As aerial robots are tasked to navigate environments of increased complexity, embedding collision tolerance in their design becomes important. In this survey we review the current state-of-the-art within the niche field of collision-tolerant micro aerial vehicles and present different design approaches identified in the literature, as well as methods that have focused on autonomy functionalities that exploit collision resilience. Subsequently, we discuss the relevance to biological systems and provide our view on key directions of future fruitful research.

本文通过讨论参加了为期三年的SubT竞赛的六支球队的不同大满贯策略和成果，报道了地下大满贯的现状。特别是，本文有四个主要目标。首先，我们审查团队采用的算法，架构和系统；特别重点是以激光雷达以激光雷达为中心的SLAM解决方案（几乎所有竞争中所有团队的首选方法），异质的多机器人操作（包括空中机器人和地面机器人）和现实世界的地下操作（从存在需要处理严格的计算约束的晦涩之处）。我们不会回避讨论不同SubT SLAM系统背后的肮脏细节，这些系统通常会从技术论文中省略。其次，我们通过强调当前的SLAM系统的可能性以及我们认为与一些良好的系统工程有关的范围来讨论该领域的成熟度。第三，我们概述了我们认为是基本的开放问题，这些问题可能需要进一步的研究才能突破。最后，我们提供了在SubT挑战和相关工作期间生产的开源SLAM实现和数据集的列表，并构成了研究人员和从业人员的有用资源。

本文介绍了Cerberus机器人系统系统，该系统赢得了DARPA Subterranean挑战最终活动。出席机器人自主权。由于其几何复杂性，降解的感知条件以及缺乏GPS支持，严峻的导航条件和拒绝通信，地下设置使自动操作变得特别要求。为了应对这一挑战，我们开发了Cerberus系统，该系统利用了腿部和飞行机器人的协同作用，再加上可靠的控制，尤其是为了克服危险的地形，多模式和多机器人感知，以在传感器退化，以及在传感器退化的条件下进行映射以及映射通过统一的探索路径计划和本地运动计划，反映机器人特定限制的弹性自主权。 Cerberus基于其探索各种地下环境及其高级指挥和控制的能力，表现出有效的探索，对感兴趣的对象的可靠检测以及准确的映射。在本文中，我们报告了DARPA地下挑战赛的初步奔跑和最终奖项的结果，并讨论了为社区带来利益的教训所面临的亮点和挑战。

本文有助于设计一种利用基于学习的碰撞预测网络的新型导航计划程序的方法。神经网络是任务，以预测机器人的速度转向角度空间中的预定运动原语库中的每个动作序列的碰撞成本，仅给出电流深度图像和机器人的估计线性和角速度。此外，我们通过使用Monte Carlo辍学来处理机器人的部分状态的不确定性。然后将不确定性感应的碰撞成本与由全球计划者给出的目标方向组合，以便以倒退的地平线方式确定最佳动作序列。为了展示该方法，我们开发了集成轻量级传感和计算资源的弹性小型飞行机器人。进行了一组模拟和实验研究，包括杂乱和感知挑战性环境的现场部署，以评估预测网络的质量和所提出的规划师的性能。

本文介绍了使用腿部和空中机器人对地下环境的自主组织探索的新战略。对洞穴网络和地下矿井等地下设置量身定制的事实往往涉及复杂，大规模和多分支拓扑，而其中的无线通信可能特别具有挑战性，这项工作围绕板载勘探的协同作用构成路径规划器，允许有弹性的长期自主权和多机器人协调框架。车载路径规划器统一横跨腿和飞行机器人，并在具有陡坡的环境中导航，以及不同的几何形状。当通信链接可用时，团队的每个机器人都会共享到集中位置的内容，其中多机器人协调框架识别探索空间的全球边界，通知每个系统应该重新定位以便最佳地继续其使命。通过瑞士在地下矿区内部部署验证了该策略，使用腿部和飞行机器人共同探索45分钟，以及三种系统的较长仿真研究。

Recent progress in geometric computer vision has shown significant advances in reconstruction and novel view rendering from multiple views by capturing the scene as a neural radiance field. Such approaches have changed the paradigm of reconstruction but need a plethora of views and do not make use of object shape priors. On the other hand, deep learning has shown how to use priors in order to infer shape from single images. Such approaches, though, require that the object is reconstructed in a canonical pose or assume that object pose is known during training. In this paper, we address the problem of how to compute equivariant priors for reconstruction from a few images, given the relative poses of the cameras. Our proposed reconstruction is $SE(3)$-gauge equivariant, meaning that it is equivariant to the choice of world frame. To achieve this, we make two novel contributions to light field processing: we define light field convolution and we show how it can be approximated by intra-view $SE(2)$ convolutions because the original light field convolution is computationally and memory-wise intractable; we design a map from the light field to $\mathbb{R}^3$ that is equivariant to the transformation of the world frame and to the rotation of the views. We demonstrate equivariance by obtaining robust results in roto-translated datasets without performing transformation augmentation.

Practical applications of mechanical metamaterials often involve solving inverse problems where the objective is to find the (multiple) microarchitectures that give rise to a given set of properties. The limited resolution of additive manufacturing techniques often requires solving such inverse problems for specific sizes. One should, therefore, find multiple microarchitectural designs that exhibit the desired properties for a specimen with given dimensions. Moreover, the candidate microarchitectures should be resistant to fatigue and fracture, meaning that peak stresses should be minimized as well. Such a multi-objective inverse design problem is formidably difficult to solve but its solution is the key to real-world applications of mechanical metamaterials. Here, we propose a modular approach titled 'Deep-DRAM' that combines four decoupled models, including two deep learning models (DLM), a deep generative model (DGM) based on conditional variational autoencoders (CVAE), and direct finite element (FE) simulations. Deep-DRAM (deep learning for the design of random-network metamaterials) integrates these models into a unified framework capable of finding many solutions to the multi-objective inverse design problem posed here. The integrated framework first introduces the desired elastic properties to the DGM, which returns a set of candidate designs. The candidate designs, together with the target specimen dimensions are then passed to the DLM which predicts their actual elastic properties considering the specimen size. After a filtering step based on the closeness of the actual properties to the desired ones, the last step uses direct FE simulations to identify the designs with the minimum peak stresses.

Machine learning model development and optimisation can be a rather cumbersome and resource-intensive process. Custom models are often more difficult to build and deploy, and they require infrastructure and expertise which are often costly to acquire and maintain. Machine learning product development lifecycle must take into account the need to navigate the difficulties of developing and deploying machine learning models. evoML is an AI-powered tool that provides automated functionalities in machine learning model development, optimisation, and model code optimisation. Core functionalities of evoML include data cleaning, exploratory analysis, feature analysis and generation, model optimisation, model evaluation, model code optimisation, and model deployment. Additionally, a key feature of evoML is that it embeds code and model optimisation into the model development process, and includes multi-objective optimisation capabilities.

The Graph Protocol indexes historical blockchain transaction data and makes it available for querying. As the protocol is decentralized, there are many independent Indexers that index and compete with each other for serving queries to the Consumers. One dimension along which Indexers compete is pricing. In this paper, we propose a bandit-based algorithm for maximization of Indexers' revenue via Consumer budget discovery. We present the design and the considerations we had to make for a dynamic pricing algorithm being used by multiple agents simultaneously. We discuss the results achieved by our dynamic pricing bandits both in simulation and deployed into production on one of the Indexers operating on Ethereum. We have open-sourced both the simulation framework and tools we created, which other Indexers have since started to adapt into their own workflows.

This thesis introduces quantum natural language processing (QNLP) models based on a simple yet powerful analogy between computational linguistics and quantum mechanics: grammar as entanglement. The grammatical structure of text and sentences connects the meaning of words in the same way that entanglement structure connects the states of quantum systems. Category theory allows to make this language-to-qubit analogy formal: it is a monoidal functor from grammar to vector spaces. We turn this abstract analogy into a concrete algorithm that translates the grammatical structure onto the architecture of parameterised quantum circuits. We then use a hybrid classical-quantum algorithm to train the model so that evaluating the circuits computes the meaning of sentences in data-driven tasks. The implementation of QNLP models motivated the development of DisCoPy (Distributional Compositional Python), the toolkit for applied category theory of which the first chapter gives a comprehensive overview. String diagrams are the core data structure of DisCoPy, they allow to reason about computation at a high level of abstraction. We show how they can encode both grammatical structures and quantum circuits, but also logical formulae, neural networks or arbitrary Python code. Monoidal functors allow to translate these abstract diagrams into concrete computation, interfacing with optimised task-specific libraries. The second chapter uses DisCopy to implement QNLP models as parameterised functors from grammar to quantum circuits. It gives a first proof-of-concept for the more general concept of functorial learning: generalising machine learning from functions to functors by learning from diagram-like data. In order to learn optimal functor parameters via gradient descent, we introduce the notion of diagrammatic differentiation: a graphical calculus for computing the gradients of parameterised diagrams.