Abstract

The analyzed system model in this paper is a distributed parallel detection network in which each secondary user (SU) evaluates the energy-based test statistic from the received observations and sends it to a fusion center (FC), which makes the final decision. Uncertainty in the noise variance at each SU is modeled as an unknown constant in a certain interval around the nominal noise variance. It is assumed that the SUs are heterogeneous in that the nominal noise variances and the uncertainty intervals can be different for different SUs. Moreover, the received signal power at each SU may be different. For the considered system model, the paper presents important results for two inter-related themes on cooperative energy detection (CED) in the presence of noise uncertainty (NU). First, the expressions for generalized signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) walls are derived for the classical CED fusion rule, i.e., sum of energies from all SUs. Second, a Dempster-Shafer theory based CED is proposed in the presence of NU with heterogeneous sensors. In the proposed scheme, the test statistic from each SU is the energy-based basic mass assignment values, which are first discounted depending on the uncertainty level associated with the SU and then fused at the FC using the Dempster rule of combination to arrive at the global decision. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional sum fusion rule in terms of detection performance as well as the location of SNR wall.

Abstract

In buildings, a large chunk of energy is spent on heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. One way to optimize their usage is to make them demand-driven depending on human occupancy. This paper focuses on accurately estimating the number of occupants in a room by leveraging multiple heterogeneous sensor nodes and machine learning models. For this purpose, low-cost and non-intrusive sensors such as CO 2 , temperature, illumination, sound and motion were used. The sensor nodes were deployed in a room in a star configuration and measurements were recorded for a period of four days. A regression based method is proposed for calculating the slope of CO 2 , a new feature derived from real-time CO 2 values. Supervised learning algorithms such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) were used on several different combinations of feature sets. Moreover, multiple performance metrics such as accuracy, F1 score and confusion matrix were used to evaluate the performance of our models. Experimental results demonstrate a maximum accuracy of 98.4% and a high F1 score of 0.953 for estimating the number of occupants in the room. Principal component analysis (PCA) was also applied to evaluate the performance of a dataset with reduced dimensionality.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the customized-wireless sensor node implementation of the classical least mean square (LMS) algorithm for the reduction in data-transmissions from the sensor nodes to the sink in internet of things (IoT) networks. This reduction, in turn, increases the battery life of the sensor node. The system was deployed in outdoor and indoor environments to read the ambient temperature and then perform the prediction of the sensed data in order to minimize the number of data-transmissions to the sink node. The utility of the proposed concept has been demonstrated using the measured data and the battery life is increased 2.64 and 2.53 times in indoor and outdoor environments, respectively.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel control law for longitudinal speed control of autonomous vehicles. The key contributions of the proposed work include the design of a control law that reactively integrates the longitudinal surface gradient of road into its operation. In contrast to the existing works, we found that integrating the path gradient into the control framework improves the speed tracking efficacy. Since the control law is implemented over a shrinking domain scheme, it minimizes the integrated error by recomputing the control inputs at every discretized step and on sequently provides less reaction time. This makes our control law suitable for motion planning frameworks that are operating at high frequencies. Furthermore, our work is implemented using a generalized vehicle model and can be easily extended to other classes of vehicles. The performance of gradient aware - shrinking domain based controller is implemented and tested on a stock electric vehicle on which a number of sensors are mounted. Results from the tests show the robustness of our control law for speed tracking on a terrain with varying gradient while also considering stringent time constraints imposed by the planning framework.

Abstract

We present a new paradigm for real-time objectoriented SLAM with a monocular camera. Contrary to previous approaches, that rely on object-level models, we construct category-level models from CAD collections which are now widely available. To alleviate the need for huge amounts of labeled data, we develop a rendering pipeline that enables synthesis of large datasets from a limited amount of manually labeled data. Using data thus synthesized, we learn categorylevel models for object deformations in 3D, as well as discriminative object features in 2D. These category models are instance-independent and aid in the design of object landmark observations that can be incorporated into a generic monocular SLAM framework. Where typical object-SLAM approaches usually solve only for object and camera poses, we also estimate object shape on-the-fly, allowing for a wide range of objects from the category to be present in the scene. Moreover, since our 2D object features are learned discriminatively, the proposed object-SLAM system succeeds in several scenarios where sparse feature-based monocular SLAM fails due to insufficient features or parallax. Also, the proposed category models help in object instance retrieval, useful for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. We evaluate the proposed framework on multiple challenging real-world scenes and show — to the best of our knowledge — first results of an instance-independent monocular object-SLAM system and the benefits it enjoys over feature-based SLAM methods.

Abstract

This paper introduces geometry and novel object shape and pose costs for multi-object tracking in road scenes. Using images from a monocular camera alone, we devise pairwise costs for object tracks, based on several 3D cues such as object pose, shape, and motion. The proposed costs are agnostic to the data association method and can be incorporated into any optimization framework to output the pairwise data associations. These costs are easy to implement, can be computed in real-time, and complement each other to account for possible errors in a tracking-by-detection framework. We perform an extensive analysis of the designed costs and empirically demonstrate consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art under varying conditions that employ a range of object detectors, exhibit a variety in camera and object motions and, more importantly, are not reliant on the choice of the association framework. We also show that, by using the simplest of associations frameworks (two-frame Hungarian assignment),we surpass the state-of-the-art in multi-object-tracking on road scenes

Abstract

In this paper, we present a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework based on path velocity decomposition paradigm for autonomous driving. The optimization underlying the MPC has a two layer structure wherein first, an appropriate path is computed for the vehicle followed by the computation of optimal forward velocity along it. The very nature of the proposed path velocity decomposition allows for seamless compatibility between the two layers of the optimization. A key feature of the proposed work is that it offloads most of the responsibility of collision avoidance to velocity optimization layer for which computationally efficient formulations can be derived. In particular, we extend our previously developed concept of time scaled collision cone (TSCC) constraints and formulate the forward velocity optimization layer as a convex quadratic programming problem. We perform validation on autonomous driving scenarios wherein proposed MPC repeatedly solves both the optimization layers in receding horizon manner to compute lane change, overtaking and merging maneuvers among multiple dynamic obstacles.

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate a novel trajectory optimization scheme that takes into consideration the state uncertainty of the robot and obstacle into its collision avoidance routine. The collision avoidance under uncertainty is modeled here as an overlap between two distributions that represent the state of the robot and obstacle respectively. We adopt the minmax procedure to characterize the area of overlap between two Gaussian distributions, and compare it with the method of Bhattacharyya distance. We provide closed form expressions that can characterize the overlap as a function of control. Our proposed algorithm can avoid overlapping uncertainty distributions in two possible ways. Firstly when a prescribed overlapping area that needs to be avoided is posed as a confidence contour lower bound, control commands are accordingly realized through a MPC framework such that these bounds are respected. Secondly in tight spaces control commands are computed such that the overlapping distribution respects a prescribed range of overlap characterized by lower and upper bounds of the confidence contours. We test our proposal with extensive set of simulations carried out under various constrained environmental configurations. We show usefulness of proposal under tight spaces where finding control maneuvers with minimal risk behavior becomes an inevitable task.

Abstract

We propose a novel motion clustering formulation over spatio-temporal depth images obtained from stereo sequences that segments multiple motion models in the scene in an unsupervised manner. The motion models are obtained at frame rates that compete with the speed of the stereo depth computation. This is possible due to a decoupling framework that first delineates spatial clusters and subsequently assigns motion labels to each of these cluster with analysis of a novel motion graph model. A principled computation of the weights of the motion graph that signifies the relative shear and stretch between possible clusters lends itself to a high fidelity segmentation of the motion models in the scene. The fidelity is vindicated through accuracies reaching 89.61% on KITTI and complex native sequences.

Abstract

Conventionally, planning frameworks for autonomous vehicles consider large safety margins and predefined paths for performing the merge maneuvers. These considerations often increase the wait time at the intersections leading to traffic disruption. In this paper, we present a motion planning framework for autonomous vehicles to perform merge maneuver in dense traffic. Our framework is divided into a two-layer structure, Lane Selection layer and Scale Optimization layer. The Lane Selection layer computes the likelihood of collision along the lanes. This likelihood represents the collision risk associated with each lane and is used for lane selection. Subsequently, the Scale Optimization layer solves the time scaled collision cone (TSCC) constraint reactively for collision-free velocities. Our framework guarantees a collision-free merging even in dense traffic with minimum disruption. Furthermore, we show the simulation results in different merging scenarios to demonstrate the efficacy of our framework