Abstract

With the advent of intelligent transport, quadrotors are becoming an attractive solu-tion while lifting or dropping of payloads during emergency evacuations, construc-tion works etc. During such operations, dynamic variations in (possibly unknown)payload cause considerable changes in the system dynamics. However, a systematic control solution to tackle such interchanging dynamical behaviour is still missing.This paper proposes a switched dynamical framework to capture the interchanging dynamics of a quadrotor during vertical operations and a robust adaptive control solution to tackle such dynamics when it is unknown. The stability of the closed-loop system is studied analytically and the effectiveness of the proposed solution is verified via simulations

Abstract

In the presence of unmodelled dynamics and uncertainties with no a priori constant bounds, conventional robust adaptation strategies for switched systems cannot allow the control gains of inactive subsystems to remain constant during inactive intervals: vanishing gains are typically required in order to prove bounded stability. As a consequence, these strategies, known in literature as leakage-based adaptive methods, might introduce poor transients at each switching instant. Leakage-based adaptive control becomes even more problematic in the switched nonlinear case, where non-conservative state-dependent upper bounds for uncertainties and unmodelled dynamics are required. This work shows that, for a class of switched Euler–Lagrange systems, such difficulties can be mitigated: a novel leakage-based stable mechanism is introduced which allows the gains of inactive subsystems to remain constant. At the same time, unmodelled dynamics and uncertainties with no a priori bounds can be handled by a quadratic state-dependent upper bound structure that reduces conservativeness as compared to state-of-the-art structures. The proposed design is validated analytically and its performance is studied in simulation with a pick-and-place robotic manipulator example.

Abstract

Automated vision-based score estimation models can be used to provide an alternate opinion to avoid judgment bias. Existing works have learned score estimation models by regressing the video representation to ground truth score provided by judges. However, such regression-based solutions lack interpretability in terms of giving reasons for the awarded score. One solution to make the scores more explicable is to compare the given action video with a reference video, which would capture the temporal variations vis-á-vis the reference video and map those variations to the final score. In this work, we propose a new action scoring system termed as Reference Guided Regression (RGR), which comprises (1) a Deep Metric Learning Module that learns similarity between any two action videos based on their ground truth scores given by the judges, and (2) a Score Estimation Module that uses the first module to find

Abstract

We present DRACO, a method for Dense Reconstruction And Canonicalization of Object shape from one or more RGB images. Canonical shape reconstruction, estimating 3D object shape in a coordinate space canonicalized for scale, rotation, and translation parameters, is an emerging paradigm that holds promise for a multitude of robotic applications. Prior approaches either rely on painstakingly gathered dense 3D supervision, or produce only sparse canonical representations, limiting real-world applicability. DRACO performs dense canonicalization using only weak supervision in the form of camera poses and semantic keypoints at train time. During inference, DRACO predicts dense object-centric depth maps in a canonical coordinate-space, solely using one or more RGB images of an object. Extensive experiments on canonical shape reconstruction and pose estimation show that DRACO is competitive or superior to fully-supervised methods.

Abstract

In this paper, we present BirdSLAM, a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for the challenging scenario of autonomous driving platforms equipped with only a monocular camera. BirdSLAM tackles challenges faced by other monocular SLAM systems (such as scale ambiguity in monocular reconstruction, dynamic object localization, and uncertainty in feature representation) by using an orthographic (bird's-eye) view as the configuration space in which localization and mapping are performed. By assuming only the height of the ego-camera above the ground, BirdSLAM leverages single-view metrology cues to accurately localize the ego-vehicle and all other traffic participants in bird's-eye view. We demonstrate that our system outperforms prior work that uses strictly greater information, and highlight the relevance of each design decision via an ablation analysis.

Abstract

Modern NLP defines the task of style transfer as modifying the style of a given sentence without appreciably changing its semantics, which implies that the outputs of style transfer systems should be paraphrases of their inputs. However, many existing systems purportedly designed for style transfer inherently warp the input's meaning through attribute transfer, which changes semantic properties such as sentiment. In this paper, we reformulate unsupervised style transfer as a paraphrase generation problem, and present a simple methodology based on fine-tuning pretrained language models on automatically generated paraphrase data. Despite its simplicity, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art style transfer systems on both human and automatic evaluations. We also survey 23 style transfer papers and discover that existing automatic metrics can be easily gamed and propose fixed variants. Finally, we pivot to a more real-world style transfer setting by collecting a large dataset of 15M sentences in 11 diverse styles, which we use for an in-depth analysis of our system.

Abstract

Manual identification of ECG heart-beat classes by cardiologists is time consuming and cumbersome. These professionals rely on computer based methods for determination of these heart-disease types. In this work, existing literature is organized into a proposed taxonomy based on dichotomies involving full time series-based versus feature-based, AAMI versus Non-AAMI, and inter-patient versus intra-patient based distinctions. The basic contributions of this work are systematic review of literature on heart-beat abnormality detection, identifying research gaps and the research issues unmet sofar in the literature to propose novel approaches for addressing these gaps.

Abstract

Significant advances have been made recently in Visual Place Recognition (VPR), feature correspondence, and localization due to the proliferation of deep-learning-based methods. However, existing approaches tend to address, partially or fully, only one of two key challenges: viewpoint change and perceptual aliasing. In this paper, we present novel research that simultaneously addresses both challenges by combining deep-learned features with geometric transformations based on reasonable domain assumptions about navigation on a ground-plane, whilst also removing the requirement for specialized hardware setup (eg lighting, downwards facing cameras). In particular, our integration of VPR with SLAM by leveraging the robustness of deep-learned features and our homography-based extreme viewpoint invariance significantly boosts the performance of VPR, feature correspondence, and pose graph submodules of the SLAM pipeline. For the first time, we demonstrate a localization system capable of state-of-the-art performance despite perceptual aliasing and extreme 180-degree-rotated viewpoint change in a range of real-world and simulated experiments. Our system is able to achieve early loop closures that prevent significant drifts in SLAM trajectories. We also compare extensively several deep architectures for VPR and descriptor matching. We also show that superior place recognition and descriptor matching across opposite views results in a similar performance gain in back-end pose graph optimization.

Abstract

Recent neuroimaging evidence suggest that there exists a unique individual-specific functional connectivity (FC) pattern consistent across tasks. The objective of our study is to utilize FC patterns to identify an individual using a supervised machine learning approach. To this end, we use two previously published data sets that comprises resting-state and task-based fMRI responses. We use static FC measures as input to a linear classifier to evaluate its performance. We additionally extend this analysis to capture dynamic FC using two approaches: the common sliding window approach and the more recent phase synchrony-based measure. We found that the classification models using dynamic FC patterns as input outperform their static analysis counterpart by a significant margin for both data sets. Furthermore, sliding window-based analysis proved to capture more individual-specific brain connectivity patterns …

Abstract

Keeping time is fundamental for our everyday existence. Various isochronous activities, such as locomotion, require us to use internal timekeeping. This phenomenon comes into play also in other human pursuits such as dance and music. When listening to music, we spontaneously perceive and predict its beat. The process of beat perception comprises both beat inference and beat maintenance, their relative importance depending on the salience of beat in the music. To study functional connectivity associated with these processes in a naturalistic situation, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain responses of participants while they were listening to a piece of music containing strong contrasts in beat salience. Subsequently, we utilized dynamic graph analysis and psychophysiological interactions (PPI) analysis in connection with computational modelling of beat salience to investigate …