The purpose of this work was to tackle practical issues which arise when using a tendon-driven robotic manipulator with a long, passive, flexible proximal section in medical applications. A separable robot which overcomes difficulties in actuation and sterilization is introduced, in which the body containing the electronics is reusable and the remainder is disposable. A control input which resolves the redundancy in the kinematics and a physical interpretation of this redundancy are provided. The effect of a static change in the proximal section angle on bending angle error was explored under four testing conditions for a sinusoidal input. Bending angle error increased for increasing proximal section angle for all testing conditions with an average error reduction of 41.48% for retension, 4.28% for hysteresis, and 52.35% for re-tension + hysteresis compensation relative to the baseline case. Two major sources of error in tracking the bending angle were identified: time delay from hysteresis and DC offset from the proximal section angle. Examination of these error sources revealed that the simple hysteresis compensation was most effective for removing time delay and re-tension compensation for removing DC offset, which was the primary source of increasing error. The re-tension compensation was also tested for dynamic changes in the proximal section and reduced error in the final configuration of the tip by 89.14% relative to the baseline case.

位置敏感探测器（PSDS）提供了高精度跟踪单个活动标记的两个（或三个）自由（DOF）位置，同时具有高更新频率和低延迟的快速响应时间，所有使用非常简单的信号处理电路。然而，由于缺乏方向测量，有限的跟踪范围和对环境变化的敏感性，它们并不特别适用于6-DOF对象姿势跟踪系统。我们提出了一种新颖的6-DOF姿势跟踪系统，用于需要单个有效标记的刚性物体跟踪。所提出的系统使用立体声的PSD对和多个惯性测量单元（IMU）。这是基于实用的方法来识别和控制红外发光二极管（IR-LED）有源标记的功率，目的是增加跟踪工作空间并降低功耗。我们所提出的跟踪系统用三种不同的工作空间尺寸验证，使用具有三种不同动态运动模式的机器人臂操纵器进行静态和动态位置精度。结果表明，静态位置根均方（RMS）误差为0.6mm。动态位置rms误差为0.7-0.9mm。方向rms误差在不同动态运动时的0.04和0.9度之间。总的来说，我们所提出的跟踪系统能够在工作空间的中间范围和实验室设置下的所有工作空间的子度准确度下跟踪刚性物体姿势。

Generating wind power scenarios is very important for studying the impacts of multiple wind farms that are interconnected to the grid. We develop a graph convolutional generative adversarial network (GCGAN) approach by leveraging GAN's capability in generating large number of realistic scenarios without using statistical modeling. Unlike existing GAN-based wind power data generation approaches, we design GAN's hidden layers to match the underlying spatial and temporal characteristics. We advocate to use graph filters to embed the spatial correlation among multiple wind farms, and a one-dimensional (1D) convolutional layer for representing the temporal feature filters. The proposed graph and feature filter designs significantly reduce the GAN model complexity, leading to improvements on the training efficiency and computation complexity. Numerical results using real wind power data from Australia demonstrate that the scenarios generated by the proposed GCGAN exhibit more realistic spatial and temporal statistics than other GAN-based outputs.

The 3D-aware image synthesis focuses on conserving spatial consistency besides generating high-resolution images with fine details. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has been introduced for synthesizing novel views with low computational cost and superior performance. While several works investigate a generative NeRF and show remarkable achievement, they cannot handle conditional and continuous feature manipulation in the generation procedure. In this work, we introduce a novel model, called Class-Continuous Conditional Generative NeRF ($\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF), which can synthesize conditionally manipulated photorealistic 3D-consistent images by projecting conditional features to the generator and the discriminator. The proposed $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF is evaluated with three image datasets, AFHQ, CelebA, and Cars. As a result, our model shows strong 3D-consistency with fine details and smooth interpolation in conditional feature manipulation. For instance, $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF exhibits a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 7.64 in 3D-aware face image synthesis with a $\text{128}^{2}$ resolution. Additionally, we provide FIDs of generated 3D-aware images of each class of the datasets as it is possible to synthesize class-conditional images with $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF.

In both terrestrial and marine ecology, physical tagging is a frequently used method to study population dynamics and behavior. However, such tagging techniques are increasingly being replaced by individual re-identification using image analysis. This paper introduces a contrastive learning-based model for identifying individuals. The model uses the first parts of the Inception v3 network, supported by a projection head, and we use contrastive learning to find similar or dissimilar image pairs from a collection of uniform photographs. We apply this technique for corkwing wrasse, Symphodus melops, an ecologically and commercially important fish species. Photos are taken during repeated catches of the same individuals from a wild population, where the intervals between individual sightings might range from a few days to several years. Our model achieves a one-shot accuracy of 0.35, a 5-shot accuracy of 0.56, and a 100-shot accuracy of 0.88, on our dataset.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

According to the rapid development of drone technologies, drones are widely used in many applications including military domains. In this paper, a novel situation-aware DRL- based autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm in cyber-physical loitering munition applications. On the battlefield, the design of DRL-based autonomous control algorithm is not straightforward because real-world data gathering is generally not available. Therefore, the approach in this paper is that cyber-physical virtual environment is constructed with Unity environment. Based on the virtual cyber-physical battlefield scenarios, a DRL-based automated nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm can be designed, evaluated, and visualized. Moreover, many obstacles exist which is harmful for linear trajectory control in real-world battlefield scenarios. Thus, our proposed autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm utilizes situation-aware components those are implemented with a Raycast function in Unity virtual scenarios. Based on the gathered situation-aware information, the drone can autonomously and nonlinearly adjust its trajectory during flight. Therefore, this approach is obviously beneficial for avoiding obstacles in obstacle-deployed battlefields. Our visualization-based performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm is superior from the other linear mobility control algorithms.

In robotics and computer vision communities, extensive studies have been widely conducted regarding surveillance tasks, including human detection, tracking, and motion recognition with a camera. Additionally, deep learning algorithms are widely utilized in the aforementioned tasks as in other computer vision tasks. Existing public datasets are insufficient to develop learning-based methods that handle various surveillance for outdoor and extreme situations such as harsh weather and low illuminance conditions. Therefore, we introduce a new large-scale outdoor surveillance dataset named eXtremely large-scale Multi-modAl Sensor dataset (X-MAS) containing more than 500,000 image pairs and the first-person view data annotated by well-trained annotators. Moreover, a single pair contains multi-modal data (e.g. an IR image, an RGB image, a thermal image, a depth image, and a LiDAR scan). This is the first large-scale first-person view outdoor multi-modal dataset focusing on surveillance tasks to the best of our knowledge. We present an overview of the proposed dataset with statistics and present methods of exploiting our dataset with deep learning-based algorithms. The latest information on the dataset and our study are available at https://github.com/lge-robot-navi, and the dataset will be available for download through a server.

Springs are efficient in storing and returning elastic potential energy but are unable to hold the energy they store in the absence of an external load. Lockable springs use clutches to hold elastic potential energy in the absence of an external load but have not yet been widely adopted in applications, partly because clutches introduce design complexity, reduce energy efficiency, and typically do not afford high-fidelity control over the energy stored by the spring. Here, we present the design of a novel lockable compression spring that uses a small capstan clutch to passively lock a mechanical spring. The capstan clutch can lock up to 1000 N force at any arbitrary deflection, unlock the spring in less than 10 ms with a control force less than 1 % of the maximal spring force, and provide an 80 % energy storage and return efficiency (comparable to a highly efficient electric motor operated at constant nominal speed). By retaining the form factor of a regular spring while providing high-fidelity locking capability even under large spring forces, the proposed design could facilitate the development of energy-efficient spring-based actuators and robots.

Supervision for metric learning has long been given in the form of equivalence between human-labeled classes. Although this type of supervision has been a basis of metric learning for decades, we argue that it hinders further advances of the field. In this regard, we propose a new regularization method, dubbed HIER, to discover the latent semantic hierarchy of training data, and to deploy the hierarchy to provide richer and more fine-grained supervision than inter-class separability induced by common metric learning losses. HIER achieved this goal with no annotation for the semantic hierarchy but by learning hierarchical proxies in hyperbolic spaces. The hierarchical proxies are learnable parameters, and each of them is trained to serve as an ancestor of a group of data or other proxies to approximate the semantic hierarchy among them. HIER deals with the proxies along with data in hyperbolic space since geometric properties of the space are well-suited to represent their hierarchical structure. The efficacy of HIER was evaluated on four standard benchmarks, where it consistently improved performance of conventional methods when integrated with them, and consequently achieved the best records, surpassing even the existing hyperbolic metric learning technique, in almost all settings.