Continual learning in robotics seeks systems that can constantly adapt to changing environments and tasks, mirroring human adaptability. A key challenge is refining dynamics models, essential for planning and control, while addressing issues such as safe adaptation, catastrophic forgetting, outlier management, data efficiency, and balancing exploration with exploitation -- all within task and onboard resource constraints. Towards this goal, we introduce a generative framework leveraging flow matching for online robot dynamics model alignment. Rather than executing actions based on a misaligned model, our approach refines planned actions to better match with those the robot would take if its model was well aligned. We find that by transforming the actions themselves rather than exploring with a misaligned model -- as is traditionally done -- the robot collects informative data more efficiently, thereby accelerating learning. Moreover, we validate that the method can handle an evolving and possibly imperfect model while reducing, if desired, the dependency on replay buffers or legacy model snapshots. We validate our approach using two platforms: an unmanned ground vehicle and a quadrotor. The results highlight the method's adaptability and efficiency, with a record 34.2\% higher task success rate, demonstrating its potential towards enabling continual robot learning. Code: https://github.com/AlejandroMllo/action_flow_matching.
Bias is an inherent threat to human decision-making, including in decisions made during software development. Extensive research has demonstrated the presence of biases at various stages of the software development life-cycle. Notably, code reviews are highly susceptible to prejudice-induced biases, and individuals are often unaware of these biases as they occur. Developing methods to automatically detect these biases is crucial for addressing the associated challenges. Recent advancements in visual data analytics have shown promising results in detecting potential biases by analyzing user interaction patterns. In this project, we propose a controlled experiment to extend this approach to detect potentially biased outcomes in code reviews by observing how reviewers interact with the code. We employ the "spotlight model of attention", a cognitive framework where a reviewer's gaze is tracked to determine their focus areas on the review screen. This focus, identified through gaze tracking, serves as an indicator of the reviewer's areas of interest or concern. We plan to analyze the sequence of gaze focus using advanced sequence modeling techniques, including Markov Models, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Conditional Random Fields (CRF). These techniques will help us identify patterns that may suggest biased interactions. We anticipate that the ability to automatically detect potentially biased interactions in code reviews will significantly reduce unnecessary push-backs, enhance operational efficiency, and foster greater diversity and inclusion in software development. This approach not only helps in identifying biases but also in creating a more equitable development environment by mitigating these biases effectively
We introduce lower-bound certificates for classical planning tasks, which can be used to prove the unsolvability of a task or the optimality of a plan in a way that can be verified by an independent third party. We describe a general framework for generating lower-bound certificates based on pseudo-Boolean constraints, which is agnostic to the planning algorithm used. As a case study, we show how to modify the $A^{*}$ algorithm to produce proofs of optimality with modest overhead, using pattern database heuristics and $h^\textit{max}$ as concrete examples. The same proof logging approach works for any heuristic whose inferences can be efficiently expressed as reasoning over pseudo-Boolean constraints.
Scientific development often takes place in the context of research projects carried out by dedicated students during their time at university. In the field of self-driving software research, the Formula Student Driverless competitions are an excellent platform to promote research and attract young engineers. This article presents the software stack developed by BME Formula Racing Team, that formed the foundation of the development that ultimately led us to full-scale autonomous racing. The experience we gained here contributes greatly to our successful participation in the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League. We therefore think it is important to share the system we used, providing a valuable starting point for other ambitious students. We provide a detailed description of the software pipeline we used, including a brief description of the hardware-software architecture. Furthermore, we introduce the methods that we developed for the modules that implement perception; localisation and mapping, planning, and control tasks.
In the trajectory planning of automated driving, data-driven statistical artificial intelligence (AI) methods are increasingly established for predicting the emergent behavior of other road users. While these methods achieve exceptional performance in defined datasets, they usually rely on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption and thus tend to be vulnerable to distribution shifts that occur in the real world. In addition, these methods lack explainability due to their black box nature, which poses further challenges in terms of the approval process and social trustworthiness. Therefore, in order to use the capabilities of data-driven statistical AI methods in a reliable and trustworthy manner, the concept of TrustMHE is introduced and investigated in this paper. TrustMHE represents a complementary approach, independent of the underlying AI systems, that combines AI-driven out-of-distribution detection with control-driven moving horizon estimation (MHE) to enable not only detection and monitoring, but also intervention. The effectiveness of the proposed TrustMHE is evaluated and proven in three simulation scenarios.
Recent events, including the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, supply chain disruptions, and climate change impacts, have exposed the critical need to ensure energy security and resilience in energy systems. We review existing definitions and interrelations between energy security and resilience, conceptualising these terms in the context of energy system transformations. We introduce a classification of disturbances into shock events and slow burn processes to highlight key challenges to energy system resilience. Examples illustrate their distinct impacts on technical, economic, and environmental system performance over time. We compile relevant recourse options across resilience capacity levels and system planning horizons to address these challenges, emphasising actionable strategies for an increasingly integrated energy system. Finally, we propose policy recommendations to integrate shock events and slow burn processes into future energy system planning, enabling forward-looking decision-making and system design to analyse and mitigate potential disruptions.
Shared autonomy allows for combining the global planning capabilities of a human operator with the strengths of a robot such as repeatability and accurate control. In a real-time teleoperation setting, one possibility for shared autonomy is to let the human operator decide for the rough movement and to let the robot do fine adjustments, e.g., when the view of the operator is occluded. We present a learning-based concept for shared autonomy that aims at supporting the human operator in a real-time teleoperation setting. At every step, our system tracks the target pose set by the human operator as accurately as possible while at the same time satisfying a set of constraints which influence the robot's behavior. An important characteristic is that the constraints can be dynamically activated and deactivated which allows the system to provide task-specific assistance. Since the system must generate robot commands in real-time, solving an optimization problem in every iteration is not feasible. Instead, we sample potential target configurations and use Neural Networks for predicting the constraint costs for each configuration. By evaluating each configuration in parallel, our system is able to select the target configuration which satisfies the constraints and has the minimum distance to the operator's target pose with minimal delay. We evaluate the framework with a pick and place task on a bi-manual setup with two Franka Emika Panda robot arms with Robotiq grippers.
Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized in search and rescue missions, a trend driven by technological advancements, including enhancements in automation, avionics, and the reduced cost of electronics. In this work, we introduce a collaborative model predictive control (MPC) framework aimed at addressing the joint problem of guidance and state estimation for tracking multiple castaway targets with a fleet of autonomous UAV agents. We assume that each UAV agent is equipped with a camera sensor, which has a limited sensing range and is utilized for receiving noisy observations from multiple moving castaways adrift in maritime conditions. We derive a nonlinear mixed integer programming (NMIP) -based controller that facilitates the guidance of the UAVs by generating non-myopic trajectories within a receding planning horizon. These trajectories are designed to minimize the tracking error across multiple targets by directing the UAV fleet to locations expected to yield targets measurements, thereby minimizing the uncertainty of the estimated target states. Extensive simulation experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in tracking multiple castaways in maritime environments.
Navigating autonomous vehicles in open scenarios is a challenge due to the difficulties in handling unseen objects. Existing solutions either rely on small models that struggle with generalization or large models that are resource-intensive. While collaboration between the two offers a promising solution, the key challenge is deciding when and how to engage the large model. To address this issue, this paper proposes opportunistic collaborative planning (OCP), which seamlessly integrates efficient local models with powerful cloud models through two key innovations. First, we propose large vision model guided model predictive control (LVM-MPC), which leverages the cloud for LVM perception and decision making. The cloud output serves as a global guidance for a local MPC, thereby forming a closed-loop perception-to-control system. Second, to determine the best timing for large model query and service, we propose collaboration timing optimization (CTO), including object detection confidence thresholding (ODCT) and cloud forward simulation (CFS), to decide when to seek cloud assistance and when to offer cloud service. Extensive experiments show that the proposed OCP outperforms existing methods in terms of both navigation time and success rate.
Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, pivotal to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), are emerging as a transformative transportation paradigm with the potential to redefine urban and regional mobility. While these systems offer unprecedented efficiency in transporting people and goods, they rely heavily on computation capability, safety-critical operations such as real-time navigation, environmental sensing, and trajectory tracking--necessitating robust offboard computational support. A widely adopted solution involves offloading these tasks to terrestrial base stations (BSs) along the flight path. However, air-to-ground connectivity is often constrained by spectrum conflicts with terrestrial users, which poses a significant challenge to maintaining reliable task execution. Cognitive radio (CR) techniques offer promising capabilities for dynamic spectrum access, making them a natural fit for addressing this issue. Existing studies often overlook the time-varying nature of BS resources, such as spectrum availability and CPU cycles, which leads to inaccurate trajectory planning, suboptimal offloading success rates, excessive energy consumption, and operational delays. To address these challenges, we propose a trajectory optimization framework for eVTOL swarms that maximizes task offloading success probability while minimizing both energy consumption and resource competition (e.g., spectrum and CPU cycles) with primary terrestrial users. The proposed algorithm integrates a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) model to dynamically estimate BS resource availability and a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to determine optimal offloading decisions, selecting both the BSs and access time windows that align with energy and temporal constraints.
AI-driven semi-autonomous robotic surgery is essential for addressing the medical challenges of long-duration interplanetary missions, where limited crew sizes and communication delays restrict traditional surgical approaches. Current robotic surgery systems require full surgeon control, demanding extensive expertise and limiting feasibility in space. We propose a novel adaptation of the Fuzzy Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm for obstacle avoidance and collaborative control in a two-degree-of-freedom robotic arm modeled on the Miniaturized Robotic-Assisted surgical system. It was found that the Fuzzy Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm resulted in an 743 percent improvement to path search time and 43 percent improvement to path cost.
Efficient trajectory generation is critical for autonomous systems, yet current numerical methods often struggle to handle periodic behaviors effectively, especially when equidistant time nodes are required. This paper introduces a novel mixed Bernstein-Fourier approximation framework tailored explicitly for optimal motion planning. Our proposed methodology leverages the uniform convergence properties of Bernstein polynomials for nonperiodic behaviors while effectively capturing periodic dynamics through Fourier series. Theoretical results are established, including uniform convergence proofs for approximations of functions, derivatives, and integrals, as well as detailed error bound analyses. We further introduce a regulated least squares approach for determining approximation coefficients, enhancing numerical stability and practical applicability. Within an optimal control context, we establish feasibility and consistency of approximated solutions to their continuous counterparts. We also extend the covector mapping theorem, providing theoretical guarantees for approximating dual variables crucial in verifying the necessary optimality conditions from Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. Comprehensive numerical examples illustrate the method's superior performance, demonstrating substantial improvements in computational efficiency and precision in scenarios with complex periodic constraints and dynamics. Our mixed Bernstein-Fourier methodology thus presents a robust, theoretically grounded, and computationally efficient approach for advanced optimal trajectory planning in autonomous systems.
Gait disorders are commonly observed in older adults, who frequently experience various issues related to walking. Additionally, researchers and clinicians extensively investigate mobility related to gait in typically and atypically developing children, athletes, and individuals with orthopedic and neurological disorders. Effective gait analysis enables the understanding of the causal mechanisms of mobility and balance control of patients, the development of tailored treatment plans to improve mobility, the reduction of fall risk, and the tracking of rehabilitation progress. However, analyzing gait data is a complex task due to the multivariate nature of the data, the large volume of information to be interpreted, and the technical skills required. Existing tools for gait analysis are often limited to specific patient groups (e.g., cerebral palsy), only handle a specific subset of tasks in the entire workflow, and are not openly accessible. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a requirements assessment with gait practitioners (e.g., researchers, clinicians) via surveys and identified key components of the workflow, including (1) data processing and (2) data analysis and visualization. Based on the findings, we designed VIGMA, an open-access visual analytics framework integrated with computational notebooks and a Python library, to meet the identified requirements. Notably, the framework supports analytical capabilities for assessing disease progression and for comparing multiple patient groups. We validated the framework through usage scenarios with experts specializing in gait and mobility rehabilitation. VIGMA is available at https://github.com/komar41/VIGMA.
Our goal is to enable robots to plan sequences of tabletop actions to push a block with unknown physical properties to a desired goal pose on the table. We approach this problem by learning the constituent models of a Partially-Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), where the robot can observe the outcome of a push, but the physical properties of the block that govern the dynamics remain unknown. The pushing problem is a difficult POMDP to solve due to the challenge of state estimation. The physical properties have a nonlinear relationship with the outcomes, requiring computationally expensive methods, such as particle filters, to represent beliefs. Leveraging the Attentive Neural Process architecture, we propose to replace the particle filter with a neural network that learns the inference computation over the physical properties given a history of actions. This Neural Process is integrated into planning as the Neural Process Tree with Double Progressive Widening (NPT-DPW). Simulation results indicate that NPT-DPW generates more effective plans faster than traditional particle filter methods, even in complex pushing scenarios.
Task and motion planning is a well-established approach for solving long-horizon robot planning problems. However, traditional methods assume that each task-level robot action, or skill, can be reduced to kinematic motion planning. In this work, we address the challenge of planning with both kinematic skills and closed-loop motor controllers that go beyond kinematic considerations. We propose a novel method that integrates these controllers into motion planning using Composable Interaction Primitives (CIPs), enabling the use of diverse, non-composable pre-learned skills in hierarchical robot planning. Toward validating our Task and Skill Planning (TASP) approach, we describe ongoing robot experiments in real-world scenarios designed to demonstrate how CIPs can allow a mobile manipulator robot to effectively combine motion planning with general-purpose skills to accomplish complex tasks.
To safely traverse non-flat terrain, robots must account for the influence of terrain shape in their planned motions. Terrain-aware motion planners use an estimate of the vehicle roll and pitch as a function of pose, vehicle suspension, and ground elevation map to weigh the cost of edges in the search space. Encoding such information in a traditional two-dimensional cost map is limiting because it is unable to capture the influence of orientation on the roll and pitch estimates from sloped terrain. The research presented herein addresses this problem by encoding kinodynamic information in the edges of a recombinant motion planning search space based on the Efficiently Adaptive State Lattice (EASL). This approach, which we describe as a Kinodynamic Efficiently Adaptive State Lattice (KEASL), differs from the prior representation in two ways. First, this method uses a novel encoding of velocity and acceleration constraints and vehicle direction at expanded nodes in the motion planning graph. Second, this approach describes additional steps for evaluating the roll, pitch, constraints, and velocities associated with poses along each edge during search in a manner that still enables the graph to remain recombinant. Velocities are computed using an iterative bidirectional method using Eulerian integration that more accurately estimates the duration of edges that are subject to terrain-dependent velocity limits. Real-world experiments on a Clearpath Robotics Warthog Unmanned Ground Vehicle were performed in a non-flat, unstructured environment. Results from 2093 planning queries from these experiments showed that KEASL provided a more efficient route than EASL in 83.72% of cases when EASL plans were adjusted to satisfy terrain-dependent velocity constraints. An analysis of relative runtimes and differences between planned routes is additionally presented.
This paper proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of the prior 2D navigation map via SLAM to generate a sequence of points of interest (POIs). This sequence is then ordered to create an optimal path given the robot's current position. To control the high-level operation, a finite state machine is used to switch between two modes: navigating towards a POI using Nav2, and scanning the local surrounding. We validate the method in a leveled indoor obstacle-free non-convex environment on time efficiency and reachability over five trials. The map reader and the path planner can quickly process maps of width and height ranging between [196,225] pixels and [185,231] pixels in 2.52 ms/pixel and 1.7 ms/pixel, respectively, where their computation time increases with 22.0 ns/pixel and 8.17 $\mu$s/pixel, respectively. The robot managed to reach 86.5\% of all waypoints over all five runs. The proposed method suffers from drift occurring in the 2D navigation map.
We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does not suffer from compounding errors like imitation learning. Contemporary RL approaches for driving use complex shaped rewards that sum multiple individual rewards, \eg~progress, position, or orientation rewards. We show that PPO fails to optimize a popular version of these rewards when the mini-batch size is increased, which limits the scalability of these approaches. Instead, we propose a new reward design based primarily on optimizing a single intuitive reward term: route completion. Infractions are penalized by terminating the episode or multiplicatively reducing route completion. We find that PPO scales well with higher mini-batch sizes when trained with our simple reward, even improving performance. Training with large mini-batch sizes enables efficient scaling via distributed data parallelism. We scale PPO to 300M samples in CARLA and 500M samples in nuPlan with a single 8-GPU node. The resulting model achieves 64 DS on the CARLA longest6 v2 benchmark, outperforming other RL methods with more complex rewards by a large margin. Requiring only minimal adaptations from its use in CARLA, the same method is the best learning-based approach on nuPlan. It scores 91.3 in non-reactive and 90.6 in reactive traffic on the Val14 benchmark while being an order of magnitude faster than prior work.
Online experiments using metaverse platforms have gained significant traction in Human-Computer Interaction and Virtual Reality (VR) research. However, current research workflows are highly fragmented, as researchers must use separate tools for system implementation, participant recruitment, experiment execution, and data collection, reducing consistency and increasing workload. We present LUIDA (Large-scale Unified Infrastructure for Digital Assessments), a metaverse-based framework that integrates these fragmented processes. LUIDA automatically allocates interconnected virtual environments for parallel experiment execution and provides implementation templates adaptable to various VR research domains, requiring minimal metaverse development expertise. Our evaluation included two studies using a prototype built on Cluster, the commercial metaverse platform. First, VR researchers using LUIDA to develop and run experiments reported high usability scores (SUS: 73.75) and moderate workload (NASA-TLX: 24.11) for overall usage, with interviews confirming streamlined workflows compared to traditional laboratory experiments. Second, we conducted three replicated experiments with public Cluster users, each recruiting approximately 200 participants within one week. These experiments produced results that closely matched the original studies, validating the experimental integrity of LUIDA across research domains. After technical refinements, we plan to release LUIDA as an open platform, providing a standardized protocol to improve research efficiency and experimental reproducibility in VR studies.
Augmented reality (AR) applications for construction monitoring rely on real-time environmental tracking to visualize architectural elements. However, construction sites present significant challenges for traditional tracking methods due to featureless surfaces, dynamic changes, and drift accumulation, leading to misalignment between digital models and the physical world. This paper proposes a BIM-aware drift correction method to address these challenges. Instead of relying solely on SLAM-based localization, we align ``as-built" detected planes from the real-world environment with ``as-planned" architectural planes in BIM. Our method performs robust plane matching and computes a transformation (TF) between SLAM (S) and BIM (B) origin frames using optimization techniques, minimizing drift over time. By incorporating BIM as prior structural knowledge, we can achieve improved long-term localization and enhanced AR visualization accuracy in noisy construction environments. The method is evaluated through real-world experiments, showing significant reductions in drift-induced errors and optimized alignment consistency. On average, our system achieves a reduction of 52.24% in angular deviations and a reduction of 60.8% in the distance error of the matched walls compared to the initial manual alignment by the user.
As part of the collaboration building a set of detectors for the new collider, our group was tasked with designing and building a large-scale cosmic ray detector, which was to complement the capabilities of the MPD (Dubna) detec-tor set. The detector was planned as a trigger for cosmic ray particles and to be used to calibrate and test other systems. Additional functions were to be the detection of pairs of high-energy muons originating from some parti-cle decay processes generated during collisions and con-tinuous observation of the cosmic muon stream in order to detect multi muons events. From the very beginning, the detector was designed as a scalable and universal device for many applications. The following work will present the basic features and parameters of the Modular COsmic Ray Detector (MCORD) and examples of its possible use in high energy physics, astrophysics and geology. Thanks to its universal nature, MCORD can be potential used as a fast trigger, neutron veto detector, muon detector and as a tool in muon tomography.
Navigating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) through cluttered and dynamic environments remains a significant challenge, particularly when dealing with fast-moving or sudden-appearing obstacles. This paper introduces a complete LiDAR-based system designed to enable UAVs to avoid various moving obstacles in complex environments. Benefiting the high computational efficiency of perception and planning, the system can operate in real time using onboard computing resources with low latency. For dynamic environment perception, we have integrated our previous work, M-detector, into the system. M-detector ensures that moving objects of different sizes, colors, and types are reliably detected. For dynamic environment planning, we incorporate dynamic object predictions into the integrated planning and control (IPC) framework, namely DynIPC. This integration allows the UAV to utilize predictions about dynamic obstacles to effectively evade them. We validate our proposed system through both simulations and real-world experiments. In simulation tests, our system outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across several metrics, including success rate, time consumption, average flight time, and maximum velocity. In real-world trials, our system successfully navigates through forests, avoiding moving obstacles along its path.
Urban land use classification and mapping are critical for urban planning, resource management, and environmental monitoring. Existing remote sensing techniques often lack precision in complex urban environments due to the absence of ground-level details. Unlike aerial perspectives, street view images provide a ground-level view that captures more human and social activities relevant to land use in complex urban scenes. Existing street view-based methods primarily rely on supervised classification, which is challenged by the scarcity of high-quality labeled data and the difficulty of generalizing across diverse urban landscapes. This study introduces an unsupervised contrastive clustering model for street view images with a built-in geographical prior, to enhance clustering performance. When combined with a simple visual assignment of the clusters, our approach offers a flexible and customizable solution to land use mapping, tailored to the specific needs of urban planners. We experimentally show that our method can generate land use maps from geotagged street view image datasets of two cities. As our methodology relies on the universal spatial coherence of geospatial data ("Tobler's law"), it can be adapted to various settings where street view images are available, to enable scalable, unsupervised land use mapping and updating. The code will be available at https://github.com/lin102/CCGP.
On-demand feeder bus services present an innovative solution to urban mobility challenges, yet their success depends on thorough assessment and strategic planning. Despite their potential, a comprehensive framework for evaluating feasibility and identifying suitable service areas remains underdeveloped. Simulation Framework for Feeder Location Evaluation (SimFLEX) uses spatial, demographic, and transport-specific data to run microsimulations and compute key performance indicators (KPIs), including service attractiveness, waiting time reduction, and added value. SimFLEX employs multiple replications to estimate demand and mode choices and integrates OpenTripPlanner (OTP) for public transport routing and ExMAS for calculating shared trip attributes and KPIs. For each demand scenario, we model the traveler learning process using the method of successive averages (MSA), stabilizing the system. After stabilization, we calculate KPIs for comparative and sensitivity analyzes. We applied SimFLEX to compare two remote urban areas in Krakow, Poland - Bronowice and Skotniki - the candidates for service launch. Our analysis revealed notable differences between analyzed areas: Skotniki exhibited higher service attractiveness (up to 30%) and added value (up to 7%), while Bronowice showed greater potential for reducing waiting times (by nearly 77%). To assess the reliability of our model output, we conducted a sensitivity analysis across a range of alternative-specific constants (ASC). The results consistently confirmed Skotniki as the superior candidate for service implementation. SimFLEX can be instrumental for policymakers to estimate new service performance in the considered area, publicly available and applicable to various use cases. It can integrate alternative models and approaches, making it a versatile tool for policymakers and urban planners to enhance urban mobility.
The lack of generalization in learning-based autonomous driving applications is shown by the narrow range of road scenarios that vehicles can currently cover. A generalizable approach should capture many distinct road structures and topologies, as well as consider traffic participants, and dynamic changes in the environment, so that vehicles can navigate and perform motion planning tasks even in the most difficult situations. Designing suitable feature spaces for neural network-based motion planers that encapsulate all kinds of road scenarios is still an open research challenge. This paper tackles this learning-based generalization challenge and shows how graph representations of road networks can be leveraged by using multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques in order to obtain such feature spaces. State-of-the-art graph representations and MDS approaches are analyzed for the autonomous driving use case. Finally, the option of embedding graph nodes is discussed in order to perform easier learning procedures and obtain dimensionality reduction.
Over the last few decades, European rail transport has undergone major changes as part of the process of liberalization set out in European regulations. In this context of liberalization, railway undertakings compete with each other for the limited infrastructure capacity available to offer their rail services. The infrastructure manager is responsible for the equitable allocation of infrastructure between all companies in the market, which is essential to ensure the efficiency and sustainability of this competitive ecosystem. In this paper, a methodology based on Jain, Gini and Atkinson equity metrics is used to solve the rail service allocation problem in a liberalized railway market, analyzing the solutions obtained. The results show that the proposed methodology and the equity metrics used allow for equitable planning in different competitiveness scenarios. These results contrast with solutions where the objective of the infrastructure manager is to maximize its own profit, without regard for the equitable allocation of infrastructure. Therefore, the computational tests support the methodology and metrics used as a planning and decision support tool in a liberalized railway market.
Reliability plays a key role in the experience of a rail traveler. The reliability of journeys involving transfers is affected by the reliability of the transfers and the consequences of missing a transfer, as well as the possible delay of the train used to reach the destination. In this paper, we propose a flexible method to model the reliability of train journeys with any number of transfers. The method combines a transfer reliability model based on gradient boosting responsible for predicting the reliability of transfers between trains and a delay model based on probabilistic Bayesian regression, which is used to model train arrival delays. The models are trained on delay data from four Swedish train stations and evaluated on delay data from another two stations, in order to evaluate the generalization performance of the models. We show that the probabilistic delay model, which models train delays following a mixture distribution with two lognormal components, allows to much more realistically model the distribution of actual train delays compared to a standard lognormal model. Finally, we show how these models can be used together to sample the arrival delay at the final destination of the entire journey. The results indicate that the method accurately predicts the reliability for nine out of ten tested journeys. The method could be used to improve journey planners by providing reliability information to travelers. Further applications include timetable planning and transport modeling.
Rapid progress in intelligent unmanned systems has presented new opportunities for mobile crowd sensing (MCS). Today, heterogeneous air-ground collaborative multi-agent framework, which comprise unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), have presented superior flexibility and efficiency compared to traditional homogeneous frameworks in complex sensing tasks. Within this context, task allocation among different agents always play an important role in improving overall MCS quality. In order to better allocate tasks among heterogeneous collaborative agents, in this paper, we investigated two representative complex multi-agent task allocation scenarios with dual optimization objectives: (1) For AG-FAMT (Air-Ground Few Agents More Tasks) scenario, the objectives are to maximize the task completion while minimizing the total travel distance; (2) For AG-MAFT (Air-Ground More Agents Few Tasks) scenario, where the agents are allocated based on their locations, has the optimization objectives of minimizing the total travel distance while reducing travel time cost. To achieve this, we proposed a Multi-Task Minimum Cost Maximum Flow (MT-MCMF) optimization algorithm tailored for AG-FAMT, along with a multi-objective optimization algorithm called W-ILP designed for AG-MAFT, with a particular focus on optimizing the charging path planning of UAVs. Our experiments based on a large-scale real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed two algorithms both outperform baseline approaches under varying experimental settings, including task quantity, task difficulty, and task distribution, providing a novel way to improve the overall quality of mobile crowdsensing tasks.
Accurate 3D trajectory data is crucial for advancing autonomous driving. Yet, traditional datasets are usually captured by fixed sensors mounted on a car and are susceptible to occlusion. Additionally, such an approach can precisely reconstruct the dynamic environment in the close vicinity of the measurement vehicle only, while neglecting objects that are further away. In this paper, we introduce the DeepScenario Open 3D Dataset (DSC3D), a high-quality, occlusion-free dataset of 6 degrees of freedom bounding box trajectories acquired through a novel monocular camera drone tracking pipeline. Our dataset includes more than 175,000 trajectories of 14 types of traffic participants and significantly exceeds existing datasets in terms of diversity and scale, containing many unprecedented scenarios such as complex vehicle-pedestrian interaction on highly populated urban streets and comprehensive parking maneuvers from entry to exit. DSC3D dataset was captured in five various locations in Europe and the United States and include: a parking lot, a crowded inner-city, a steep urban intersection, a federal highway, and a suburban intersection. Our 3D trajectory dataset aims to enhance autonomous driving systems by providing detailed environmental 3D representations, which could lead to improved obstacle interactions and safety. We demonstrate its utility across multiple applications including motion prediction, motion planning, scenario mining, and generative reactive traffic agents. Our interactive online visualization platform and the complete dataset are publicly available at https://app.deepscenario.com, facilitating research in motion prediction, behavior modeling, and safety validation.
Effective stock price forecasting (estimating future prices) and prediction (estimating future price changes) are pivotal for investors, regulatory agencies, and policymakers. These tasks enable informed decision-making, risk management, strategic planning, and superior portfolio returns. Despite their importance, forecasting and prediction are challenging due to the dynamic nature of stock price data, which exhibit significant temporal variations in distribution and statistical properties. Additionally, while both forecasting and prediction targets are derived from the same dataset, their statistical characteristics differ significantly. Forecasting targets typically follow a log-normal distribution, characterized by significant shifts in mean and variance over time, whereas prediction targets adhere to a normal distribution. Furthermore, although multi-step forecasting and prediction offer a broader perspective and richer information compared to single-step approaches, it is much more challenging due to factors such as cumulative errors and long-term temporal variance. As a result, many previous works have tackled either single-step stock price forecasting or prediction instead. To address these issues, we introduce a novel model, termed Patched Channel Integration Encoder (PCIE), to tackle both stock price forecasting and prediction. In this model, we utilize multiple stock channels that cover both historical prices and price changes, and design a novel tokenization method to effectively embed these channels in a cross-channel and temporally efficient manner. Specifically, the tokenization process involves univariate patching and temporal learning with a channel-mixing encoder to reduce cumulative errors. Comprehensive experiments validate that PCIE outperforms current state-of-the-art models in forecast and prediction tasks.