The rise in renewable energy is creating new dynamics in the energy grid that promise to create a cleaner and more participative energy grid, where technology plays a crucial part in making the required flexibility to achieve the vision of the next-generation grid. This work presents FRESCO, a framework that aims to ease the implementation of energy markets using a hierarchical control architecture of reinforcement learning agents trained using federated learning. The core concept we are proving is that having greedy agents subject to changing conditions from a higher level agent creates a cooperative setup that will allow for fulfilling all the individual objectives. This paper presents a general overview of the framework, the current progress, and some insights we obtained from the recent results. Climate change has emerged as one of our planet's most pressing challenges.

Place recognition plays a crucial role in re-localization and loop closure detection tasks for robots and vehicles. This paper seeks a well-defined global descriptor for LiDAR-based place recognition. Compared to local descriptors, global descriptors show remarkable performance in urban road scenes but are usually viewpoint-dependent. To this end, we propose a simple yet robust global descriptor dubbed FreSCo that decomposes the viewpoint difference during revisit and achieves both translation and rotation invariance by leveraging Fourier Transform and circular shift technique. Besides, a fast two-stage pose estimation method is proposed to estimate the relative pose after place retrieval by utilizing the compact 2D point clouds extracted from the original data. Experiments show that FreSCo exhibited superior performance than contemporaneous methods on sequences of different scenes from multiple datasets. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/soytony/FreSCo.

I remember walking into that place, which always sent you through a kitchen full of good things to eat and then into a study full of several fascinating objects, including oscilloscopes, as well as a giant model of a fly that was several feet long. The place had amazing couches and beds where the students listened carefully to Fresco. During our last talk, Fresco surprised me by arguing city planning had become more important to people than flying around on flying wings and driving in curvy cars. He reminded me of a term that I first heard when I attended school at his lab. The word was "cybernetics" -- the design of machines to make better machines than those produced by human hands.