In this paper we propose a robotic system for Irrigation Water Management (IWM) in a structured robotic greenhouse environment. A commercially available robotic manipulator is equipped with an RGB-D camera and a soil moisture sensor. The two are used to automate the procedure known as "feel and appearance method", which is a way of monitoring soil moisture to determine when to irrigate and how much water to apply. We develop a compliant force control framework that enables the robot to insert the soil moisture sensor in the sensitive plant root zone of the soil, without harming the plant. RGB-D camera is used to roughly estimate the soil surface, in order to plan the soil sampling approach. Used together with the developed adaptive force control algorithm, the camera enables the robot to sample the soil without knowing the exact soil stiffness a priori. Finally, we postulate a deep learning based approach to utilize the camera to visually assess the soil health and moisture content.
相關內容
Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision offer an excellent opportunity to investigate high-level visual analysis tasks such as human localization and human pose estimation. Although the performance of human localization and human pose estimation has significantly improved in recent reports, they are not perfect and erroneous localization and pose estimation can be expected among video frames. Studies on the integration of these techniques into a generic pipeline that is robust to noise introduced from those errors are still lacking. This paper fills the missing study. We explored and developed two working pipelines that suited the visual-based positioning and pose estimation tasks. Analyses of the proposed pipelines were conducted on a badminton game. We showed that the concept of tracking by detection could work well, and errors in position and pose could be effectively handled by a linear interpolation technique using information from nearby frames. The results showed that the Visual-based Positioning and Pose Estimation could deliver position and pose estimations with good spatial and temporal resolutions.
Consistent motion estimation is fundamental for all mobile autonomous systems. While this sounds like an easy task, often, it is not the case because of changing environmental conditions affecting odometry obtained from vision, Lidar, or the wheels themselves. Unsusceptible to challenging lighting and weather conditions, radar sensors are an obvious alternative. Usually, automotive radars return a sparse point cloud, representing the surroundings. Utilizing this information to motion estimation is challenging due to unstable and phantom measurements, which result in a high rate of outliers. We introduce a credible and robust probabilistic approach to estimate the ego-motion based on these challenging radar measurements; intended to be used within a loosely-coupled sensor fusion framework. Compared to existing solutions, evaluated on the popular nuScenes dataset and others, we show that our proposed algorithm is more credible while not depending on explicit correspondence calculation.
Continuous-time measurements are instrumental for a multitude of tasks in quantum engineering and quantum control, including the estimation of dynamical parameters of open quantum systems monitored through the environment. However, such measurements do not extract the maximum amount of information available in the output state, so finding alternative optimal measurement strategies is a major open problem. In this paper we solve this problem in the setting of discrete-time input-output quantum Markov chains. We present an efficient algorithm for optimal estimation of one-dimensional dynamical parameters which consists of an iterative procedure for updating a `measurement filter' operator and determining successive measurement bases for the output units. A key ingredient of the scheme is the use of a coherent quantum absorber as a way to post-process the output after the interaction with the system. This is designed adaptively such that the joint system and absorber stationary state is pure at a reference parameter value. The scheme offers an exciting prospect for optimal continuous-time adaptive measurements, but more work is needed to find realistic practical implementations.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
The past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in improving the perception performance of LiDARs on autonomous vehicles. While most of the existing works focus on developing new deep learning algorithms or model architectures, we study the problem from the physical design perspective, i.e., how different placements of multiple LiDARs influence the learning-based perception. To this end, we introduce an easy-to-compute information-theoretic surrogate metric to quantitatively and fast evaluate LiDAR placement for 3D detection of different types of objects. We also present a new data collection, detection model training and evaluation framework in the realistic CARLA simulator to evaluate disparate multi-LiDAR configurations. Using several prevalent placements inspired by the designs of self-driving companies, we show the correlation between our surrogate metric and object detection performance of different representative algorithms on KITTI through extensive experiments, validating the effectiveness of our LiDAR placement evaluation approach. Our results show that sensor placement is non-negligible in 3D point cloud-based object detection, which will contribute up to 10% performance discrepancy in terms of average precision in challenging 3D object detection settings. We believe that this is one of the first studies to quantitatively investigate the influence of LiDAR placement on perception performance.
This paper presents GoPose, a 3D skeleton-based human pose estimation system that uses WiFi devices at home. Our system leverages the WiFi signals reflected off the human body for 3D pose estimation. In contrast to prior systems that need specialized hardware or dedicated sensors, our system does not require a user to wear or carry any sensors and can reuse the WiFi devices that already exist in a home environment for mass adoption. To realize such a system, we leverage the 2D AoA spectrum of the signals reflected from the human body and the deep learning techniques. In particular, the 2D AoA spectrum is proposed to locate different parts of the human body as well as to enable environment-independent pose estimation. Deep learning is incorporated to model the complex relationship between the 2D AoA spectrums and the 3D skeletons of the human body for pose tracking. Our evaluation results show GoPose achieves around 4.7cm of accuracy under various scenarios including tracking unseen activities and under NLoS scenarios.
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and inferred risk can be incomplete and sampling inefficient. Some formal verification methods suffer from the model precision and other surrogate assumptions. In this paper, we propose a scenario sampling based testing framework that characterizes the overall safety performance of a legged robot by specifying (i) where (in terms of a set of states) the robot is potentially safe, and (ii) how safe the robot is within the specified set. The framework can also help certify the commercial deployment of the legged robot in real-world environment along with human and compare safety performance among legged robots with different mechanical structures and dynamic properties. The proposed framework is further deployed to evaluate a group of state-of-the-art legged robot locomotion controllers from various model-based, deep neural network involved, and reinforcement learning based methods in the literature. Among a series of intended work domains of the studied legged robots (e.g. tracking speed on sloped surface, with abrupt changes on demanded velocity, and against adversarial push-over disturbances), we show that the method can adequately capture the overall safety characterization and the subtle performance insights. Many of the observed safety outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, have never been reported by the existing work in the legged robot literature.
We demonstrate that merely analog transmissions and match filtering can realize the function of an edge server in federated learning (FL). Therefore, a network with massively distributed user equipments (UEs) can achieve large-scale FL without an edge server. We also develop a training algorithm that allows UEs to continuously perform local computing without being interrupted by the global parameter uploading, which exploits the full potential of UEs' processing power. We derive convergence rates for the proposed schemes to quantify their training efficiency. The analyses reveal that when the interference obeys a Gaussian distribution, the proposed algorithm retrieves the convergence rate of a server-based FL. But if the interference distribution is heavy-tailed, then the heavier the tail, the slower the algorithm converges. Nonetheless, the system run time can be largely reduced by enabling computation in parallel with communication, whereas the gain is particularly pronounced when communication latency is high. These findings are corroborated via excessive simulations.
Leveraging line features to improve localization accuracy of point-based visual-inertial SLAM (VINS) is gaining interest as they provide additional constraints on scene structure. However, real-time performance when incorporating line features in VINS has not been addressed. This paper presents PL-VINS, a real-time optimization-based monocular VINS method with point and line features, developed based on the state-of-the-art point-based VINS-Mono \cite{vins}. We observe that current works use the LSD \cite{lsd} algorithm to extract line features; however, LSD is designed for scene shape representation instead of the pose estimation problem, which becomes the bottleneck for the real-time performance due to its high computational cost. In this paper, a modified LSD algorithm is presented by studying a hidden parameter tuning and length rejection strategy. The modified LSD can run at least three times as fast as LSD. Further, by representing space lines with the Pl\"{u}cker coordinates, the residual error in line estimation is modeled in terms of the point-to-line distance, which is then minimized by iteratively updating the minimum four-parameter orthonormal representation of the Pl\"{u}cker coordinates. Experiments in a public benchmark dataset show that the localization error of our method is 12-16\% less than that of VINS-Mono at the same pose update frequency. %For the benefit of the community, The source code of our method is available at: //github.com/cnqiangfu/PL-VINS.
Soft robotic grippers facilitate contact-rich manipulation, including robust grasping of varied objects. Yet the beneficial compliance of a soft gripper also results in significant deformation that can make precision manipulation challenging. We present visual pressure estimation & control (VPEC), a method that uses a single RGB image of an unmodified soft gripper from an external camera to directly infer pressure applied to the world by the gripper. We present inference results for a pneumatic gripper and a tendon-actuated gripper making contact with a flat surface. We also show that VPEC enables precision manipulation via closed-loop control of inferred pressure. We present results for a mobile manipulator (Stretch RE1 from Hello Robot) using visual servoing to do the following: achieve target pressures when making contact; follow a spatial pressure trajectory; and grasp small objects, including a microSD card, a washer, a penny, and a pill. Overall, our results show that VPEC enables grippers with high compliance to perform precision manipulation.
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