Motion planning under sensing uncertainty is critical for robots in unstructured environments to guarantee safety for both the robot and any nearby humans. Most work on planning under uncertainty does not scale to high-dimensional robots such as manipulators, assumes simplified geometry of the robot or environment, or requires per-object knowledge of noise. Instead, we propose a method that directly models sensor-specific aleatoric uncertainty to find safe motions for high-dimensional systems in complex environments, without exact knowledge of environment geometry. We combine a novel implicit neural model of stochastic signed distance functions with a hierarchical optimization-based motion planner to plan low-risk motions without sacrificing path quality. Our method also explicitly bounds the risk of the path, offering trustworthiness. We empirically validate that our method produces safe motions and accurate risk bounds and is safer than baseline approaches.
Fingerprint-based localization improves the positioning performance in challenging, non-line-of-sight (NLoS) dominated indoor environments. However, fingerprinting models require an expensive life-cycle management including recording and labeling of radio signals for the initial training and regularly at environmental changes. Alternatively, channel-charting avoids this labeling effort as it implicitly associates relative coordinates to the recorded radio signals. Then, with reference real-world coordinates (positions) we can use such charts for positioning tasks. However, current channel-charting approaches lag behind fingerprinting in their positioning accuracy and still require reference samples for localization, regular data recording and labeling to keep the models up to date. Hence, we propose a novel framework that does not require reference positions. We only require information from velocity information, e.g., from pedestrian dead reckoning or odometry to model the channel charts, and topological map information, e.g., a building floor plan, to transform the channel charts into real coordinates. We evaluate our approach on two different real-world datasets using 5G and distributed single-input/multiple-output system (SIMO) radio systems. Our experiments show that even with noisy velocity estimates and coarse map information, we achieve similar position accuracies
Quantifying predictive uncertainty of deep semantic segmentation networks is essential in safety-critical tasks. In applications like autonomous driving, where video data is available, convolutional long short-term memory networks are capable of not only providing semantic segmentations but also predicting the segmentations of the next timesteps. These models use cell states to broadcast information from previous data by taking a time series of inputs to predict one or even further steps into the future. We present a temporal postprocessing method which estimates the prediction performance of convolutional long short-term memory networks by either predicting the intersection over union of predicted and ground truth segments or classifying between intersection over union being equal to zero or greater than zero. To this end, we create temporal cell state-based input metrics per segment and investigate different models for the estimation of the predictive quality based on these metrics. We further study the influence of the number of considered cell states for the proposed metrics.
Tactile information is important for robust performance in robotic tasks that involve physical interaction, such as object manipulation. However, with more data included in the reasoning and control process, modeling behavior becomes increasingly difficult. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) produced promising results for learning complex behavior in various domains, including tactile-based manipulation in robotics. In this work, we present our open-source reinforcement learning environments for the TIAGo service robot. They produce tactile sensor measurements that resemble those of a real sensorised gripper for TIAGo, encouraging research in transfer learning of DRL policies. Lastly, we show preliminary training results of a learned force control policy and compare it to a classical PI controller.
Live migration of an application or VM is a well-known technique for load balancing, performance optimization, and resource management. To minimize the total downtime during migration, two popular methods -- pre-copy or post-copy -- are used in practice. These methods scale to large VMs and applications since the downtime is independent of the memory footprint of an application. However, in a secure, trusted execution environment (TEE) like Intel's scalable SGX, the state-of-the-art still uses the decade-old stop-and-copy method, where the total downtime is proportional to the application's memory footprint. This is primarily due to the fact that TEEs like Intel SGX do not expose memory and page table accesses to the OS, quite unlike unsecure applications. However, with modern TEE solutions that efficiently support large applications, such as Intel's Scalable SGX and AMD's Epyc, it is high time that TEE migration methods also evolve to enable live migration of large TEE applications with minimal downtime (stop-and-copy cannot be used any more). We present OptMig, an end-to-end solution for live migrating large memory footprints in TEE-enabled applications. Our approach does not require a developer to modify the application; however, we need a short, separate compilation pass and specialized software library support. Our optimizations reduce the total downtime by 98% for a representative microbenchmark that uses 20GB of secure memory and by 90 -- 96% for a suite of Intel SGX applications that have multi-GB memory footprints.
Path reasoning methods over knowledge graphs have gained popularity for their potential to improve transparency in recommender systems. However, the resulting models still rely on pre-trained knowledge graph embeddings, fail to fully exploit the interdependence between entities and relations in the KG for recommendation, and may generate inaccurate explanations. In this paper, we introduce PEARLM, a novel approach that efficiently captures user behaviour and product-side knowledge through language modelling. With our approach, knowledge graph embeddings are directly learned from paths over the KG by the language model, which also unifies entities and relations in the same optimisation space. Constraints on the sequence decoding additionally guarantee path faithfulness with respect to the KG. Experiments on two datasets show the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Source code and datasets: AVAILABLE AFTER GETTING ACCEPTED.
The advancement of robots, particularly those functioning in complex human-centric environments, relies on control solutions that are driven by machine learning. Understanding how learning-based controllers make decisions is crucial since robots are often safety-critical systems. This urges a formal and quantitative understanding of the explanatory factors in the interpretability of robot learning. In this paper, we aim to study interpretability of compact neural policies through the lens of disentangled representation. We leverage decision trees to obtain factors of variation [1] for disentanglement in robot learning; these encapsulate skills, behaviors, or strategies toward solving tasks. To assess how well networks uncover the underlying task dynamics, we introduce interpretability metrics that measure disentanglement of learned neural dynamics from a concentration of decisions, mutual information and modularity perspective. We showcase the effectiveness of the connection between interpretability and disentanglement consistently across extensive experimental analysis.
To facilitate reliable deployments of autonomous robots in the real world, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection capabilities are often required. A powerful approach for OOD detection is based on density estimation with Normalizing Flows (NFs). However, we find that prior work with NFs attempts to match the complex target distribution topologically with naive base distributions leading to adverse implications. In this work, we circumvent this topological mismatch using an expressive class-conditional base distribution trained with an information-theoretic objective to match the required topology. The proposed method enjoys the merits of wide compatibility with existing learned models without any performance degradation and minimum computation overhead while enhancing OOD detection capabilities. We demonstrate superior results in density estimation and 2D object detection benchmarks in comparison with extensive baselines. Moreover, we showcase the applicability of the method with a real-robot deployment.
The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been gaining momentum in recent years owing to technological advances and a significant reduction in their cost. UAV technology can be used in a wide range of domains, including communication, agriculture, security, and transportation. It may be useful to group the UAVs into clusters/flocks in certain domains, and various challenges associated with UAV usage can be alleviated by clustering. Several computational challenges arise in UAV flock management, which can be solved by using machine learning (ML) methods. In this survey, we describe the basic terms relating to UAVS and modern ML methods, and we provide an overview of related tutorials and surveys. We subsequently consider the different challenges that appear in UAV flocks. For each issue, we survey several machine learning-based methods that have been suggested in the literature to handle the associated challenges. Thereafter, we describe various open issues in which ML can be applied to solve the different challenges of flocks, and we suggest means of using ML methods for this purpose. This comprehensive review may be useful for both researchers and developers in providing a wide view of various aspects of state-of-the-art ML technologies that are applicable to flock management.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.