Lab meeting June 29th (Jim): A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning

Title: A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning

Stephane Ross, Geoffrey Gordon, and J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), April, 2011.

Abstracts:
Sequential prediction problems such as imitation learning, where future observations depend on previous predictions (actions), violate the common i.i.d. assumptions made in statistical learning. ... In this paper, we propose a new iterative algorithm, which trains a stationary deterministic policy, that can be seen as a no regret algorithm in an online learning setting. We show that any such no regret algorithm, combined with additional reduction assumptions, must find a policy with good performance under the distribution of observations it induces in such sequential settings.

Link

Lab Meeting June 22th (Chih-Chung):Minimum Snap Trajectory Generation and Control for Quadrotors (ICRA2011,best paper)

Title: Minimum Snap Trajectory Generation and Control for Quadrotors

Authors: Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar

Abstracts:
We address the controller design and the trajectory
generation for a quadrotor maneuvering in three
dimensions in a tightly constrained setting typical of indoor
environments. In such settings, it is necessary to allow for
significant excursions of the attitude from the hover state and
small angle approximations cannot be justified for the roll
and pitch. We develop an algorithm that enables the real-time
generation of optimal trajectories through a sequence of 3-D
positions and yaw angles, while ensuring safe passage through
specified corridors and satisfying constraints on velocities,
accelerations and inputs. A nonlinear controller ensures the
faithful tracking of these trajectories. Experimental results
illustrate the application of the method to fast motion (5-10
body lengths/second) in three-dimensional slalom courses.

[link]

Lab Meeting June 15th (Shao-Chen): Distributed Robust Data Fusion Based on Dynamic Voting (ICRA2011)

Title: Distributed Robust Data Fusion Based on Dynamic Voting

Authors: Eduardo Montijano, Sonia Mart´ınez and Carlos Sagues

Abstract:

Data association mistakes, estimation and measurement errors are some of the factors that can contribute to incorrect observations in robotic sensor networks. In order to act reliably, a robotic network must be able to fuse and correct its perception of the world by discarding any outlier information. This is a difficult task if the network is to be deployed remotely and the robots do not have access to groundtruth sites or manual calibration. In this paper, we present a novel, distributed scheme for robust data fusion in autonomous robotic networks. The proposed method adapts the RANSAC algorithm to exploit measurement redundancy, and enables robots determine an inlier observation with local communications. Different hypotheses are generated and voted for using a dynamic consensus algorithm. As the hypotheses are computed, the robots can change their opinion making the voting process dynamic. Assuming that at least one hypothesis is initialized with only inliers, we show that the method converges to the maximum likelihood of all the inlier observations in a general instance. Several simulations exhibit the good performance of the algorithm, which also gives acceptable results in situations where the conditions to guarantee convergence do not hold.

[link]

Lab Meeting June 15th (David): Sparse Scene Flow Segmentation for Moving Object Detection (Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2011)

Title: Sparse Scene Flow Segmentation for Moving Object Detection (Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2011)

Authors: P. Lenz, J. Ziegler, A. Geiger, M. Roser

Abstract:
Modern driver assistance systems such as collision avoidance or intersection assistance need reliable information on the current environment. Extracting such information from camera-based systems is a complex and challenging task for inner city taffic scenarios. This paper presents an approach for object detection utilizing sparse scene flow. For consecutive stereo images taken from a moving vehicle, corresponding interest points are extracted. Thus, for every interest point, disparity and optical flow values are known and consequently, scene flow can be calculated. Adjacent interest points describing a similar scene flow are considered to belong to one rigid object. The proposed method does not rely on object classes and allows for a robust detection of dynamic objects in traffic scenes. Leading vehicles are continuously detected for several frames. Oncoming objects are detected within five frames after their appearance.

Link: http://www.rainsoft.de/publications/iv11b.pdf

Lab Meeting June 8th, 2011 (Jeff): Incremental Construction of the Saturated-GVG for Multi-Hypothesis Topological SLAM

Title: Incremental Construction of the Saturated-GVG for Multi-Hypothesis
Topological SLAM

Authors: Tong Tao, Stephen Tully, George Kantor, and Howie Choset

Abstract:

The generalized Voronoi graph (GVG) is a topological representation of an environment that can be incrementally constructed with a mobile robot using sensor-based control. However, because of sensor range limitations, the GVG control law will fail when the robot moves into a large open area. This paper discusses an extended GVG approach to topological navigation and mapping: the saturated generalized Voronoi graph (S-GVG), for which the robot employs an additional wall-following behavior to navigate along obstacles at the range limit of the sensor. In this paper, we build upon previous work related to the S-GVG and provide two important contributions: 1) a rigorous discussion of the control laws and algorithm modifications that are necessary for incremental construction of the S-GVG with a mobile robot, and 2) a method for incorporating the S-GVG into a novel multi-hypothesis SLAM algorithm for loop-closing and localization. Experiments with a wheeled mobile robot in an office-like environment validate the ffectiveness of the proposed approach.

Link:
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(ICRA), 2011
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biorobotics/papers/icra11_tao.pdf
LocalLink

Lab Meeting June 1, 2011 (Alan): Semantic Structure from Motion (CVPR 2011)

Title: Semantic Structure from Motion (CVPR 2011)

Authors: Sid Yingze Bao and Silvio Savarese

Abstract

Conventional rigid structure from motion (SFM) addresses the problem of recovering the camera parameters (motion) and the 3D locations (structure) of scene points, given observed 2D image feature points. In this paper, we propose a new formulation called Semantic Structure From Motion (SSFM). In addition to the geometrical constraints provided by SFM, SSFM takes advantage of both semantic and geometrical properties associated with objects in the scene (Fig. 1). These properties allow us to recover not only the structure and motion but also the 3D locations, poses, and categories of objects in the scene. We cast this problem as a max-likelihood problem where geometry (cameras, points, objects) and semantic information (object classes) are simultaneously estimated. The key intuition is that, in addition to image features, the measurements of objects across views provide additional geometrical constraints that relate cameras and scene parameters. These constraints make the geometry estimation process more robust and, in turn, make object detection more accurate. Our framework has the unique ability to: i) estimate camera poses only from object detections, ii) enhance camera pose estimation, compared to feature-point-based SFM algorithms, iii) improve object detections given multiple uncalibrated images, compared to independently detecting objects in single images. Extensive quantitative results on three datasets – LiDAR cars, street-view pedestrians, and Kinect office desktop – verify our theoretical claims.

Link