scholarly journals Neuroevolutionary Control for Autonomous Soaring

Aerospace ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
Eric J. Kim ◽  
Ruben E. Perez

The energy efficiency and flight endurance of small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) can be improved through the implementation of autonomous soaring strategies. Biologically inspired flight techniques such as dynamic and thermal soaring offer significant energy savings through the exploitation of naturally occurring wind phenomena for thrustless flight. Recent interest in the application of artificial intelligence algorithms for autonomous soaring has been motivated by the pursuit of instilling generalized behavior in control systems, centered around the use of neural networks. However, the topology of such networks is usually predetermined, restricting the search space of potential solutions, while often resulting in complex neural networks that can pose implementation challenges for the limited hardware onboard small-scale autonomous vehicles. In exploring a novel method of generating neurocontrollers, this paper presents a neural network-based soaring strategy to extend flight times and advance the potential operational capability of SUAVs. In this study, the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm is used to train efficient and effective neurocontrollers that can control a simulated aircraft along sustained dynamic and thermal soaring trajectories. The proposed approach evolves interpretable neural networks in a way that preserves simplicity while maximizing performance without requiring extensive training datasets. As a result, the combined trajectory planning and aircraft control strategy is suitable for real-time implementation on SUAV platforms.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 377
Author(s):  
Chiao-Ling Kuo ◽  
Ming-Hua Tsai

The importance of road characteristics has been highlighted, as road characteristics are fundamental structures established to support many transportation-relevant services. However, there is still huge room for improvement in terms of types and performance of road characteristics detection. With the advantage of geographically tiled maps with high update rates, remarkable accessibility, and increasing availability, this paper proposes a novel simple deep-learning-based approach, namely joint convolutional neural networks (CNNs) adopting adaptive squares with combination rules to detect road characteristics from roadmap tiles. The proposed joint CNNs are responsible for the foreground and background image classification and various types of road characteristics classification from previous foreground images, raising detection accuracy. The adaptive squares with combination rules help efficiently focus road characteristics, augmenting the ability to detect them and provide optimal detection results. Five types of road characteristics—crossroads, T-junctions, Y-junctions, corners, and curves—are exploited, and experimental results demonstrate successful outcomes with outstanding performance in reality. The information of exploited road characteristics with location and type is, thus, converted from human-readable to machine-readable, the results will benefit many applications like feature point reminders, road condition reports, or alert detection for users, drivers, and even autonomous vehicles. We believe this approach will also enable a new path for object detection and geospatial information extraction from valuable map tiles.


2011 ◽  
Vol 464 ◽  
pp. 38-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping Ye ◽  
Gui Rong Weng

This paper proposed a novel method for leaf classification and recognition. In the method, the moment invariant and fractal dimension were regarded as the characteristic parameters of the plant leaf. In order to extract the representative characteristic parameters, pretreatment of the leaf images, including RGB-gray converting, image binarization and leafstalk removing. The extracted leaf characteristic parameters were further utilized as training sets to train the neural networks. The proposed method was proved effectively to reach a recognition rate about 92% for most of the testing leaf samples


Author(s):  
Daniel Auge ◽  
Julian Hille ◽  
Etienne Mueller ◽  
Alois Knoll

AbstractBiologically inspired spiking neural networks are increasingly popular in the field of artificial intelligence due to their ability to solve complex problems while being power efficient. They do so by leveraging the timing of discrete spikes as main information carrier. Though, industrial applications are still lacking, partially because the question of how to encode incoming data into discrete spike events cannot be uniformly answered. In this paper, we summarise the signal encoding schemes presented in the literature and propose a uniform nomenclature to prevent the vague usage of ambiguous definitions. Therefore we survey both, the theoretical foundations as well as applications of the encoding schemes. This work provides a foundation in spiking signal encoding and gives an overview over different application-oriented implementations which utilise the schemes.


Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fidel Rodríguez-Corbo ◽  
Leyre Azpilicueta ◽  
Mikel Celaya-Echarri ◽  
Peio López-Iturri ◽  
Imanol Picallo ◽  
...  

With the growing demand of vehicle-mounted sensors over the last years, the amount of critical data communications has increased significantly. Developing applications such as autonomous vehicles, drones or real-time high-definition entertainment requires high data-rates in the order of multiple Gbps. In the next generation of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, a wider bandwidth will be needed, as well as more precise localization capabilities and lower transmission latencies than current vehicular communication systems due to safety application requirements; 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is envisioned to be the key factor in the development of this next generation of vehicular communications. However, the implementation of mmWave links arises with difficulties due to blocking effects between mmWave transceivers, as well as different channel impairments for these high frequency bands. In this work, the mmWave channel propagation characterization for V2X communications has been performed by means of a deterministic in-house 3D ray launching simulation technique. A complex heterogeneous urban scenario has been modeled to analyze the different propagation phenomena of multiple mmWave V2X links. Results for large and small-scale propagation effects are obtained for line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) trajectories, enabling inter-data vehicular comparison. These analyzed results and the proposed methodology can aid in an adequate design and implementation of next generation vehicular networks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1013
Author(s):  
Zvezdan Lončarević ◽  
Rok Pahič ◽  
Aleš Ude ◽  
Andrej Gams

Autonomous robot learning in unstructured environments often faces the problem that the dimensionality of the search space is too large for practical applications. Dimensionality reduction techniques have been developed to address this problem and describe motor skills in low-dimensional latent spaces. Most of these techniques require the availability of a sufficiently large database of example task executions to compute the latent space. However, the generation of many example task executions on a real robot is tedious, and prone to errors and equipment failures. The main result of this paper is a new approach for efficient database gathering by performing a small number of task executions with a real robot and applying statistical generalization, e.g., Gaussian process regression, to generate more data. We have shown in our experiments that the data generated this way can be used for dimensionality reduction with autoencoder neural networks. The resulting latent spaces can be exploited to implement robot learning more efficiently. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the problem of robotic throwing at a target. Simulation and real-world results with a humanoid robot TALOS are provided. They confirm the effectiveness of generalization-based database acquisition and the efficiency of learning in a low-dimensional latent space.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2381
Author(s):  
Jaewon Lee ◽  
Hyeonjeong Lee ◽  
Miyoung Shin

Mental stress can lead to traffic accidents by reducing a driver’s concentration or increasing fatigue while driving. In recent years, demand for methods to detect drivers’ stress in advance to prevent dangerous situations increased. Thus, we propose a novel method for detecting driving stress using nonlinear representations of short-term (30 s or less) physiological signals for multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, from hand/foot galvanic skin response (HGSR, FGSR) and heart rate (HR) short-term input signals, first, we generate corresponding two-dimensional nonlinear representations called continuous recurrence plots (Cont-RPs). Second, from the Cont-RPs, we use multimodal CNNs to automatically extract FGSR, HGSR, and HR signal representative features that can effectively differentiate between stressed and relaxed states. Lastly, we concatenate the three extracted features into one integrated representation vector, which we feed to a fully connected layer to perform classification. For the evaluation, we use a public stress dataset collected from actual driving environments. Experimental results show that the proposed method demonstrates superior performance for 30-s signals, with an overall accuracy of 95.67%, an approximately 2.5–3% improvement compared with that of previous works. Additionally, for 10-s signals, the proposed method achieves 92.33% classification accuracy, which is similar to or better than the performance of other methods using long-term signals (over 100 s).


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
Khoma V.V. ◽  
◽  
Khoma Y.V. ◽  
Khoma P.P. ◽  
Sabodashko D.V. ◽  
...  

A novel method for ECG signal outlier processing based on autoencoder neural networks is presented in the article. Typically, heartbeats with serious waveform distortions are treated as outliers and are skipped from the authentication pipeline. The main idea of the paper is to correct these waveform distortions rather them in order to provide the system with better statistical base. During the experiments, the optimum autoencoder architecture was selected. An open Physionet ECGID database was used to verify the proposed method. The results of the studies were compared with previous studies that considered the correction of anomalies based on a statistical approach. On the one hand, the autoencoder shows slightly lower accuracy than the statistical method, but it greatly simplifies the construction of biometric identification systems, since it does not require precise tuning of hyperparameters.


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