Robotics and Automation deals with manufacture and applications of robots and computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information technology to reduce the need for human work. The journal provides an Open Access platform to publish the latest contributions in the field of robotics, automation technologies, robotic surgery, intelligent robotics, mechatronics, and biomimetics novel and biologically-inspired robotics, modelling, identification and control of robotic systems, biomedical, rehabilitation and surgical robotics, exoskeletons, prosthetics and artificial organs, AI, neural networks and fuzzy logic in robotics etc. This top best scholarly journal is using Editorial Manager System for online manuscript submission, review and tracking. Editorial board members of the Robotics & Automation or outside experts review manuscripts; at least two independent reviewer's approval followed by the editor is required for the acceptance of any citable manuscript. The journal includes a wide range of fields in its discipline to create a platform for the authors to make their contribution towards the journal and the editorial office promises a peer review process for the submitted manuscripts for the quality of publishing.

Conditional independence testing is a fundamental problem underlying causal discovery and a particularly challenging task in the presence of nonlinear and high-dimensional dependencies. Here a fully non-parametric test for continuous data based on conditional mutual information combined with a local permutation scheme is presented. Through a nearest neighbor approach, the test efficiently adapts also to non-smooth distributions due to strongly nonlinear dependencies. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the test reliably simulates the null distribution even for small sample sizes and with high-dimensional conditioning sets. The test is better calibrated than kernel-based tests utilizing an analytical approximation of the null distribution, especially for non-smooth densities, and reaches the same or higher power levels. Combining the local permutation scheme with the kernel tests leads to better calibration, but suffers in power. For smaller sample sizes and lower dimensions, the test is faster than random fourier feature-based kernel tests if the permutation scheme is (embarrassingly) parallelized, but the runtime increases more sharply with sample size and dimensionality. Thus, more theoretical research to analytically approximate the null distribution and speed up the estimation for larger sample sizes is desirable.

Despite recent advances, the remaining bottlenecks in deep generative models are necessity of extensive training and difficulties with generalization from small number of training examples. We develop a new generative model called Generative Matching Network which is inspired by the recently proposed matching networks for one-shot learning in discriminative tasks. By conditioning on the additional input dataset, our model can instantly learn new concepts that were not available in the training data but conform to a similar generative process. The proposed framework does not explicitly restrict diversity of the conditioning data and also does not require an extensive inference procedure for training or adaptation. Our experiments on the Omniglot dataset demonstrate that Generative Matching Networks significantly improve predictive performance on the fly as more additional data is available and outperform existing state of the art conditional generative models.

Vehicle climate control systems aim to keep passengers thermally comfortable. However, current systems control temperature rather than thermal comfort and tend to be energy hungry, which is of particular concern when considering electric vehicles. This paper poses energy-efficient vehicle comfort control as a Markov Decision Process, which is then solved numerically using Sarsa({\lambda}) and an empirically validated, single-zone, 1D thermal model of the cabin. The resulting controller was tested in simulation using 200 randomly selected scenarios and found to exceed the performance of bang-bang, proportional, simple fuzzy logic, and commercial controllers with 23%, 43%, 40%, 56% increase, respectively. Compared to the next best performing controller, energy consumption is reduced by 13% while the proportion of time spent thermally comfortable is increased by 23%. These results indicate that this is a viable approach that promises to translate into substantial comfort and energy improvements in the car.

We discuss the computational complexity of approximating maximum a posteriori inference in sum-product networks. We first show NP-hardness in trees of height two by a reduction from maximum independent set; this implies non-approximability within a sublinear factor. We show that this is a tight bound, as we can find an approximation within a linear factor in networks of height two. We then show that, in trees of height three, it is NP-hard to approximate the problem within a factor $2^{f(n)}$ for any sublinear function $f$ of the size of the input $n$. Again, this bound is tight, as we prove that the usual max-product algorithm finds (in any network) approximations within factor $2^{c \cdot n}$ for some constant $c < 1$. Last, we present a simple algorithm, and show that it provably produces solutions at least as good as, and potentially much better than, the max-product algorithm. We empirically analyze the proposed algorithm against max-product using synthetic and realistic networks.

In essence, people who interact with advanced technology want to be able to trust it appropriately, and then act on that trust. In interpersonal relationships, and otherwise, humans act largely based on trust. For example, a supervisor asks a subordinate to accomplish a task based on several factors that indicate they can trust them to accomplish that task. When consumers make purchases, they do so with trust that the product will perform as promised. Likewise, when using something like an autonomous vehicle, the user must be able to trust it appropriately in order to use it properly. With the rapid advancement of the capabilities of intelligent computing technology to do tasks that were previously assumed to be too complicated for computers, there has been much recent discussion regarding how humans can trust this technology - although the connection to trust is not always made explicit, per se.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been actively investigated and used in a wide range of problems in the past decade. A significant amount of attention has been given to develop NMF algorithms that are suitable to model time series with strong temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel state-space approach to perform dynamic NMF (D-NMF). In the proposed probabilistic framework, the NMF coefficients act as the state variables and their dynamics are modeled using a multi-lag nonnegative vector autoregressive (N-VAR) model within the process equation. We use expectation maximization and propose a maximum-likelihood estimation framework to estimate the basis matrix and the N-VAR model parameters. Interestingly, the N-VAR model parameters are obtained by simply applying NMF. Moreover, we derive a maximum a posteriori estimate of the state variables (i.e., the NMF coefficients) that is based on a prediction step and an update step, similarly to the Kalman filter. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach using different numerical simulations where D-NMF significantly outperforms its static counterpart. Experimental results for three different applications show that the proposed approach outperforms two state-of-the-art NMF approaches that exploit temporal dependencies, namely a nonnegative hidden Markov model and a frame stacking approach, while it requires less memory and computational power.

A latent space model for a family of random graphs assigns real-valued vectors to nodes of the graph such that edge probabilities are determined by latent positions. Latent space models provide a natural statistical framework for graph visualizing and clustering. A latent space model of particular interest is the Random Dot Product Graph (RDPG), which can be fit using an efficient spectral method; however, this method is based on a heuristic that can fail, even in simple cases. Here, we consider a closely related latent space model, the Logistic RDPG, which uses a logistic link function to map from latent positions to edge likelihoods. Over this model, we show that asymptotically exact maximum likelihood inference of latent position vectors can be achieved using an efficient spectral method. Our method involves computing top eigenvectors of a normalized adjacency matrix and scaling eigenvectors using a regression step. The novel regression scaling step is an essential part of the proposed method. In simulations, we show that our proposed method is more accurate and more robust than common practices. We also show the effectiveness of our approach over standard real networks of the karate club and political blogs.

The generation of preferences represented as CP-nets for experiments and empirical testing has typically been done in an ad hoc manner that may have introduced a large statistical bias in previous experimental work. We present novel polynomial-time algorithms for generating CP-nets with n nodes and maximum in-degree c uniformly at random. We extend this result to several statistical cultures commonly used in the social choice and preference reasoning literature. A CP-net is composed of both a graph and underlying cp-statements; our algorithm is the first to provably generate both the graph structure and cp-statements, and hence the underlying preference orders themselves, uniformly at random. We have released this code as a free and open source project. We use the uniform generation algorithm to investigate the maximum and expected flipping lengths, i.e., the maximum length over all outcomes o and o', of a minimal proof that o is preferred to o'. Using our new statistical evidence, we conjecture that, for CP-nets with binary variables and complete conditional preference tables, the expected flipping length is polynomial in the number of preference variables. This has positive implications for the usability of CP-nets as compact preference models.

We study the problem of self-interested planning under uncertainty in settings shared with more than a thousand other agents, each of which plans at its own individual level. We refer to such large numbers of agents as an agent population. The decision-theoretic formalism of interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) is used to model the agent's self-interested planning. The first contribution of this article is a method for drastically scaling the finitely-nested I-POMDP to certain agent populations for the first time. Our method exploits two types of structure that is often exhibited by agent populations -- anonymity and context-specific independence. We present a variant called the many-agent I-POMDP that models both these types of structure to plan efficiently under uncertainty in multiagent settings. In particular, the complexity of the belief update and solution in the many-agent I-POMDP is polynomial in the number of agents compared with the exponential growth that challenges the original framework. While exploiting structure helps mitigate the curse of many agents, the well-known curse of history that afflicts I-POMDPs continues to challenge scalability in terms of the planning horizon. The second contribution of this article is an application of the branch-and-bound scheme to reduce the exponential growth of the search tree for look ahead. For this, we introduce new fast-computing upper and lower bounds for the exact value function of the many-agent I-POMDP. This speeds up the look-ahead computations without trading off optimality, and reduces both memory and run time complexity. The third contribution is a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the methods on three new problems domains -- policing large protests, controlling traffic congestion at a busy intersection, and improving the AI for the popular Clash of Clans multiplayer game. We demonstrate the feasibility of exact self-interested planning in these large problems, and that our methods for speeding up the planning are effective. Altogether, these contributions represent a principled and significant advance toward moving self-interested planning under uncertainty to real-world applications.