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Computers can help us to trigger our intuition about how to solve a problem. But how does a computer take into account what a user wants and update these triggers? User preferences are hard to model as they are by nature vague, depend on the user’s background and are not always deterministic, changing depending on the context and process under which they were established. We pose that the process of preference discovery should be the object of interest in computer aided design or ideation. The process should be transparent, informative, interactive and intuitive. We formulate Hyper-Pref, a cyclic co-creative process between human and computer, which triggers the user’s intuition about what is possible and is updated according to what the user wants based on their decisions. We combine quality diversity algorithms, a divergent optimization method that can produce many, diverse solutions, with variational autoencoders to both model that diversity as well as the user’s preferences, discovering the preference hypervolume within large search spaces.
Short summary
This dataset accompanies our paper
A. Mitrevski, P. G. Plöger, and G. Lakemeyer, "Representation and Experience-Based Learning of Explainable Models for Robot Action Execution," in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020.
Contents
There are three zip archives included, each of them a dump of a MongoDB database corresponding to one of the three experiments in the paper:
Grasping a drawer handle (handle_drawer_logs.zip)
Grasping a fridge handle (handle_fridge_logs.zip)
Pulling an object (pull_logs.zip)
All three experiments were performed with a Toyota HSR. Only the data necessary for learning the models used in our experiments are included here.
Usage
After unzipping the archives, each database can be restored with the command
mongorestore [directory_name]
This will create a MongoDB database with the name of the directory (handle_drawer_logs, handle_fridge_logs, and pull_logs).
Code for processing the data and model learning can be found in our <a href="https://github.com/alex-mitrevski/explainable-robot-execution-models">GitHub repository.
Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews of static scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.
Kollaborative Industrieroboter werden für produzierende Unternehmen immer kosteneffizienter. Während diese Systeme für den menschlichen Mitarbeiter eine große Hilfe sein können, stellen sie gleichzeitig ein ernstes Gesundheitsrisiko dar, wenn die zwingend notwendigen Sicherheitsmaßnahmen nur unzureichend umgesetzt werden. Herkömmliche Sicherheitseinrichtungen wie Zäune oder Lichtvorhänge bieten einen guten Schutz, aber solch statische Schutzvorrichtungen sind in neuen, hochdynamischen Arbeitsszenarien problematisch.
Im Forschungsprojekt BeyondSPAI wurde ein Funktionsmuster eines Multisensorsystems zur Absicherung solcher dynamischer Arbeitsszenarien entworfen, implementiert und im Feld getestet. Kern des Systems ist eine robuste optische Materialklassifikation, die mit Hilfe eines intelligenten InGaAs-Kamerasystems Haut von anderen typischen Werkstückoberflächen (z.B. Holz, Metalle od. Kunststoffe) unterscheiden kann. Diese einzigartige Eigenschaft wird genutzt, um menschliche Mitarbeiter zuverlässig zu erkennen, so dass ein konventioneller Roboter in Folge als personenbewusster Cobot arbeiten kann.
Das System ist modular und kann leicht mit weiteren Sensoren verschiedenster Art erweitert werden. Es kann an verschiedene Marken von Industrierobotern angepasst werden und lässt sich schnell an bestehenden Robotersystemen integrieren. Die vier vom System bereitgestellten Sicherheitsausgänge können dazu verwendet werden - abhängig von der durchdrungenen Überwachungszone - entweder eine Warnung auszugeben, die Bewegung des Roboters auf eine sichere Geschwindigkeit zu verlangsamen, oder den Roboter sicher anzuhalten. Sobald alle Zonen wieder als „eindeutig frei von Personen“ identifiziert sind, kann der Roboter wieder beschleunigen, seine ursprüngliche Bewegung wiederaufnehmen und die Arbeit fortsetzen.
The ongoing digitisation in everyday working life means that ever larger amounts of personal data of employees are processed by their employers. This development is particularly problematic with regard to employee data protection and the right to informational self-determination. We strive for the use of company Privacy Dashboards as a means to compensate for missing transparency and control. For conceptual design we use among other things the method of mental models. We present the methodology and first results of our research. We highlight the opportunities that such an approach offers for the user-centred development of Privacy Dashboards.
With the digital transformation, software systems have become an integral part of our society and economy. In every part of our life, software systems are increasingly utilized to, e.g., simplify housework or to optimize business processes. All these applications are connected to the Internet, which already includes millions of software services consumed by billions of people. Applications which process such a magnitude of users and data traffic requires to be highly scalable and are therefore denoted as Ultra Large Scale (ULS) systems. Roy Fielding has defined one of the first approaches which allows designing modern ULS software systems. In his doctoral thesis, Fielding introduced the architectural style Representational State Transfer (REST) which builds the theoretical foundation of the web. At present, the web is considered as the world's largest ULS system. Due to a large number of users and the significance of software for society and the economy, the security of ULS systems is another crucial quality factor besides high scalability.
Telepresence robots allow users to be spatially and socially present in remote environments. Yet, it can be challenging to remotely operate telepresence robots, especially in dense environments such as academic conferences or workplaces. In this paper, we primarily focus on the effect that a speed control method, which automatically slows the telepresence robot down when getting closer to obstacles, has on user behaviors. In our first user study, participants drove the robot through a static obstacle course with narrow sections. Results indicate that the automatic speed control method significantly decreases the number of collisions. For the second study we designed a more naturalistic, conference-like experimental environment with tasks that require social interaction, and collected subjective responses from the participants when they were asked to navigate through the environment. While about half of the participants preferred automatic speed control because it allowed for smoother and safer navigation, others did not want to be influenced by an automatic mechanism. Overall, the results suggest that automatic speed control simplifies the user interface for telepresence robots in static dense environments, but should be considered as optionally available, especially in situations involving social interactions.
The ability to finely segment different instances of various objects in an environment forms a critical tool in the perception tool-box of any autonomous agent. Traditionally instance segmentation is treated as a multi-label pixel-wise classification problem. This formulation has resulted in networks that are capable of producing high-quality instance masks but are extremely slow for real-world usage, especially on platforms with limited computational capabilities. This thesis investigates an alternate regression-based formulation of instance segmentation to achieve a good trade-off between mask precision and run-time. Particularly the instance masks are parameterized and a CNN is trained to regress to these parameters, analogous to bounding box regression performed by an object detection network.
In this investigation, the instance segmentation masks in the Cityscape dataset are approximated using irregular octagons and an existing object detector network (i.e., SqueezeDet) is modified to regresses to the parameters of these octagonal approximations. The resulting network is referred to as SqueezeDetOcta. At the image boundaries, object instances are only partially visible. Due to the convolutional nature of most object detection networks, special handling of the boundary adhering object instances is warranted. However, the current object detection techniques seem to be unaffected by this and handle all the object instances alike. To this end, this work proposes selectively learning only partial, untainted parameters of the bounding box approximation of the boundary adhering object instances. Anchor-based object detection networks like SqueezeDet and YOLOv2 have a discrepancy between the ground-truth encoding/decoding scheme and the coordinate space used for clustering, to generate the prior anchor shapes. To resolve this disagreement, this work proposes clustering in a space defined by two coordinate axes representing the natural log transformations of the width and height of the ground-truth bounding boxes.
When both SqueezeDet and SqueezeDetOcta were trained from scratch, SqueezeDetOcta lagged behind the SqueezeDet network by a massive ≈ 6.19 mAP. Further analysis revealed that the sparsity of the annotated data was the reason for this lackluster performance of the SqueezeDetOcta network. To mitigate this issue transfer-learning was used to fine-tune the SqueezeDetOcta network starting from the trained weights of the SqueezeDet network. When all the layers of the SqueezeDetOcta were fine-tuned, it outperformed the SqueezeDet network paired with logarithmically extracted anchors by ≈ 0.77 mAP. In addition to this, the forward pass latencies of both SqueezeDet and SqueezeDetOcta are close to ≈ 19ms. Boundary adhesion considerations, during training, resulted in an improvement of ≈ 2.62 mAP of the baseline SqueezeDet network. A SqueezeDet network paired with logarithmically extracted anchors improved the performance of the baseline SqueezeDet network by ≈ 1.85 mAP.
In summary, this work demonstrates that if given sufficient fine instance annotated data, an existing object detection network can be modified to predict much finer approximations (i.e., irregular octagons) of the instance annotations, whilst having the same forward pass latency as that of the bounding box predicting network. The results justify the merits of logarithmically extracted anchors to boost the performance of any anchor-based object detection network. The results also showed that the special handling of image boundary adhering object instances produces more performant object detectors.
The simultaneous operation of multiple different semiconducting metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors is demanding for the readout circuitry. The challenge results from the strongly varying signal intensities of the various sensor types to the target gas. While some sensors change their resistance only slightly, other types can react with a resistive change over a range of several decades. Therefore, a suitable readout circuit has to be able to capture all these resistive variations, requiring it to have a very large dynamic range. This work presents a compact embedded system that provides a full, high range input interface (readout and heater management) for MOX sensor operation. The system is modular and consists of a central mainboard that holds up to eight sensor-modules, each capable of supporting up to two MOX sensors, therefore supporting a total maximum of 16 different sensors. Its wide input range is archived using the resistance-to-time measurement method. The system is solely built with commercial off-the-shelf components and tested over a range spanning from 100Ω to 5 GΩ (9.7 decades) with an average measurement error of 0.27% and a maximum error of 2.11%. The heater management uses a well-tested power-circuit and supports multiple modes of operation, hence enabling the system to be used in highly automated measurement applications. The experimental part of this work presents the results of an exemplary screening of 16 sensors, which was performed to evaluate the system’s performance.
Object detectors have improved considerably in the last years by using advanced CNN architectures. However, many detector hyper-parameters are generally manually tuned, or they are used with values set by the detector authors. Automatic Hyper-parameter optimization has not been explored in improving CNN-based object detectors hyper-parameters. In this work, we propose the use of Black-box optimization methods to tune the prior/default box scales in Faster R-CNN and SSD, using Bayesian Optimization, SMAC, and CMA-ES. We show that by tuning the input image size and prior box anchor scale on Faster R-CNN mAP increases by 2% on PASCAL VOC 2007, and by 3% with SSD. On the COCO dataset with SSD there are mAP improvement in the medium and large objects, but mAP decreases by 1% in small objects. We also perform a regression analysis to find the significant hyper-parameters to tune.
In this paper we introduce the Perception for Autonomous Systems (PAZ) software library. PAZ is a hierarchical perception library that allow users to manipulate multiple levels of abstraction in accordance to their requirements or skill level. More specifically, PAZ is divided into three hierarchical levels which we refer to as pipelines, processors, and backends. These abstractions allows users to compose functions in a hierarchical modular scheme that can be applied for preprocessing, data-augmentation, prediction and postprocessing of inputs and outputs of machine learning (ML) models. PAZ uses these abstractions to build reusable training and prediction pipelines for multiple robot perception tasks such as: 2D keypoint estimation, 2D object detection, 3D keypoint discovery, 6D pose estimation, emotion classification, face recognition, instance segmentation, and attention mechanisms.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms should learn as much as possible about the environment but not the properties of the physics engines that generate the environment. There are multiple algorithms that solve the task in a physics engine based environment but there is no work done so far to understand if the RL algorithms can generalize across physics engines. In this work, we compare the generalization performance of various deep reinforcement learning algorithms on a variety of control tasks. Our results show that MuJoCo is the best engine to transfer the learning to other engines. On the other hand, none of the algorithms generalize when trained on PyBullet. We also found out that various algorithms have a promising generalizability if the effect of random seeds can be minimized on their performance.
An internal model of self-motion provides a fundamental basis for action in our daily lives, yet little is known about its development. The ability to control self-motion develops in youth and often deteriorates with advanced age. Self-motion generates relative motion between the viewer and the environment. Thus, the smoothness of the visual motion created will vary as control improves. Here, we study the influence of the smoothness of visually simulated self-motion on an observer's ability to judge how far they have travelled over a wide range of ages. Previous studies were typically highly controlled and concentrated on university students. But are such populations representative of the general public? And are there developmental and sex effects? Here, estimates of distance travelled (visual odometry) during visually induced self-motion were obtained from 466 participants drawn from visitors to a public science museum. Participants were presented with visual motion that simulated forward linear self-motion through a field of lollipops using a head-mounted virtual reality display. They judged the distance of their simulated motion by indicating when they had reached the position of a previously presented target. The simulated visual motion was presented with or without horizontal or vertical sinusoidal jitter. Participants' responses indicated that they felt they travelled further in the presence of vertical jitter. The effectiveness of the display increased with age over all jitter conditions. The estimated time for participants to feel that they had started to move also increased slightly with age. There were no differences between the sexes. These results suggest that age should be taken into account when generating motion in a virtual reality environment. Citizen science studies like this can provide a unique and valuable insight into perceptual processes in a truly representative sample of people.
OSC data
(2020)