While the majority of autonomous driving research has concentrated on everyday driving scenarios, further safety and performance improvements of autonomous vehicles require a focus on extreme driving conditions. In this context, autonomous racing is a new area of research that has been attracting considerable interest recently. Due to the fact that a vehicle is driven by its perception, planning, and control limits during racing, numerous research and development issues arise. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the autonomous racing system built by team KAIST for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). Our autonomy stack consists primarily of a multi-modal perception module, a high-speed overtaking planner, a resilient control stack, and a system status manager. We present the details of all components of our autonomy solution, including algorithms, implementation, and unit test results. In addition, this paper outlines the design principles and the results of a systematical analysis. Even though our design principles are derived from the unique application domain of autonomous racing, they can also be applied to a variety of safety-critical, high-cost-of-failure robotics applications. The proposed system was integrated into a full-scale autonomous race car (Dallara AV-21) and field-tested extensively. As a result, team KAIST was one of three teams who qualified and participated in the official IAC race events without any accidents. Our proposed autonomous system successfully completed all missions, including overtaking at speeds of around $220 km/h$ in the IAC@CES2022, the world's first autonomous 1:1 head-to-head race.

With the ever growing number of space debris in orbit, the need to prevent further space population is becoming more and more apparent. Refueling, servicing, inspection and deorbiting of spacecraft are some example missions that require precise navigation and docking in space. Having multiple, collaborating robots handling these tasks can greatly increase the efficiency of the mission in terms of time and cost. This article will introduce a modern and efficient control architecture for satellites on collaborative docking missions. The proposed architecture uses a centralized scheme that combines state-of-the-art, ad-hoc implementations of algorithms and techniques to maximize robustness and flexibility. It is based on a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for which efficient cost function and constraint sets are designed to ensure a safe and accurate docking. A simulation environment is also presented to validate and test the proposed control scheme.

Real-world robotic manipulation tasks remain an elusive challenge, since they involve both fine-grained environment interaction, as well as the ability to plan for long-horizon goals. Although deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have shown encouraging results when planning end-to-end in high-dimensional environments, they remain fundamentally limited by poor sample efficiency due to inefficient exploration, and by the complexity of credit assignment over long horizons. In this work, we present Efficient Learning of High-Level Plans from Play (ELF-P), a framework for robotic learning that bridges motion planning and deep RL to achieve long-horizon complex manipulation tasks. We leverage task-agnostic play data to learn a discrete behavioral prior over object-centric primitives, modeling their feasibility given the current context. We then design a high-level goal-conditioned policy which (1) uses primitives as building blocks to scaffold complex long-horizon tasks and (2) leverages the behavioral prior to accelerate learning. We demonstrate that ELF-P has significantly better sample efficiency than relevant baselines over multiple realistic manipulation tasks and learns policies that can be easily transferred to physical hardware.

Anomalies refer to data points or events that deviate from normal and homogeneous events, which can include fraudulent activities, network infiltrations, equipment malfunctions, process changes, or other significant but infrequent events. Prompt detection of such events can prevent potential losses in terms of finances, information, and human resources. With the advancement of computational capabilities and the availability of large datasets, anomaly detection has become a major area of research. Among these, anomaly detection in time series has gained more attention recently due to the added complexity imposed by the time dimension. This study presents a novel framework for time series anomaly detection using a combination of Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) architecture and Autoencoder. The Bi-LSTM network, which comprises two unidirectional LSTM networks, can analyze the time series data from both directions and thus effectively discover the long-term dependencies hidden in the sequential data. Meanwhile, the Autoencoder mechanism helps to establish the optimal threshold beyond which an event can be classified as an anomaly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, it is applied to a real-world multivariate time series dataset collected from a wind farm. The Bi-LSTM Autoencoder model achieved a classification accuracy of 96.79% and outperformed more commonly used LSTM Autoencoder models.

We demonstrate formation flying for drone swarm services. A set of drones fly in four different swarm formations. A dataset is collected to study the effect of formation flying on energy consumption. We conduct a set of experiments to study the effect of wind on formation flying. We examine the forces the drones exert on each other when flying in a formation. We finally identify and classify the formations that conserve most energy under varying wind conditions. The collected dataset aims at providing researchers data to conduct further research in swarm-based drone service delivery. Demo: https://youtu.be/NnucUWhUwLs

State-of-health (SOH) estimation is a key step in ensuring the safe and reliable operation of batteries. Due to issues such as varying data distribution and sequence length in different cycles, most existing methods require health feature extraction technique, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. GRU can well solve this problem due to the simple structure and superior performance, receiving widespread attentions. However, redundant information still exists within the network and impacts the accuracy of SOH estimation. To address this issue, a new GRU network based on Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (GRU-HSIC) is proposed. First, a zero masking network is used to transform all battery data measured with varying lengths every cycle into sequences of the same length, while still retaining information about the original data size in each cycle. Second, the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) bottleneck, which evolved from Information Bottleneck (IB) theory, is extended to GRU to compress the information from hidden layers. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted experiments on datasets from the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) of the University of Maryland and NASA Ames Prognostics Center of Excellence. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves higher accuracy than other recurrent models.

Many large-scale applications can be elegantly represented using graph structures. Their scalability, however, is often limited by the domain knowledge required to apply them. To address this problem, we propose a novel Causal Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network (CTGCN). Our CTGCN architecture is based on a causal discovery mechanism, and is capable of discovering the underlying causal processes. The major advantages of our approach stem from its ability to overcome computational scalability problems with a divide and conquer technique, and from the greater explainability of predictions made using a causal model. We evaluate the scalability of our CTGCN on two datasets to demonstrate that our method is applicable to large scale problems, and show that the integration of causality into the TGCN architecture improves prediction performance up to 40% over typical TGCN approach. Our results are obtained without requiring additional domain knowledge, making our approach adaptable to various domains, specifically when little contextual knowledge is available.

Remote Sensing Change Detection (RS-CD) aims to detect relevant changes from Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images (MT-RSIs), which aids in various RS applications such as land cover, land use, human development analysis, and disaster response. The performance of existing RS-CD methods is attributed to training on large annotated datasets. Furthermore, most of these models are less transferable in the sense that the trained model often performs very poorly when there is a domain gap between training and test datasets. This paper proposes an unsupervised CD method based on deep metric learning that can deal with both of these issues. Given an MT-RSI, the proposed method generates corresponding change probability map by iteratively optimizing an unsupervised CD loss without training it on a large dataset. Our unsupervised CD method consists of two interconnected deep networks, namely Deep-Change Probability Generator (D-CPG) and Deep-Feature Extractor (D-FE). The D-CPG is designed to predict change and no change probability maps for a given MT-RSI, while D-FE is used to extract deep features of MT-RSI that will be further used in the proposed unsupervised CD loss. We use transfer learning capability to initialize the parameters of D-FE. We iteratively optimize the parameters of D-CPG and D-FE for a given MT-RSI by minimizing the proposed unsupervised ``similarity-dissimilarity loss''. This loss is motivated by the principle of metric learning where we simultaneously maximize the distance between change pair-wise pixels while minimizing the distance between no-change pair-wise pixels in bi-temporal image domain and their deep feature domain. The experiments conducted on three CD datasets show that our unsupervised CD method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised CD methods. Code available at https://github.com/wgcban/Metric-CD

Metacontrol [6] is a framework that incorporates systems with the capability to self-adapt to maintain their functionalities at an Self-adaptation can be used in robotics to increase system robustness expected performance. Metacontrol has the design goals of being and reliability. This work describes the Metacontrol method reusable and extensible. This is achieved with the design principles: for self-adaptation in robotics. Particularly, it details how the MROS (1) separating the adaptation and application reasoning; (2) exploiting (Metacontrol for ROS Systems) framework implements and packages at runtime the engineering knowledge of how the system is Metacontrol, and it demonstrate how MROS can be applied in designed to reason how and when the system needs to adapt, i.e., a navigation scenario where a mobile robot navigates in a factory by being model-based.

Quantum computing exploits entanglement, superposition, and interference to perform certain tasks with significant speedups over classical computing, The recognition that the world is quantum mechanical sometimes even exponentially faster. Indeed while such has allowed researchers to embed well-established, but speedup has already been observed for a contrived problem classical, theories into the framework of quantum Hilbert [7], reaching it for data science is still uncertain even spaces. Shannon's information theory, which is the basis at the theoretical level, but this is one of the main goals of communication technology, has been generalized for QML. to quantum Shannon theory (or quantum information theory), opening up the possibility that quantum effects In practice, QML is a broad term that encompasses all could make information transmission more efficient [1]. of the tasks shown in Figure 1. For example, one can apply The field of biology has been extended to quantum biology machine learning to quantum applications like discovering to allow for a deeper understanding of biological quantum algorithms [8] or optimizing quantum experiments processes like photosynthesis, smell, and enzyme catalysis [9, 10], or one can use a quantum neural network [2]. Turing's theory of universal computation has been to process either classical or quantum information [11].