scholarly journals A flexible optimization-based method for synthesizing intent-expressive robot arm motion

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (11) ◽  
pp. 1376-1394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Bodden ◽  
Daniel Rakita ◽  
Bilge Mutlu ◽  
Michael Gleicher

We present an approach to synthesize robot arm trajectories that effectively communicate the robot’s intent to a human collaborator while achieving task goals. Our approach uses nonlinear constrained optimization to encode task requirements and desired motion properties. Our implementation allows for a wide range of constraints and objectives. We introduce a novel objective function to optimize robot arm motions for intent-expressiveness that works in a range of scenarios and robot arm types. Our formulation supports experimentation with different theories of how viewers interpret robot motion. Through a series of human-subject experiments on real and simulated robots, we demonstrate that our method leads to improved collaborative performance against other methods, including the current state of the art. These experiments also show how our perception heuristic can affect collaborative outcomes.

Author(s):  
Paul S. Addison

Redundancy: it is a word heavy with connotations of lacking usefulness. I often hear that the rationale for not using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT)—even when it appears most appropriate for the problem at hand—is that it is ‘redundant’. Sometimes the conversation ends there, as if self-explanatory. However, in the context of the CWT, ‘redundant’ is not a pejorative term, it simply refers to a less compact form used to represent the information within the signal. The benefit of this new form—the CWT—is that it allows for intricate structural characteristics of the signal information to be made manifest within the transform space, where it can be more amenable to study: resolution over redundancy. Once the signal information is in CWT form, a range of powerful analysis methods can then be employed for its extraction, interpretation and/or manipulation. This theme issue is intended to provide the reader with an overview of the current state of the art of CWT analysis methods from across a wide range of numerate disciplines, including fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, geophysics, medicine, astronomy and finance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age’.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehrdad Shoeiby ◽  
Mohammad Ali Armin ◽  
Sadegh Aliakbarian ◽  
Saeed Anwar ◽  
Lars petersson

<div>Advances in the design of multi-spectral cameras have</div><div>led to great interests in a wide range of applications, from</div><div>astronomy to autonomous driving. However, such cameras</div><div>inherently suffer from a trade-off between the spatial and</div><div>spectral resolution. In this paper, we propose to address</div><div>this limitation by introducing a novel method to carry out</div><div>super-resolution on raw mosaic images, multi-spectral or</div><div>RGB Bayer, captured by modern real-time single-shot mo-</div><div>saic sensors. To this end, we design a deep super-resolution</div><div>architecture that benefits from a sequential feature pyramid</div><div>along the depth of the network. This, in fact, is achieved</div><div>by utilizing a convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) to learn the</div><div>inter-dependencies between features at different receptive</div><div>fields. Additionally, by investigating the effect of different</div><div>attention mechanisms in our framework, we show that a</div><div>ConvLSTM inspired module is able to provide superior at-</div><div>tention in our context. Our extensive experiments and anal-</div><div>yses evidence that our approach yields significant super-</div><div>resolution quality, outperforming current state-of-the-art</div><div>mosaic super-resolution methods on both Bayer and multi-</div><div>spectral images. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge,</div><div>our method is the first specialized method to super-resolve</div><div>mosaic images, whether it be multi-spectral or Bayer.</div><div><br></div>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Fallah ◽  
Sungmin O ◽  
Rene Orth

Abstract. Precipitation is a crucial variable for hydro-meteorological applications. Unfortunately, rain gauge measurements are sparse and unevenly distributed, which substantially hampers the use of in-situ precipitation data in many regions of the world. The increasing availability of high-resolution gridded precipitation products presents a valuable alternative, especially over gauge-sparse regions. Nevertheless, uncertainties and corresponding differences across products can limit the applicability of these data. This study examines the usefulness of current state-of-the-art precipitation datasets in hydrological modelling. For this purpose, we force a conceptual hydrological model with multiple precipitation datasets in > 200 European catchments. We consider a wide range of precipitation products, which are generated via (1) interpolation of gauge measurements (E-OBS and GPCC V.2018), (2) combination of multiple sources (MSWEP V2) and (3) data assimilation into reanalysis models (ERA-Interim, ERA5, and CFSR). For each catchment, runoff and evapotranspiration simulations are obtained by forcing the model with the various precipitation products. Evaluation is done at the monthly time scale during the period of 1984–2007. We find that simulated runoff values are highly dependent on the accuracy of precipitation inputs, and thus show significant differences between the simulations. By contrast, simulated evapotranspiration is generally much less influenced. The results are further analysed with respect to different hydro-climatic regimes. We find that the impact of precipitation uncertainty on simulated runoff increases towards wetter regions, while the opposite is observed in the case of evapotranspiration. Finally, we perform an indirect performance evaluation of the precipitation datasets by comparing the runoff simulations with streamflow observations. Thereby, E-OBS yields the best agreement, while furthermore ERA5, GPCC V.2018 and MSWEP V2 show good performance. In summary, our findings highlight a climate-dependent propagation of precipitation uncertainty through the water cycle; while runoff is strongly impacted in comparatively wet regions such as Central Europe, there are increasing implications on evapotranspiration towards drier regions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e495
Author(s):  
Saleh Albahli ◽  
Hafiz Tayyab Rauf ◽  
Abdulelah Algosaibi ◽  
Valentina Emilia Balas

Artificial intelligence (AI) has played a significant role in image analysis and feature extraction, applied to detect and diagnose a wide range of chest-related diseases. Although several researchers have used current state-of-the-art approaches and have produced impressive chest-related clinical outcomes, specific techniques may not contribute many advantages if one type of disease is detected without the rest being identified. Those who tried to identify multiple chest-related diseases were ineffective due to insufficient data and the available data not being balanced. This research provides a significant contribution to the healthcare industry and the research community by proposing a synthetic data augmentation in three deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures for the detection of 14 chest-related diseases. The employed models are DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, and ResNet152V2; after training and validation, an average ROC-AUC score of 0.80 was obtained competitive as compared to the previous models that were trained for multi-class classification to detect anomalies in x-ray images. This research illustrates how the proposed model practices state-of-the-art deep neural networks to classify 14 chest-related diseases with better accuracy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 243 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel F Carr ◽  
Munir Pirmohamed

Adverse drug reactions can be caused by a wide range of therapeutics. Adverse drug reactions affect many bodily organ systems and vary widely in severity. Milder adverse drug reactions often resolve quickly following withdrawal of the casual drug or sometimes after dose reduction. Some adverse drug reactions are severe and lead to significant organ/tissue injury which can be fatal. Adverse drug reactions also represent a financial burden to both healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical industry. Thus, a number of stakeholders would benefit from development of new, robust biomarkers for the prediction, diagnosis, and prognostication of adverse drug reactions. There has been significant recent progress in identifying predictive genomic biomarkers with the potential to be used in clinical settings to reduce the burden of adverse drug reactions. These have included biomarkers that can be used to alter drug dose (for example, Thiopurine methyltransferase (TPMT) and azathioprine dose) and drug choice. The latter have in particular included human leukocyte antigen (HLA) biomarkers which identify susceptibility to immune-mediated injuries to major organs such as skin, liver, and bone marrow from a variety of drugs. This review covers both the current state of the art with regard to genomic adverse drug reaction biomarkers. We also review circulating biomarkers that have the potential to be used for both diagnosis and prognosis, and have the added advantage of providing mechanistic information. In the future, we will not be relying on single biomarkers (genomic/non-genomic), but on multiple biomarker panels, integrated through the application of different omics technologies, which will provide information on predisposition, early diagnosis, prognosis, and mechanisms. Impact statement • Genetic and circulating biomarkers present significant opportunities to personalize patient therapy to minimize the risk of adverse drug reactions. ADRs are a significant heath issue and represent a significant burden to patients, healthcare providers, and the pharmaceutical industry. • This review details the current state of the art in biomarkers of ADRs (both genetic and circulating). There is still significant variability in patient response which cannot be explained by current knowledge of genetic risk factors for ADRs; however, we discussed how specific advances in genomics have the potential to yield better and more predictive models. • Many current clinically utilized circulating biomarkers of tissue injury are valid biomarkers for a number of ADRs. However, they often give little insight into the specific cell or tissue subtype which may be affected. Emerging circulating biomarkers with potential to provide greater information on the etiology/pathophysiology of ADRs are described.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-601
Author(s):  
Ausamah Al Houri ◽  
Ahed Habib ◽  
Ahmed Elzokra ◽  
Maan Habib

Tensile strength of soil is indeed one of the important parameters to many civil engineering applications. It is related to wide range of cracks specially in places such as slops, embankment dams, retaining walls or landfills. Despite of the fact that tensile strength is usually presumed to be zero or negligible, its effect on the erosion and cracks development in soil is significant. Thus, to study the tensile strength and behavior of soil several techniques and devices were introduced. These testing methods are classified into direct and indirect ways depending on the loading conditions. The direct techniques including c-shaped mold and 8-shaped mold are in general complicated tests and require high accuracy as they are based on applying a uniaxial tension load directly to the specimen. On the other hand, the indirect tensile tests such as the Brazilian, flexure beam, double punch and hollow cylinder tests provide easy ways to assess the tensile strength of soil under controlled conditions. Although there are many studies in this topic the current state of the art lack of a detailed article that reviews these methodologies. Therefore, this paper is intended to summarize and compare available tests for investigating the tensile behavior of soils.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (48) ◽  
pp. eabd7710
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ichnowski ◽  
Yahav Avigal ◽  
Vishal Satish ◽  
Ken Goldberg

Robots for picking in e-commerce warehouses require rapid computing of efficient and smooth robot arm motions between varying configurations. Recent results integrate grasp analysis with arm motion planning to compute optimal smooth arm motions; however, computation times on the order of tens of seconds dominate motion times. Recent advances in deep learning allow neural networks to quickly compute these motions; however, they lack the precision required to produce kinematically and dynamically feasible motions. While infeasible, the network-computed motions approximate the optimized results. The proposed method warm starts the optimization process by using the approximate motions as a starting point from which the optimizing motion planner refines to an optimized and feasible motion with few iterations. In experiments, the proposed deep learning–based warm-started optimizing motion planner reduces compute and motion time when compared to a sampling-based asymptotically optimal motion planner and an optimizing motion planner. When applied to grasp-optimized motion planning, the results suggest that deep learning can reduce the computation time by two orders of magnitude (300×), from 29 s to 80 ms, making it practical for e-commerce warehouse picking.


2019 ◽  
pp. 887-915
Author(s):  
Zulkifli Mohamed ◽  
Genci Capi

The number of robots operating in human environments is increasing every day. In order to operate in such environments, the robot must be able to navigate, interact with human, pick and place different objects. This chapter presents a mobile humanoid robot that is able to localize itself, navigate to the target location, and generates the arm motion based on the specific task. The robot utilizes the Laser Range Finder, camera and compass sensor for localization and navigation. In addition, the robot generates the arm motion satisfying multiple motion criteria, simultaneously. This chapter evolves neural controllers that generate the humanoid robot arm motion in dynamic environment optimizing three different objective functions: minimum time, distance and acceleration. In a single ran of Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm, multiple neural controllers are generate and the same neural controller can be employed to generate the robot motion for a wide range of initial and goal positions.


Biosensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noushin Nasiri ◽  
Christian Clarke

Human breath has long been known as a system that can be used to diagnose diseases. With advancements in modern nanotechnology, gas sensors can now diagnose, predict, and monitor a wide range of diseases from human breath. From cancer to diabetes, the need to treat at the earliest stages of a disease to both increase patient outcomes and decrease treatment costs is vital. Therefore, it is the promising candidate of rapid and non-invasive human breath gas sensors over traditional methods that will fulfill this need. In this review, we focus on the nano-dimensional design of current state-of-the-art gas sensors, which have achieved records in selectivity, specificity, and sensitivity. We highlight the methods of fabrication for these devices and relate their nano-dimensional materials to their record performance to provide a pathway for the gas sensors that will supersede.


Author(s):  
Graham R. Edwards ◽  
Tat-Hean Gan

Guided wave ultrasonics is now an established technology for detecting corrosion in pipes. The technique is principally applied to pipe that is insulated, buried or otherwise inaccessible to conventional NDT. TWI has experience in applying the technique to offshore risers, where there are specific problems. Access beneath the cut-off valves of the platform is restricted and the clamps used to hold the riser and the coatings used to protect it in the splash zone can affect test performance. This paper will describe these problems in detail and discuss ways of overcoming them. Case studies will be used to illustrate the current state-of-the-art and TWI’s research and development programme in long range ultrasonics for inspecting a wide range of components from pipes to railway lines will highlight future developments.


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