Energy
IMPACT: A Toolchain for Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Specification, Prototyping, and Deployment
Florez, Alvaro, Astudillo, Alejandro, Decré, Wilm, Swevers, Jan, Gillis, Joris
The toolchain reduces the engineering complexity of NMPC implementations by providing the user with an easy-to-use application programming interface, and with the flexibility of using multiple state-of-the-art tools and numerical optimization solvers for rapid prototyping of NMPC solutions. IMPACT is written in Python, users can call it from Python and MATLAB, and the generated NMPC solvers can be directly executed from C, Python, MATLAB and Simulink. An application example is presented involving problem specification and deployment on embedded hardware using Simulink, showing the effectiveness and applicability of IMPACT for NMPC-based solutions.
Self-Inspection Method of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Power Plants Using Deep Q-Network Reinforcement Learning
For the purpose of inspecting power plants, autonomous robots can be built using reinforcement learning techniques. The method replicates the environment and employs a simple reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. This strategy might be applied in several sectors, including the electricity generation sector. A pre-trained model with perception, planning, and action is suggested by the research. To address optimization problems, such as the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation problem, Deep Q-network (DQN), a reinforcement learning-based framework that Deepmind launched in 2015, incorporates both deep learning and Q-learning. To overcome problems with current procedures, the research proposes a power plant inspection system incorporating UAV autonomous navigation and DQN reinforcement learning. These training processes set reward functions with reference to states and consider both internal and external effect factors, which distinguishes them from other reinforcement learning training techniques now in use. The key components of the reinforcement learning segment of the technique, for instance, introduce states such as the simulation of a wind field, the battery charge level of an unmanned aerial vehicle, the height the UAV reached, etc. The trained model makes it more likely that the inspection strategy will be applied in practice by enabling the UAV to move around on its own in difficult environments. The average score of the model converges to 9,000. The trained model allowed the UAV to make the fewest number of rotations necessary to go to the target point.
Soft Fluidic Closed-Loop Controller for Untethered Underwater Gliders
Bonofiglio, Kalina, Whiteside, Lauryn, Angeles, Maya, Haahr, Matthew, Simpson, Brandon, Palmer, Josh, Wu, Yijia, Nemitz, Markus P.
Abstract--Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. A soft hydrostatic pressure sensor is configured as a bangbang controller actuating a swim bladder made from silicone balloons. Due to its simple design, low cost, and ease of fabrication using FDM printing and soft lithography, it serves as a starting point for the exploration of non-electronic underwater soft robots. A. Traditional Underwater Gliders Over the last several decades, underwater gliders have gained popularity among autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) [1], [2]. Compared to other AUVs, underwater gliders can achieve greater traveling distances, lower power consumption, and improved cost effectiveness.
Transient Stability Analysis with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Stiasny, Jochen, Misyris, Georgios S., Chatzivasileiadis, Spyros
We explore the possibility to use physics-informed neural networks to drastically accelerate the solution of ordinary differential-algebraic equations that govern the power system dynamics. When it comes to transient stability assessment, the traditionally applied methods either carry a significant computational burden, require model simplifications, or use overly conservative surrogate models. Conventional neural networks can circumvent these limitations but are faced with high demand of high-quality training datasets, while they ignore the underlying governing equations. Physics-informed neural networks are different: they incorporate the power system differential algebraic equations directly into the neural network training and drastically reduce the need for training data. This paper takes a deep dive into the performance of physics-informed neural networks for power system transient stability assessment. Introducing a new neural network training procedure to facilitate a thorough comparison, we explore how physics-informed neural networks compare with conventional differential-algebraic solvers and classical neural networks in terms of computation time, requirements in data, and prediction accuracy. We illustrate the findings on the Kundur two-area system, and assess the opportunities and challenges of physics-informed neural networks to serve as a transient stability analysis tool, highlighting possible pathways to further develop this method.
Multi-Robot Persistent Monitoring: Minimizing Latency and Number of Robots with Recharging Constraints
Asghar, Ahmad Bilal, Sundaram, Shreyas, Smith, Stephen L.
In this paper we study multi-robot path planning for persistent monitoring tasks. We consider the case where robots have a limited battery capacity with a discharge time $D$. We represent the areas to be monitored as the vertices of a weighted graph. For each vertex, there is a constraint on the maximum allowable time between robot visits, called the latency. The objective is to find the minimum number of robots that can satisfy these latency constraints while also ensuring that the robots periodically charge at a recharging depot. The decision version of this problem is known to be PSPACE-complete. We present a $O(\frac{\log D}{\log \log D}\log \rho)$ approximation algorithm for the problem where $\rho$ is the ratio of the maximum and the minimum latency constraints. We also present an orienteering based heuristic to solve the problem and show empirically that it typically provides higher quality solutions than the approximation algorithm. We extend our results to provide an algorithm for the problem of minimizing the maximum weighted latency given a fixed number of robots. We evaluate our algorithms on large problem instances in a patrolling scenario and in a wildfire monitoring application. We also compare the algorithms with an existing solver on benchmark instances.
Offline Learning of Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Controllers for Parkinson Disease Treatment
Gao, Qitong, Schimdt, Stephen L., Chowdhury, Afsana, Feng, Guangyu, Peters, Jennifer J., Genty, Katherine, Grill, Warren M., Turner, Dennis A., Pajic, Miroslav
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has shown great promise toward treating motor symptoms caused by Parkinson's disease (PD), by delivering electrical pulses to the Basal Ganglia (BG) region of the brain. However, DBS devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can only deliver continuous DBS (cDBS) stimuli at a fixed amplitude; this energy inefficient operation reduces battery lifetime of the device, cannot adapt treatment dynamically for activity, and may cause significant side-effects (e.g., gait impairment). In this work, we introduce an offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework, allowing the use of past clinical data to train an RL policy to adjust the stimulation amplitude in real time, with the goal of reducing energy use while maintaining the same level of treatment (i.e., control) efficacy as cDBS. Moreover, clinical protocols require the safety and performance of such RL controllers to be demonstrated ahead of deployments in patients. Thus, we also introduce an offline policy evaluation (OPE) method to estimate the performance of RL policies using historical data, before deploying them on patients. We evaluated our framework on four PD patients equipped with the RC+S DBS system, employing the RL controllers during monthly clinical visits, with the overall control efficacy evaluated by severity of symptoms (i.e., bradykinesia and tremor), changes in PD biomakers (i.e., local field potentials), and patient ratings. The results from clinical experiments show that our RL-based controller maintains the same level of control efficacy as cDBS, but with significantly reduced stimulation energy. Further, the OPE method is shown effective in accurately estimating and ranking the expected returns of RL controllers.
Implicit Ray-Transformers for Multi-view Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Qi, Zipeng, Chen, Hao, Liu, Chenyang, Shi, Zhenwei, Zou, Zhengxia
The mainstream CNN-based remote sensing (RS) image semantic segmentation approaches typically rely on massive labeled training data. Such a paradigm struggles with the problem of RS multi-view scene segmentation with limited labeled views due to the lack of considering 3D information within the scene. In this paper, we propose ''Implicit Ray-Transformer (IRT)'' based on Implicit Neural Representation (INR), for RS scene semantic segmentation with sparse labels (such as 4-6 labels per 100 images). We explore a new way of introducing multi-view 3D structure priors to the task for accurate and view-consistent semantic segmentation. The proposed method includes a two-stage learning process. In the first stage, we optimize a neural field to encode the color and 3D structure of the remote sensing scene based on multi-view images. In the second stage, we design a Ray Transformer to leverage the relations between the neural field 3D features and 2D texture features for learning better semantic representations. Different from previous methods that only consider 3D prior or 2D features, we incorporate additional 2D texture information and 3D prior by broadcasting CNN features to different point features along the sampled ray. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we construct a challenging dataset containing six synthetic sub-datasets collected from the Carla platform and three real sub-datasets from Google Maps. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the CNN-based methods and the state-of-the-art INR-based segmentation methods in quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Cloud Services Enable Efficient AI-Guided Simulation Workflows across Heterogeneous Resources
Ward, Logan, Pauloski, J. Gregory, Hayot-Sasson, Valerie, Chard, Ryan, Babuji, Yadu, Sivaraman, Ganesh, Choudhury, Sutanay, Chard, Kyle, Thakur, Rajeev, Foster, Ian
Applications that fuse machine learning and simulation can benefit from the use of multiple computing resources, with, for example, simulation codes running on highly parallel supercomputers and AI training and inference tasks on specialized accelerators. Here, we present our experiences deploying two AI-guided simulation workflows across such heterogeneous systems. A unique aspect of our approach is our use of cloud-hosted management services to manage challenging aspects of cross-resource authentication and authorization, function-as-a-service (FaaS) function invocation, and data transfer. We show that these methods can achieve performance parity with systems that rely on direct connection between resources. We achieve parity by integrating the FaaS system and data transfer capabilities with a system that passes data by reference among managers and workers, and a user-configurable steering algorithm to hide data transfer latencies. We anticipate that this ease of use can enable routine use of heterogeneous resources in computational science.
GPT-4 Will Make ChatGPT Smarter but Won't Fix Its Flaws
With its uncanny ability to hold a conversation, answer questions, and write coherent prose, poetry, and code, the chatbot ChatGPT has forced many people to rethink the potential of artificial intelligence. The startup that made ChatGPT, OpenAI, today announced a much-anticipated new version of the AI model at its core. The new algorithm, called GPT-4, follows GPT-3, a groundbreaking text-generation model that OpenAI announced in 2020, which was later adapted to create ChatGPT last year. The new model scores more highly on a range of tests designed to measure intelligence and knowledge in humans and machines, OpenAI says. It also makes fewer blunders and can respond to images as well as text.
IDVVCORP – Clean Energy Solar and Crypto Solutions
We are a provider of clean energy solutions specializing in solar technology, battery storage, as well as clean energy crypto mining options for both on & off grid. We're currently implementing EV2G / Bi-directional charging options, thus allowing you to use your electric vehicle as a means of a backup battery, or to sell power back to the grid. In 2022 IDVV started to offer its clients a Clean Energy Crypto mining solution. Our Plug-n-Play mining rigs can be installed in existing or current systems and allows the option to sell power back to the grid or mine crypto currency with any power surplus. In 2023 We acquired WITech as part of an expansion into the AI Sector.