Joint parcel delivery by trucks and drones has enjoyed significant attention for some time, as the advantages of one delivery method offset the disadvantages of the other. This paper focuses on the vehicle routing problem with drones and drone speed selection (VRPD-DSS), which considers speed-dependent energy consumption and drone-charging in detail. For this purpose, we formulate a comprehensive mixed-integer problem that aims to minimize the operational costs consisting of fuel consumption costs of the trucks, labor costs for the drivers, and energy costs of the drones. The speed at which a drone performs a flight must be selected from a discrete set. We introduce preprocessing steps to eliminate dominated speeds for a flight to reduce the problem size and use valid inequalities to accelerate the solution process. The consideration of speed-dependent energy consumption leads to the fact that it is advisable to perform different flights at different speeds and not to consistently operate a drone at maximum speed. Instead, drone speed should be selected to balance drone range and speed of delivery. Our extensive computational study of a rural real-world setting shows that, by modeling energy consumption realistically, the savings in operational costs compared to truck-only delivery are significant but smaller than those identified in previously published work. Our analysis further reveals that the greatest savings stem from the fact that overall delivery time decreases compared to truck-only delivery, allowing costly truck-driver time to be reduced. The additional energy costs of the drone, however, are largely negligible.
The owner-member relationship between wheels and vehicles contributes significantly to the 3D perception of vehicles, especially in embedded environments. However, to leverage this relationship we must face two major challenges: i) Traditional IoU-based heuristics have difficulty handling occluded traffic congestion scenarios. ii) The effectiveness and applicability of the solution in a vehicle-mounted system is difficult. To address these issues, we propose an innovative relationship prediction method, DeepWORD, by designing a graph convolutional network (GCN). Specifically, to improve the information richness, we use feature maps with local correlation as input to the nodes. Subsequently, we introduce a graph attention network (GAT) to dynamically correct the a priori estimation bias. Finally, we designed a dataset as a large-scale benchmark which has annotated owner-member relationship, called WORD. In the experiments we learned that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time performance. The WORD dataset is made publicly available at //github.com/NamespaceMain/ownermember-relationship-dataset.
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular likelihood-free inference method for models with intractable likelihood functions. As ABC methods usually rely on comparing summary statistics of observed and simulated data, the choice of the statistics is crucial. This choice involves a trade-off between loss of information and dimensionality reduction, and is often determined based on domain knowledge. However, handcrafting and selecting suitable statistics is a laborious task involving multiple trial-and-error steps. In this work, we introduce an active learning method for ABC statistics selection which reduces the domain expert's work considerably. By involving the experts, we are able to handle misspecified models, unlike the existing dimension reduction methods. Moreover, empirical results show better posterior estimates than with existing methods, when the simulation budget is limited.
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) i.e., self-driving cars, operate in a safety critical domain, since errors in the autonomous driving software can lead to huge losses. Statistically, road intersections which are a part of the AVs operational design domain (ODD), have some of the highest accident rates. Hence, testing AVs to the limits on road intersections and assuring their safety on road intersections is pertinent, and thus the focus of this paper. We present a situation coverage-based (SitCov) AV-testing framework for the verification and validation (V&V) and safety assurance of AVs, developed in an open-source AV simulator named CARLA. The SitCov AV-testing framework focuses on vehicle-to-vehicle interaction on a road intersection under different environmental and intersection configuration situations, using situation coverage criteria for automatic test suite generation for safety assurance of AVs. We have developed an ontology for intersection situations, and used it to generate a situation hyperspace i.e., the space of all possible situations arising from that ontology. For the evaluation of our SitCov AV-testing framework, we have seeded multiple faults in our ego AV, and compared situation coverage based and random situation generation. We have found that both generation methodologies trigger around the same number of seeded faults, but the situation coverage-based generation tells us a lot more about the weaknesses of the autonomous driving algorithm of our ego AV, especially in edge-cases. Our code is publicly available online, anyone can use our SitCov AV-testing framework and use it or build further on top of it. This paper aims to contribute to the domain of V&V and development of AVs, not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from the viewpoint of an open-source software contribution and releasing a flexible/effective tool for V&V and development of AVs.
The multi-antenna coded caching problem, where the server having $L$ transmit antennas communicating to $K$ users through a wireless broadcast link, is addressed. In the problem setting, the server has a library of $N$ files, and each user is equipped with a dedicated cache of capacity $M$. The idea of extended placement delivery array (EPDA), an array which consists of a special symbol $\star$ and integers in a set $\{1,2,\dots,S\}$, is proposed to obtain a novel solution for the aforementioned multi-antenna coded caching problem. From a $(K,L,F,Z,S)$ EPDA, a multi-antenna coded caching scheme with $K$ users, and the server with $L$ transmit antennas, can be obtained in which the normalized memory $\frac{M}{N}=\frac{Z}{F}$, and the delivery time $T=\frac{S}{F}$. The placement delivery array (for single-antenna coded caching scheme) is a special class of EPDAs with $L=1$. For the multi-antenna coded caching schemes constructed from EPDAs, it is shown that the maximum possible Degree of Freedom (DoF) that can be achieved is $t+L$, where $t=\frac{KM}{N}$ is an integer. Furthermore, two constructions of EPDAs are proposed: a) $ K=t+L$, and b) $K=nt+(n-1)L, \hspace{0.1cm}L\geq t$, where $n\geq 2$ is an integer. In the resulting multi-antenna schemes from those EPDAs achieve the full DoF, while requiring a subpacketization number $\frac{K}{\text{gcd}(K,t,L)}$. This subpacketization number is less than that required by previously known schemes in the literature.
Since DARPA Grand Challenges (rural) in 2004/05 and Urban Challenges in 2007, autonomous driving has been the most active field of AI applications. Almost at the same time, deep learning has made breakthrough by several pioneers, three of them (also called fathers of deep learning), Hinton, Bengio and LeCun, won ACM Turin Award in 2019. This is a survey of autonomous driving technologies with deep learning methods. We investigate the major fields of self-driving systems, such as perception, mapping and localization, prediction, planning and control, simulation, V2X and safety etc. Due to the limited space, we focus the analysis on several key areas, i.e. 2D and 3D object detection in perception, depth estimation from cameras, multiple sensor fusion on the data, feature and task level respectively, behavior modelling and prediction of vehicle driving and pedestrian trajectories.
We study the use of the Wave-U-Net architecture for speech enhancement, a model introduced by Stoller et al for the separation of music vocals and accompaniment. This end-to-end learning method for audio source separation operates directly in the time domain, permitting the integrated modelling of phase information and being able to take large temporal contexts into account. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves several metrics, namely PESQ, CSIG, CBAK, COVL and SSNR, over the state-of-the-art with respect to the speech enhancement task on the Voice Bank corpus (VCTK) dataset. We find that a reduced number of hidden layers is sufficient for speech enhancement in comparison to the original system designed for singing voice separation in music. We see this initial result as an encouraging signal to further explore speech enhancement in the time-domain, both as an end in itself and as a pre-processing step to speech recognition systems.
There is growing interest in object detection in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous robots and vehicles. To enable such innovative systems, we need faster object detection. In this work, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy and speed with domain-specific approximations, i.e. category-aware image size scaling and proposals scaling, for two state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection meta-architectures. We study the effectiveness of applying approximation both statically and dynamically to understand the potential and the applicability of them. By conducting experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset, we show that domain-specific approximation has great potential to improve the speed of the system without deteriorating the accuracy of object detectors, i.e. up to 7.5x speedup for dynamic domain-specific approximation. To this end, we present our insights toward harvesting domain-specific approximation as well as devise a proof-of-concept runtime, AutoFocus, that exploits dynamic domain-specific approximation.
We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given distribution, only by observing the reward signals and following feasibility rules. Our model represents a parameterized stochastic policy, and by applying a policy gradient algorithm to optimize its parameters, the trained model produces the solution as a sequence of consecutive actions in real time, without the need to re-train for every new problem instance. On capacitated VRP, our approach outperforms classical heuristics and Google's OR-Tools on medium-sized instances in solution quality with comparable computation time (after training). We demonstrate how our approach can handle problems with split delivery and explore the effect of such deliveries on the solution quality. Our proposed framework can be applied to other variants of the VRP such as the stochastic VRP, and has the potential to be applied more generally to combinatorial optimization problems.
This paper introduces an online model for object detection in videos designed to run in real-time on low-powered mobile and embedded devices. Our approach combines fast single-image object detection with convolutional long short term memory (LSTM) layers to create an interweaved recurrent-convolutional architecture. Additionally, we propose an efficient Bottleneck-LSTM layer that significantly reduces computational cost compared to regular LSTMs. Our network achieves temporal awareness by using Bottleneck-LSTMs to refine and propagate feature maps across frames. This approach is substantially faster than existing detection methods in video, outperforming the fastest single-frame models in model size and computational cost while attaining accuracy comparable to much more expensive single-frame models on the Imagenet VID 2015 dataset. Our model reaches a real-time inference speed of up to 15 FPS on a mobile CPU.
In this paper, we present a new method for detecting road users in an urban environment which leads to an improvement in multiple object tracking. Our method takes as an input a foreground image and improves the object detection and segmentation. This new image can be used as an input to trackers that use foreground blobs from background subtraction. The first step is to create foreground images for all the frames in an urban video. Then, starting from the original blobs of the foreground image, we merge the blobs that are close to one another and that have similar optical flow. The next step is extracting the edges of the different objects to detect multiple objects that might be very close (and be merged in the same blob) and to adjust the size of the original blobs. At the same time, we use the optical flow to detect occlusion of objects that are moving in opposite directions. Finally, we make a decision on which information we keep in order to construct a new foreground image with blobs that can be used for tracking. The system is validated on four videos of an urban traffic dataset. Our method improves the recall and precision metrics for the object detection task compared to the vanilla background subtraction method and improves the CLEAR MOT metrics in the tracking tasks for most videos.