Semi-autonomous telerobotic systems allow both humans and robots to exploit their strengths, while enabling personalized execution of a task. However, for new soft robots with degrees of freedom dissimilar to those of human operators, it is unknown how the control of a task should be divided between the human and robot. This work presents a set of interaction paradigms between a human and a soft growing robot manipulator, and demonstrates them in both real and simulated scenarios. The robot can grow and retract by eversion and inversion of its tubular body, a property we exploit to implement interaction paradigms. We implemented and tested six different paradigms of human-robot interaction, beginning with full teleoperation and gradually adding automation to various aspects of the task execution. All paradigms were demonstrated by two expert and two naive operators. Results show that humans and the soft robot manipulator can split control along degrees of freedom while acting simultaneously. In the simple pick-and-place task studied in this work, performance improves as the control is gradually given to the robot, because the robot can correct certain human errors. However, human engagement and enjoyment may be maximized when the task is at least partially shared. Finally, when the human operator is assisted by haptic feedback based on soft robot position errors, we observed that the improvement in performance is highly dependent on the expertise of the human operator.
相關內容
Uncertainties in the real world mean that is impossible for system designers to anticipate and explicitly design for all scenarios that a robot might encounter. Thus, robots designed like this are fragile and fail outside of highly-controlled environments. Causal models provide a principled framework to encode formal knowledge of the causal relationships that govern the robot's interaction with its environment, in addition to probabilistic representations of noise and uncertainty typically encountered by real-world robots. Combined with causal inference, these models permit an autonomous agent to understand, reason about, and explain its environment. In this work, we focus on the problem of a robot block-stacking task due to the fundamental perception and manipulation capabilities it demonstrates, required by many applications including warehouse logistics and domestic human support robotics. We propose a novel causal probabilistic framework to embed a physics simulation capability into a structural causal model to permit robots to perceive and assess the current state of a block-stacking task, reason about the next-best action from placement candidates, and generate post-hoc counterfactual explanations. We provide exemplar next-best action selection results and outline planned experimentation in simulated and real-world robot block-stacking tasks.
Weakly hard real-time systems can, to some degree, tolerate deadline misses, but their schedulability still needs to be analyzed to ensure their quality of service. Such analysis usually occurs at early design stages to provide implementation guidelines to engineers so that they can make better design decisions. Estimating worst-case execution times (WCET) is a key input to schedulability analysis. However, early on during system design, estimating WCET values is challenging and engineers usually determine them as plausible ranges based on their domain knowledge. Our approach aims at finding restricted, safe WCET sub-ranges given a set of ranges initially estimated by experts in the context of weakly hard real-time systems. To this end, we leverage (1) multi-objective search aiming at maximizing the violation of weakly hard constraints in order to find worst-case scheduling scenarios and (2) polynomial logistic regression to infer safe WCET ranges with a probabilistic interpretation. We evaluated our approach by applying it to an industrial system in the satellite domain and several realistic synthetic systems. The results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms a baseline relying on random search without learning, and estimates safe WCET ranges with a high degree of confidence in practical time (< 23h).
Monocular depth estimation is known as an ill-posed task in which objects in a 2D image usually do not contain sufficient information to predict their depth. Thus, it acts differently from other tasks (e.g., classification and segmentation) in many ways. In this paper, we find that self-supervised monocular depth estimation shows a direction sensitivity and environmental dependency in the feature representation. But the current backbones borrowed from other tasks pay less attention to handling different types of environmental information, limiting the overall depth accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose a new Direction-aware Cumulative Convolution Network (DaCCN), which improves the depth feature representation in two aspects. First, we propose a direction-aware module, which can learn to adjust the feature extraction in each direction, facilitating the encoding of different types of information. Secondly, we design a new cumulative convolution to improve the efficiency for aggregating important environmental information. Experiments show that our method achieves significant improvements on three widely used benchmarks, KITTI, Cityscapes, and Make3D, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the popular benchmarks with all three types of self-supervision.
Haptic upper limb exoskeletons are robots that assist human operators during task execution while having the ability to render virtual or remote environments. Therefore, the stability of such robots in physical human-robot-environment interaction must be guaranteed, in addition to performing well during task execution. Having a wide range of Z-width, which shows the region of passively renderable impedance by a haptic display, is also important to render a wide range of virtual environments. To address these issues, in this study, subsystem-based adaptive impedance control is designed for having a stable human-robot-environment interaction of 7 degrees of freedom haptic exoskeleton. The presented control decomposes the entire system into subsystems and designs the controller at the subsystem level. The stability of the controller in the presence of contact with the virtual environment and human arm force is proved by employing the virtual stability concept. Additionally, the Z-width of the 7-DoF haptic exoskeleton is drawn using experimental data and improved using varying virtual mass element for the virtual environment. Finally, experimental results are provided to demonstrate the perfect performance of the proposed controller in accomplishing the predefined task.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is in the spotlight as a definitive solution for privacy, but the high computational overhead of FHE poses a challenge to its practical adoption. Although prior studies have attempted to design ASIC accelerators to mitigate the overhead, their designs require excessive amounts of chip resources (e.g., areas) to contain and process massive data for FHE operations. We propose CiFHER, a chiplet-based FHE accelerator with a resizable structure, to tackle the challenge with a cost-effective multi-chip module (MCM) design. First, we devise a flexible architecture of a chiplet core whose configuration can be adjusted to conform to the global organization of chiplets and design constraints. The distinctive feature of our core is a recomposable functional unit providing varying computational throughput for number-theoretic transform (NTT), the most dominant function in FHE. Then, we establish generalized data mapping methodologies to minimize the network overhead when organizing the chips into the MCM package in a tiled manner, which becomes a significant bottleneck due to the technology constraints of MCMs. Also, we analyze the effectiveness of various algorithms, including a novel limb duplication algorithm, on the MCM architecture. A detailed evaluation shows that a CiFHER package composed of 4 to 64 compact chiplets provides performance comparable to state-of-the-art monolithic ASIC FHE accelerators with significantly lower package-wide power consumption while reducing the area of a single core to as small as 4.28mm$^2$.
Spread spectrum multiple access systems demand minimum possible cross-correlation between the sequences within a set of sequences having good auto-correlation properties. Through a connection between generalised Frank sequences and Florentine arrays, we present a family of perfect sequences with low cross-correlation having a larger family size, compared with previous works. In particular, the family size can be equal to the square root of the period when the period of the perfect sequences is even. In contrast, the number of the perfect sequences of even period with low cross-correlation is equal to one in all previous works.
We address the task of probabilistic anomaly attribution in the black-box regression setting, where the goal is to compute the probability distribution of the attribution score of each input variable, given an observed anomaly. The training dataset is assumed to be unavailable. This task differs from the standard XAI (explainable AI) scenario, since we wish to explain the anomalous deviation from a black-box prediction rather than the black-box model itself. We begin by showing that mainstream model-agnostic explanation methods, such as the Shapley values, are not suitable for this task because of their ``deviation-agnostic property.'' We then propose a novel framework for probabilistic anomaly attribution that allows us to not only compute attribution scores as the predictive mean but also quantify the uncertainty of those scores. This is done by considering a generative process for perturbations that counter-factually bring the observed anomalous observation back to normalcy. We introduce a variational Bayes algorithm for deriving the distributions of per variable attribution scores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first probabilistic anomaly attribution framework that is free from being deviation-agnostic.
With the rise in popularity of digital Atlases to communicate spatial variation, there is an increasing need for robust small-area estimates. However, current small-area estimation methods suffer from various modelling problems when data are very sparse or when estimates are required for areas with very small populations. These issues are particularly heightened when modelling proportions. Additionally, recent work has shown significant benefits in modelling at both the individual and area levels. We propose a two-stage Bayesian hierarchical small area estimation model for proportions that can: account for survey design; use both individual-level survey-only covariates and area-level census covariates; reduce direct estimate instability; and generate prevalence estimates for small areas with no survey data. Using a simulation study we show that, compared with existing Bayesian small area estimation methods, our model can provide optimal predictive performance (Bayesian mean relative root mean squared error, mean absolute relative bias and coverage) of proportions under a variety of data conditions, including very sparse and unstable data. To assess the model in practice, we compare modeled estimates of current smoking prevalence for 1,630 small areas in Australia using the 2017-2018 National Health Survey data combined with 2016 census data.
The emergence of self-supervised representation (i.e., wav2vec 2.0) allows speaker-recognition approaches to process spoken signals through foundation models built on speech data. Nevertheless, effective fusion on the representation requires further investigating, due to the inclusion of fixed or sub-optimal temporal pooling strategies. Despite of improved strategies considering graph learning and graph attention factors, non-injective aggregation still exists in the approaches, which may influence the performance for speaker recognition. In this regard, we propose a speaker recognition approach using Isomorphic Graph ATtention network (IsoGAT) on self-supervised representation. The proposed approach contains three modules of representation learning, graph attention, and aggregation, jointly considering learning on the self-supervised representation and the IsoGAT. Then, we perform experiments for speaker recognition tasks on VoxCeleb1\&2 datasets, with the corresponding experimental results demonstrating the recognition performance for the proposed approach, compared with existing pooling approaches on the self-supervised representation.
Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas inspired by elementary Microeconomics. Agents learn to produce resources in a spatially complex world, trade them with one another, and consume those that they prefer. We show that the emergent production, consumption, and pricing behaviors respond to environmental conditions in the directions predicted by supply and demand shifts in Microeconomics. We also demonstrate settings where the agents' emergent prices for goods vary over space, reflecting the local abundance of goods. After the price disparities emerge, some agents then discover a niche of transporting goods between regions with different prevailing prices -- a profitable strategy because they can buy goods where they are cheap and sell them where they are expensive. Finally, in a series of ablation experiments, we investigate how choices in the environmental rewards, bartering actions, agent architecture, and ability to consume tradable goods can either aid or inhibit the emergence of this economic behavior. This work is part of the environment development branch of a research program that aims to build human-like artificial general intelligence through multi-agent interactions in simulated societies. By exploring which environment features are needed for the basic phenomena of elementary microeconomics to emerge automatically from learning, we arrive at an environment that differs from those studied in prior multi-agent reinforcement learning work along several dimensions. For example, the model incorporates heterogeneous tastes and physical abilities, and agents negotiate with one another as a grounded form of communication.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191