beacon data
Beacon2Science: Enhancing STEREO/HI beacon data1 with machine learning for efficient CME tracking
Louëdec, Justin Le, Bauer, Maike, Amerstorfer, Tanja, Davies, Jackie A.
Observing and forecasting coronal mass ejections (CME) in real-time is crucial due to the strong geomagnetic storms they can generate that can have a potentially damaging effect, for example, on satellites and electrical devices. With its near-real-time availability, STEREO/HI beacon data is the perfect candidate for early forecasting of CMEs. However, previous work concluded that CME arrival prediction based on beacon data could not achieve the same accuracy as with high-resolution science data due to data gaps and lower quality. We present our novel pipeline entitled ''Beacon2Science'', bridging the gap between beacon and science data to improve CME tracking. Through this pipeline, we first enhance the quality (signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution) of beacon data. We then increase the time resolution of enhanced beacon images through learned interpolation to match science data's 40-minute resolution. We maximize information coherence between consecutive frames with adapted model architecture and loss functions through the different steps. The improved beacon images are comparable to science data, showing better CME visibility than the original beacon data. Furthermore, we compare CMEs tracked in beacon, enhanced beacon, and science images. The tracks extracted from enhanced beacon data are closer to those from science images, with a mean average error of $\sim 0.5 ^\circ$ of elongation compared to $1^\circ$ with original beacon data. The work presented in this paper paves the way for its application to forthcoming missions such as Vigil and PUNCH.
- Europe > Austria > Styria > Graz (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- North America > Canada > Alberta > Census Division No. 13 > Athabasca County (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom (0.04)
RECON: Reducing Causal Confusion with Human-Placed Markers
Sanchez, Robert Ramirez, Nemlekar, Heramb, Sagheb, Shahabedin, Nunez, Cara M., Losey, Dylan P.
Imitation learning enables robots to learn new tasks from human examples. One current fundamental limitation while learning from humans is causal confusion. Causal confusion occurs when the robot's observations include both task-relevant and extraneous information: for instance, a robot's camera might see not only the intended goal, but also clutter and changes in lighting within its environment. Because the robot does not know which aspects of its observations are important a priori, it often misinterprets the human's examples and fails to learn the desired task. To address this issue, we highlight that -- while the robot learner may not know what to focus on -- the human teacher does. In this paper we propose that the human proactively marks key parts of their task with small, lightweight beacons. Under our framework the human attaches these beacons to task-relevant objects before providing demonstrations: as the human shows examples of the task, beacons track the position of marked objects. We then harness this offline beacon data to train a task-relevant state embedding. Specifically, we embed the robot's observations to a latent state that is correlated with the measured beacon readings: in practice, this causes the robot to autonomously filter out extraneous observations and make decisions based on features learned from the beacon data. Our simulations and a real robot experiment suggest that this framework for human-placed beacons mitigates causal confusion and enables robots to learn the desired task from fewer demonstrations. See videos here: https://youtu.be/oy85xJvtLSU
- North America > United States > Virginia > Montgomery County > Blacksburg (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York > Tompkins County > Ithaca (0.04)