planner to achieve comprehensive visual coverage of large-scale outdoor scenarios for small drones. Following an initial reconnaissance flight, a coarse map of the scene gets built in real-time. Then, regions of the map that were not appropriately observed are identified and grouped by a novel perception-aware clustering process that enables the generation of continuous trajectories (sweeps) to cover them efficiently. Thanks to this partitioning of the map into a set of tasks, we can generalize the planning to an arbitrary number of drones and perform a well-balanced workload distribution among them. We compare our approach against a state-of-the-art method for exploration and show the advantages of our pipeline in terms of efficiency for obtaining coverage in large environments.ISSN:2377-376

The UMA-SAR Dataset: Multimodal data collection from a ground vehicle during outdoor disaster response training exercises

- [The full description of the dataset can be found at: https://www.uma.es/robotics-and-mechatronics/info/124594/sar-datasets/ ] - Collection of multimodal raw data captured from a manned all-terrain vehicle in the course of two realistic outdoor search and rescue (SAR) exercises for actual emergency responders conducted in Málaga (Spain) in 2018 and 2019: the UMA-SAR dataset. The sensor suite, applicable to unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), consisted of overlapping visible light (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) forward-looking monocular cameras, a Velodyne HDL-32 three-dimensional (3D) lidar, as well as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and two global positioning system (GPS) receivers as ground truth. Our mission was to collect a wide range of data from the SAR domain, including persons, vehicles, debris, and SAR activity on unstructured terrain. In particular, four data sequences were collected following closed-loop routes during the exercises, with a total path length of 5.2 km and a total time of 77 min. In addition, we provide three more sequences of the empty site for comparison purposes (an extra 4.9 km and 46 min). Furthermore, the data is offered both in human-readable format and as rosbag files, and two specific software tools are provided for extracting and adapting this dataset to the users’ preference. The review of previously published disaster robotics repositories indicates that this dataset can contribute to fill a gap regarding visual and thermal datasets and can serve as a research tool for cross-cutting areas such as multispectral image fusion, machine learning for scene understanding, person and object detection, and localization and mapping in unstructured environments.This work has been performed in the frame of the project “TRUST-ROB: Towards Resilient UGV and UAV Manipulator Teams for Robotic Search and Rescue Tasks,” funded by the Spanish Government (grant number RTI2018-093421-B-I00) and project UMA18-FEDERJA-090 funded by the Andalusian Regional Government (Junta de Andalucía

Late Breaking Results on vS-Graphs: Integrating Visual SLAM and Situational Graphs for Multi-level Scene Understanding​

editorial reviewed9. Industry, innovation and infrastructur

GWAS and meta-analysis identifies 49 genetic variants underlying critical COVID-19

Data availability: Downloadable summary data are available through the GenOMICC data site (https://genomicc.org/data). Summary statistics are available, but without the 23andMe summary statistics, except for the 10,000 most significant hits, for which full summary statistics are available. The full GWAS summary statistics for the 23andMe discovery dataset will be made available through 23andMe to qualified researchers under an agreement with 23andMe that protects the privacy of the 23andMe participants. For further information and to apply for access to the data, see the 23andMe website (https://research.23andMe.com/dataset-access/). All individual-level genotype and whole-genome sequencing data (for both academic and commercial uses) can be accessed through the UKRI/HDR UK Outbreak Data Analysis Platform (https://odap.ac.uk). A restricted dataset for a subset of GenOMICC participants is also available through the Genomics England data service. Monocyte RNA-seq data are available under the title ‘Monocyte gene expression data’ within the Oxford University Research Archives (https://doi.org/10.5287/ora-ko7q2nq66). Sequencing data will be made freely available to organizations and researchers to conduct research in accordance with the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research through a data access agreement. Sequencing data have been deposited at the European Genome–Phenome Archive (EGA), which is hosted by the EBI and the CRG, under accession number EGAS00001007111.Extended data figures and tables are available online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06034-3#Sec21 .Supplementary information is available online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06034-3#Sec22 .Code availability: Code to calculate the imputation of P values on the basis of SNPs in linkage disequilibrium is available at GitHub (https://github.com/baillielab/GenOMICC_GWAS).Acknowledgements: We thank the members of the Banco Nacional de ADN and the GRA@CE cohort group; and the research participants and employees of 23andMe for making this work possible. A full list of contributors who have provided data that were collated in the HGI project, including previous iterations, is available online (https://www.covid19hg.org/acknowledgements).Change history: 11 July 2023: A Correction to this paper has been published at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06383-z. -- In the version of this article initially published, the name of Ana Margarita Baldión-Elorza, of the SCOURGE Consortium, appeared incorrectly (as Ana María Baldion) and has now been amended in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.Copyright © The Author(s) 2023, Critical illness in COVID-19 is an extreme and clinically homogeneous disease phenotype that we have previously shown1 to be highly efficient for discovery of genetic associations2. Despite the advanced stage of illness at presentation, we have shown that host genetics in patients who are critically ill with COVID-19 can identify immunomodulatory therapies with strong beneficial effects in this group3. Here we analyse 24,202 cases of COVID-19 with critical illness comprising a combination of microarray genotype and whole-genome sequencing data from cases of critical illness in the international GenOMICC (11,440 cases) study, combined with other studies recruiting hospitalized patients with a strong focus on severe and critical disease: ISARIC4C (676 cases) and the SCOURGE consortium (5,934 cases). To put these results in the context of existing work, we conduct a meta-analysis of the new GenOMICC genome-wide association study (GWAS) results with previously published data. We find 49 genome-wide significant associations, of which 16 have not been reported previously. To investigate the therapeutic implications of these findings, we infer the structural consequences of protein-coding variants, and combine our GWAS results with gene expression data using a monocyte transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) model, as well as gene and protein expression using Mendelian randomization. We identify potentially druggable targets in multiple systems, including inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).GenOMICC was funded by Sepsis Research (the Fiona Elizabeth Agnew Trust), the Intensive Care Society, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship (to J.K.B., 223164/Z/21/Z), the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), Illumina, LifeArc, the Medical Research Council, UKRI, a BBSRC Institute Program Support Grant to the Roslin Institute (BBS/E/D/20002172, BBS/E/D/10002070 and BBS/E/D/30002275) and UKRI grants MC_PC_20004, MC_PC_19025, MC_PC_1905 and MRNO2995X/1. A.D.B. acknowledges funding from the Wellcome PhD training fellowship for clinicians (204979/Z/16/Z), the Edinburgh Clinical Academic Track (ECAT) programme. This research is supported in part by the Data and Connectivity National Core Study, led by Health Data Research UK in partnership with the Office for National Statistics and funded by UK Research and Innovation (grant MC_PC_20029). Laboratory work was funded by a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship to B.F. (201488/Z/16/Z). We acknowledge the staff at NHS Digital, Public Health England and the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre who provided clinical data on the participants; and the National Institute for Healthcare Research Clinical Research Network (NIHR CRN) and the Chief Scientist’s Office (Scotland), who facilitate recruitment into research studies in NHS hospitals, and to the global ISARIC and InFACT consortia. GenOMICC genotype controls were obtained using UK Biobank Resource under project 788 funded by Roslin Institute Strategic Programme Grants from the BBSRC (BBS/E/D/10002070 and BBS/E/D/30002275) and Health Data Research UK (HDR-9004 and HDR-9003). UK Biobank data were used in the GSMR analyses presented here under project 66982. The UK Biobank was established by the Wellcome Trust medical charity, Medical Research Council, Department of Health, Scottish Government and the Northwest Regional Development Agency. It has also had funding from the Welsh Assembly Government, British Heart Foundation and Diabetes UK. The work of L.K. was supported by an RCUK Innovation Fellowship from the National Productivity Investment Fund (MR/R026408/1). J.Y. is supported by the Westlake Education Foundation. SCOURGE is funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (COV20_00622 to A.C., PI20/00876 to C.F.), European Union (ERDF) ‘A way of making Europe’, Fundación Amancio Ortega, Banco de Santander (to A.C.), Cabildo Insular de Tenerife (CGIEU0000219140 ‘Apuestas científicas del ITER para colaborar en la lucha contra la COVID-19’ to C.F.) and Fundación Canaria Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Canarias (PIFIISC20/57 to C.F.). We also acknowledge the contribution of the Centro National de Genotipado (CEGEN) and Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) for funding this project by providing supercomputing infrastructures. A.D.L. is a recipient of fellowships from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq)-Brazil (309173/2019-1 and 201527/2020-0)