Edge computing is becoming more and more popular among researchers who seek to take advantage of the edge resources and the minimal time delays, in order to run their robotic applications more efficiently. Recently, many edge architectures have been proposed, each of them having their advantages and disadvantages, depending on each application. In this work, we present two different edge architectures for controlling the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The first architecture is based on docker containers and the second one is based on kubernetes, while the main framework for operating the robot is the Robotic Operating System (ROS). The efficiency of the overall proposed scheme is being evaluated through extended simulations for comparing the two architectures and the overall results obtained.

边缘计算是一项有前途的技术，可以在需要瞬时数据处理的技术领域提供新功能。机器和深度学习等领域的研究人员对其应用程序进行了广泛的边缘和云计算，这主要是由于他们提供的大量计算和存储资源。目前，机器人技术也正在寻求利用这些功能，并且随着5G网络的开发，可以克服该领域的一些现有限制。在这种情况下，重要的是要知道如何利用新兴的边缘体系结构，当今存在哪些类型的边缘体系结构和平台，以及哪些可以并且应该基于每个机器人应用程序使用。一般而言，边缘平台可以以不同的方式实现和使用，尤其是因为有几个提供商提供或多或少提供的一组服务以及一些基本差异。因此，本研究针对那些从事下一代机器人系统开发的人解决了这些讨论，并将有助于理解每个边缘计算体系结构的优势和缺点，以便明智地选择适合每个应用程序的功能。

在本文中，我们提出了一种控制策略，以解决模仿卫星运动的平面浮动平台（Slider）的安全自动对接问题。 Slider采用拟议的策略，以正确的方向接近对接端口，保持安全的距离，同时始终在整个对接操作中的对接端口上保持视觉锁定。控制障碍功能旨在强加安全，进近方向和视觉锁定限制。滑块的三个控制输入在执行约束时共享三个障碍函数。事实证明，控制输入以无冲突的方式共享，以渲染定义安全性和视觉锁定约束向前不变的集合，并在建立有限的时间收敛到视觉锁定模式时。无冲突的输入共享确保了二次程序的可行性，该程序为标称控制器生成最小侵入性的校正，旨在跟踪对接端口，因此在整个码头操作中都尊重屏障约束。提出的控制设计方法的功效通过各种模拟得到验证。

通信网络中的时间延迟是通过边缘部署机器人的主要关注点之一。本文提出了一个多阶段的非线性模型预测控制（NMPC），该控制能够处理不同的网络引起的时间延迟，以建立控制框架，以确保无碰撞的无碰撞微型航空车（MAVS）导航。这项研究介绍了一种新颖的方法，该方法通过与现有的典型多阶段NMPC相反的离散化场景树来考虑不同的采样时间，在这种情况下，系统不确定性是由场景树建模的。此外，该方法根据通信链接中时间延迟的概率考虑了多阶段NMPC方案的自适应权重。由于多阶段NMPC，获得的最佳控制动作对于多个采样时间有效。最后，在各种测试和不同的模拟环境中证明了所提出的新型控制框架的总体有效性。

在本文中，我们提出了一种反应性约束导航方案，并避免了无人驾驶汽车（UAV）的嵌入式障碍物，以便在障碍物密集的环境中实现导航。拟议的导航体系结构基于非线性模型预测控制（NMPC），并利用板载2D激光雷达来检测障碍物并在线转换环境的关键几何信息为NMPC的参数约束，以限制可用位置空间的可用位置空间无人机。本文还重点介绍了所提出的反应导航方案的现实实施和实验验证，并将其应用于多个具有挑战性的实验室实验中，我们还与相关的反应性障碍物避免方法进行了比较。提出的方法中使用的求解器是优化引擎（开放）和近端平均牛顿进行最佳控制（PANOC）算法，其中采用了惩罚方法来正确考虑导航任务期间的障碍和输入约束。拟议的新颖方案允许快速解决方案，同时使用有限的车载计算能力，这是无人机的整体闭环性能的必需功能，并在多个实时场景中应用。内置障碍物避免和实时适用性的结合使所提出的反应性约束导航方案成为无人机的优雅框架，能够执行快速的非线性控制，本地路径计划和避免障碍物，所有框架都嵌入了控制层中。

未知环境的探索和映射是自动机器人应用程序中的一项基本任务。在本文中，我们介绍了一个完整的框架，用于在未知的地下地区部署MAVS中的MAV。探索算法的主要动机是描绘机器人的下一个最佳边界，以便可以快速，安全但有效的方式覆盖新的地面。拟议的框架使用一种新颖的边界选择方法，该方法还有助于在地下洞穴，矿山和城市地区等受阻区中自动驾驶的安全导航。这项工作中提出的框架分叉了本地和全球探索中的勘探问题。拟议的勘探框架也可以根据机器人上的计算资源进行适应，这意味着可以在探索速度和地图质量之间进行权衡。这样的功能使建议的框架可以在地下探索，映射以及快速搜索和救援方案中部署。整个系统被认为是在类似隧道的环境中导航和物体定位的低复杂性和基线解决方案。在详细的仿真研究中评估了所提出的框架的性能，并与针对DARPA Sub-T挑战开发的高级探索计划框架进行了比较，这将在本文中介绍。

本文建立了一种新颖的通用和平台 - 无话会风险感知路径规划框架，其基于经典$ D ^ * $ Lite规划仪，路径设计专注于安全性和效率。该计划者生成一个网格图，其中占用/自由/未知空间用不同的遍历成本表示。在这种情况下，在这种情况下呈现，将遍历成本添加到接近占用的未知体素。算法实现也通过动态网格图来增强，具有在机器人操作期间更新和扩展的新颖能力，从而增加了使命的整体安全性，并且适用于勘探和搜索和救援任务。在生成的网格图中，$ d ^ * $ lite能够规划一个更安全的路径，具有最小的遍历成本。所提出的路径规划框架适用于分别生成2D和3D路径，以及在3D情况下，在3D情况下，用一个体素高度产生网格以计划2D路径，这是区分之间的主要因素2D和3D路径规划。在Quadcopter平台和波士顿动力学点腿机器人的多种仿真和实际场实验中广泛评估所提出的新型路径规划方案的功效。

Existing automated techniques for software documentation typically attempt to reason between two main sources of information: code and natural language. However, this reasoning process is often complicated by the lexical gap between more abstract natural language and more structured programming languages. One potential bridge for this gap is the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as GUIs inherently encode salient information about underlying program functionality into rich, pixel-based data representations. This paper offers one of the first comprehensive empirical investigations into the connection between GUIs and functional, natural language descriptions of software. First, we collect, analyze, and open source a large dataset of functional GUI descriptions consisting of 45,998 descriptions for 10,204 screenshots from popular Android applications. The descriptions were obtained from human labelers and underwent several quality control mechanisms. To gain insight into the representational potential of GUIs, we investigate the ability of four Neural Image Captioning models to predict natural language descriptions of varying granularity when provided a screenshot as input. We evaluate these models quantitatively, using common machine translation metrics, and qualitatively through a large-scale user study. Finally, we offer learned lessons and a discussion of the potential shown by multimodal models to enhance future techniques for automated software documentation.

View-dependent effects such as reflections pose a substantial challenge for image-based and neural rendering algorithms. Above all, curved reflectors are particularly hard, as they lead to highly non-linear reflection flows as the camera moves. We introduce a new point-based representation to compute Neural Point Catacaustics allowing novel-view synthesis of scenes with curved reflectors, from a set of casually-captured input photos. At the core of our method is a neural warp field that models catacaustic trajectories of reflections, so complex specular effects can be rendered using efficient point splatting in conjunction with a neural renderer. One of our key contributions is the explicit representation of reflections with a reflection point cloud which is displaced by the neural warp field, and a primary point cloud which is optimized to represent the rest of the scene. After a short manual annotation step, our approach allows interactive high-quality renderings of novel views with accurate reflection flow. Additionally, the explicit representation of reflection flow supports several forms of scene manipulation in captured scenes, such as reflection editing, cloning of specular objects, reflection tracking across views, and comfortable stereo viewing. We provide the source code and other supplemental material on https://repo-sam.inria.fr/ fungraph/neural_catacaustics/

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.