In this letter, an efficient motion planning approach with grid-based generalized Voronoi diagrams is newly proposed for mobile robots. Different from existing approaches, the novelty of this work is twofold: 1) a new state lattice-based path searching approach is proposed, in which the search space is reduced to a Voronoi corridor to further improve the search efficiency, along with a Voronoi potential field constructed to make the searched path keep a reasonable distance from obstacles to provide sufficient optimization margin for the subsequent path smoothing, and 2) an efficient quadratic programming-based path smoothing approach is presented, wherein the clearance to obstacles is considered in the form of the penalty of the deviation from the safe reference path to improve the path clearance of hard-constrained path smoothing approaches. We validate the efficiency and smoothness of our approach in various challenging simulation scenarios and large-scale outdoor environments. It is shown that the computational efficiency is improved by 17.1% in the path searching stage, and smoothing the path with our approach is 11.86 times faster than a recent gradient-based path smoothing approach. We will release the source code to the robotics community.
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This paper studies the problem of risk-averse receding horizon motion planning for agents with uncertain dynamics, in the presence of stochastic, dynamic obstacles. We propose a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that formulates the obstacle avoidance constraint using coherent risk measures. To handle disturbances, or process noise, in the state dynamics, the state constraints are tightened in a risk-aware manner to provide a disturbance feedback policy. We also propose a waypoint following algorithm that uses the proposed MPC scheme for discrete distributions and prove its risk-sensitive recursive feasibility while guaranteeing finite-time task completion. We further investigate some commonly used coherent risk metrics, namely, conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), entropic value-at-risk (EVaR), and g-entropic risk measures, and propose a tractable incorporation within MPC. We illustrate our framework via simulation studies.
The hard thresholding technique plays a vital role in the development of algorithms for sparse signal recovery. By merging this technique and heavy-ball acceleration method which is a multi-step extension of the traditional gradient descent method, we propose the so-called heavy-ball-based hard thresholding (HBHT) and heavy-ball-based hard thresholding pursuit (HBHTP) algorithms for signal recovery. It turns out that the HBHT and HBHTP can successfully recover a $k$-sparse signal if the restricted isometry constant of the measurement matrix satisfies $\delta_{3k}<0.618 $ and $\delta_{3k}<0.577,$ respectively. The guaranteed success of HBHT and HBHTP is also shown under the conditions $\delta_{2k}<0.356$ and $\delta_{2k}<0.377,$ respectively. Moreover, the finite convergence and stability of the two algorithms are also established in this paper. Simulations on random problem instances are performed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms and several existing ones. Empirical results indicate that the HBHTP performs very comparably to a few existing algorithms and it takes less average time to achieve the signal recovery than these existing methods.
In this paper we propose an accurate, and computationally efficient method for incorporating adaptive spatial resolution into weakly-compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) schemes. Particles are adaptively split and merged in an accurate manner. Critically, the method ensures that the number of neighbors of each particle is optimal, leading to an efficient algorithm. A set of background particles is used to specify either geometry-based spatial resolution, where the resolution is a function of distance to a solid body, or solution-based adaptive resolution, where the resolution is a function of the computed solution. This allows us to simulate problems using particles having length variations of the order of 1:250 with much fewer particles than currently reported with other techniques. The method is designed to automatically adapt when any solid bodies move. The algorithms employed are fully parallel. We consider a suite of benchmark problems to demonstrate the accuracy of the approach. We then consider the classic problem of the flow past a circular cylinder at a range of Reynolds numbers and show that the proposed method produces accurate results with a significantly reduced number of particles. We provide an open source implementation and a fully reproducible manuscript.
Machine learning and computational intelligence technologies gain more and more popularity as possible solution for issues related to the power grid. One of these issues, the power flow calculation, is an iterative method to compute the voltage magnitudes of the power grid's buses from power values. Machine learning and, especially, artificial neural networks were successfully used as surrogates for the power flow calculation. Artificial neural networks highly rely on the quality and size of the training data, but this aspect of the process is apparently often neglected in the works we found. However, since the availability of high quality historical data for power grids is limited, we propose the Correlation Sampling algorithm. We show that this approach is able to cover a larger area of the sampling space compared to different random sampling algorithms from the literature and a copula-based approach, while at the same time inter-dependencies of the inputs are taken into account, which, from the other algorithms, only the copula-based approach does.
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, the $k$-center problem is to find $k$ congruent disks of minimum possible radius such that their union covers all the points in $P$. The $2$-center problem is a special case of the $k$-center problem that has been extensively studied in the recent past \cite{CAHN,HT,SH}. In this paper, we consider a generalized version of the $2$-center problem called \textit{proximity connected} $2$-center (PCTC) problem. In this problem, we are also given a parameter $\delta\geq 0$ and we have the additional constraint that the distance between the centers of the disks should be at most $\delta$. Note that when $\delta=0$, the PCTC problem is reduced to the $1$-center(minimum enclosing disk) problem and when $\delta$ tends to infinity, it is reduced to the $2$-center problem. The PCTC problem first appeared in the context of wireless networks in 1992 \cite{ACN0}, but obtaining a nontrivial deterministic algorithm for the problem remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by providing a deterministic $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm for the problem.
Recent work has demonstrated that motion planners' performance can be significantly improved by retrieving past experiences from a database. Typically, the experience database is queried for past similar problems using a similarity function defined over the motion planning problems. However, to date, most works rely on simple hand-crafted similarity functions and fail to generalize outside their corresponding training dataset. To address this limitation, we propose (FIRE), a framework that extracts local representations of planning problems and learns a similarity function over them. To generate the training data we introduce a novel self-supervised method that identifies similar and dissimilar pairs of local primitives from past solution paths. With these pairs, a Siamese network is trained with the contrastive loss and the similarity function is realized in the network's latent space. We evaluate FIRE on an 8-DOF manipulator in five categories of motion planning problems with sensed environments. Our experiments show that FIRE retrieves relevant experiences which can informatively guide sampling-based planners even in problems outside its training distribution, outperforming other baselines.
Locating 3D objects from a single RGB image via Perspective-n-Points (PnP) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest interpreting PnP as a differentiable layer, so that 2D-3D point correspondences can be partly learned by backpropagating the gradient w.r.t. object pose. Yet, learning the entire set of unrestricted 2D-3D points from scratch fails to converge with existing approaches, since the deterministic pose is inherently non-differentiable. In this paper, we propose the EPro-PnP, a probabilistic PnP layer for general end-to-end pose estimation, which outputs a distribution of pose on the SE(3) manifold, essentially bringing categorical Softmax to the continuous domain. The 2D-3D coordinates and corresponding weights are treated as intermediate variables learned by minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and target pose distribution. The underlying principle unifies the existing approaches and resembles the attention mechanism. EPro-PnP significantly outperforms competitive baselines, closing the gap between PnP-based method and the task-specific leaders on the LineMOD 6DoF pose estimation and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks.
We consider smooth optimization problems with a Hermitian positive semi-definite fixed-rank constraint, where a quotient geometry with three Riemannian metrics $g^i(\cdot, \cdot)$ $(i=1,2,3)$ is used to represent this constraint. By taking the nonlinear conjugate gradient method (CG) as an example, we show that CG on the quotient geometry with metric $g^1$ is equivalent to CG on the factor-based optimization framework, which is often called the Burer--Monteiro approach. We also show that CG on the quotient geometry with metric $g^3$ is equivalent to CG on the commonly-used embedded geometry. We call two CG methods equivalent if they produce an identical sequence of iterates $\{X_k\}$. In addition, we show that if the limit point of the sequence $\{X_k\}$ generated by an algorithm has lower rank, that is $X_k\in \mathbb C^{n\times n}, k = 1, 2, \ldots$ has rank $p$ and the limit point $X_*$ has rank $r < p$, then the condition number of the Riemannian Hessian with metric $g^1$ can be unbounded, but those of the other two metrics stay bounded. Numerical experiments show that the Burer--Monteiro CG method has slower local convergence rate if the limit point has a reduced rank, compared to CG on the quotient geometry under the other two metrics. This slower convergence rate can thus be attributed to the large condition number of the Hessian near a minimizer.
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss functions are usually non-smooth. More recently, computationally fast non-convex approaches via sub-gradient descent are proposed, which, unfortunately, fail to deliver a statistically consistent estimator even under sub-Gaussian noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel Riemannian sub-gradient (RsGrad) algorithm which is not only computationally efficient with linear convergence but also is statistically optimal, be the noise Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Convergence theory is established for a general framework and specific applications to absolute loss, Huber loss, and quantile loss are investigated. Compared with existing non-convex methods, ours reveals a surprising phenomenon of dual-phase convergence. In phase one, RsGrad behaves as in a typical non-smooth optimization that requires gradually decaying stepsizes. However, phase one only delivers a statistically sub-optimal estimator which is already observed in the existing literature. Interestingly, during phase two, RsGrad converges linearly as if minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function and thus a constant stepsize suffices. Underlying the phase-two convergence is the smoothing effect of random noise to the non-smooth robust losses in an area close but not too close to the truth. Lastly, RsGrad is applicable for low-rank tensor estimation under heavy-tailed noise where a statistically optimal rate is attainable with the same phenomenon of dual-phase convergence, and a novel shrinkage-based second-order moment method is guaranteed to deliver a warm initialization. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical discovery and showcase the superiority of RsGrad over prior methods.
Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes $94k$ images with manually curated boxes from $15k$ unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we further introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially at no additional memory cost, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data will be released.
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