本文提出了一种新颖的方法，用于在具有复杂拓扑结构的地下领域的搜索和救援行动中自动合作。作为CTU-Cras-Norlab团队的一部分，拟议的系统在DARPA SubT决赛的虚拟轨道中排名第二。与专门为虚拟轨道开发的获奖解决方案相反，该建议的解决方案也被证明是在现实世界竞争极为严峻和狭窄的环境中飞行的机上实体无人机的强大系统。提出的方法可以使无缝模拟转移的无人机团队完全自主和分散的部署，并证明了其优于不同环境可飞行空间的移动UGV团队的优势。该论文的主要贡献存在于映射和导航管道中。映射方法采用新颖的地图表示形式 - 用于有效的风险意识长距离计划，面向覆盖范围和压缩的拓扑范围的LTVMAP领域，以允许在低频道通信下进行多机器人合作。这些表示形式与新的方法一起在导航中使用，以在一般的3D环境中可见性受限的知情搜索，而对环境结构没有任何假设，同时将深度探索与传感器覆盖的剥削保持平衡。所提出的解决方案还包括一条视觉感知管道，用于在没有专用GPU的情况下在5 Hz处进行四个RGB流中感兴趣的对象的板上检测和定位。除了参与DARPA SubT外，在定性和定量评估的各种环境中，在不同的环境中进行了广泛的实验验证，UAV系统的性能得到了支持。

我们提出了通过现实的模拟和现实世界实验来支持可复制研究的多运动无人机控制（UAV）和估计系统。我们提出了一个独特的多帧本地化范式，用于同时使用多个传感器同时估算各种参考框架中的无人机状态。该系统可以在GNSS和GNSS贬低的环境中进行复杂的任务，包括室外室内过渡和执行冗余估计器，以备份不可靠的本地化源。提出了两种反馈控制设计：一个用于精确和激进的操作，另一个用于稳定和平稳的飞行，并进行嘈杂的状态估计。拟议的控制和估计管道是在3D中使用Euler/Tait-Bryan角度表示的，而无需使用Euler/Tait-Bryan角度表示。取而代之的是，我们依靠旋转矩阵和一个新颖的基于标题的惯例来代表标准多电流直升机3D中的一个自由旋转自由度。我们提供了积极维护且有据可查的开源实现，包括对无人机，传感器和本地化系统的现实模拟。拟议的系统是多年应用系统，空中群，空中操纵，运动计划和遥感的多年研究产物。我们所有的结果都得到了现实世界中的部署的支持，该系统部署将系统塑造成此处介绍的表单。此外，该系统是在我们团队从布拉格的CTU参与期间使用的，该系统在享有声望的MBZIRC 2017和2020 Robotics竞赛中，还参加了DARPA SubT挑战赛。每次，我们的团队都能在世界各地最好的竞争对手中获得最高位置。在每种情况下，挑战都促使团队改善系统，并在紧迫的期限内获得大量高质量的体验。

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

In this paper, we present a novel visual SLAM and long-term localization benchmark for autonomous driving in challenging conditions based on the large-scale 4Seasons dataset. The proposed benchmark provides drastic appearance variations caused by seasonal changes and diverse weather and illumination conditions. While significant progress has been made in advancing visual SLAM on small-scale datasets with similar conditions, there is still a lack of unified benchmarks representative of real-world scenarios for autonomous driving. We introduce a new unified benchmark for jointly evaluating visual odometry, global place recognition, and map-based visual localization performance which is crucial to successfully enable autonomous driving in any condition. The data has been collected for more than one year, resulting in more than 300 km of recordings in nine different environments ranging from a multi-level parking garage to urban (including tunnels) to countryside and highway. We provide globally consistent reference poses with up to centimeter-level accuracy obtained from the fusion of direct stereo-inertial odometry with RTK GNSS. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art visual odometry and visual localization baseline approaches on the benchmark and analyze their properties. The experimental results provide new insights into current approaches and show promising potential for future research. Our benchmark and evaluation protocols will be available at https://www.4seasons-dataset.com/.