Rearrangement puzzles are variations of rearrangement problems in which the elements of a problem are potentially logically linked together. To efficiently solve such puzzles, we develop a motion planning approach based on a new state space that is logically factored, integrating the capabilities of the robot through factors of simultaneously manipulatable joints of an object. Based on this factored state space, we propose less-actions RRT (LA-RRT), a planner which optimizes for a low number of actions to solve a puzzle. At the core of our approach lies a new path defragmentation method, which rearranges and optimizes consecutive edges to minimize action cost. We solve six rearrangement scenarios with a Fetch robot, involving planar table puzzles and an escape room scenario. LA-RRT significantly outperforms the next best asymptotically-optimal planner by 4.01 to 6.58 times improvement in final action cost.

混乱环境中的机器人操纵通常需要多个对象的复杂和顺序重排，以实现目标对象的所需重新配置。由于在这种情况下涉及复杂的身体互动，基于重新安排的操作仍然仅限于一小部分任务，并且尤其容易受到物理不确定性和感知噪声的影响。本文提出了一个计划框架，该框架利用了基于抽样的计划方法的效率，并通过动态控制计划范围来关闭操作循环。我们的方法交织了计划和执行，以逐步实现操纵目标，同时纠正过程中的任何错误或路径偏差。同时，我们的框架允许在不需要明确的目标配置的情况下定义操纵目标，从而使机器人能够灵活地与所有对象进行交互以促进对目标的操纵。通过在模拟和真实机器人中进行广泛的实验，我们在混乱的环境中评估了三个操纵任务的框架：抓握，重新安置和分类。与两种基线方法相比，我们表明我们的框架可以显着提高计划效率，对身体不确定性的鲁棒性以及在有限时间预算下的任务成功率。

最近，有丰富的运动规划，用于机器人操纵新的运动规划人员不断提出，每个运动规划人员都具有自己独特的优势和劣势。然而，评估新规划者是挑战性的，研究人员往往为基准创造自己的临时问题，这是耗时的，容易偏见，并且不会直接比较其他最先进的规划者。我们呈现MotionBenchmaker，一个开源工具来生成基准测试数据集以实现现实的机器人操纵问题。 MotionBenchmaker旨在成为可扩展，易于使用的工具，允许用户通过比较运动计划算法来获得数据集并通过基准测试。凭经验，我们展示了使用MotionBenchmaker作为程序生成数据集的工具的好处，这些工具有助于对规划者的公平评估有所帮助。我们还提供了一套40个预制数据集，8个环境中有5种不同的常用机器人，作为加速运动计划研究的共同点。

RobowFlex是一个用于工业和研究应用程序机器人运动计划的软件库，利用流行的MoveIt库和机器人操作系统（ROS）中间件。 RobowFlex提供了一个增强的API，用于在单个程序中进行制作和操纵运动计划查询，从而使MoveIt的运动计划变得容易。 RobowFlex的高级API简化了许多常见的用例，同时仍可以在需要时提供对MoveIt库的低级访问。 RobOwFlex对于1）制定新运动计划者，2）评估运动计划者以及3）使用运动计划作为子例程（例如任务和运动计划）的复杂问题。 RobOwFlex还提供可视化功能，其他机器人库（例如Dart和Tesseract）的集成，并与其他机器人包互补。在我们的库中，用户无需成为ROS或MoveIT的专家即可设置运动计划查询，从结果中提取信息以及直接与各种软件组件接口。我们通过几个示例用例证明了它的功效。

Logic Mill is a scalable and openly accessible software system that identifies semantically similar documents within either one domain-specific corpus or multi-domain corpora. It uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to generate numerical representations of documents. Currently it leverages a large pre-trained language model to generate these document representations. The system focuses on scientific publications and patent documents and contains more than 200 million documents. It is easily accessible via a simple Application Programming Interface (API) or via a web interface. Moreover, it is continuously being updated and can be extended to text corpora from other domains. We see this system as a general-purpose tool for future research applications in the social sciences and other domains.

This paper proposes a novel observer-based controller for Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) designed to directly receive measurements from a Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation System (VA-INS) and produce the required thrust and rotational torque inputs. The VA-INS is composed of a vision unit (monocular or stereo camera) and a typical low-cost 6-axis Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope. A major benefit of this approach is its applicability for environments where the Global Positioning System (GPS) is inaccessible. The proposed VTOL-UAV observer utilizes IMU and feature measurements to accurately estimate attitude (orientation), gyroscope bias, position, and linear velocity. Ability to use VA-INS measurements directly makes the proposed observer design more computationally efficient as it obviates the need for attitude and position reconstruction. Once the motion components are estimated, the observer-based controller is used to control the VTOL-UAV attitude, angular velocity, position, and linear velocity guiding the vehicle along the desired trajectory in six degrees of freedom (6 DoF). The closed-loop estimation and the control errors of the observer-based controller are proven to be exponentially stable starting from almost any initial condition. To achieve global and unique VTOL-UAV representation in 6 DoF, the proposed approach is posed on the Lie Group and the design in unit-quaternion is presented. Although the proposed approach is described in a continuous form, the discrete version is provided and tested. Keywords: Vision-aided inertial navigation system, unmanned aerial vehicle, vertical take-off and landing, stochastic, noise, Robotics, control systems, air mobility, observer-based controller algorithm, landmark measurement, exponential stability.

Recent advances in upper limb prostheses have led to significant improvements in the number of movements provided by the robotic limb. However, the method for controlling multiple degrees of freedom via user-generated signals remains challenging. To address this issue, various machine learning controllers have been developed to better predict movement intent. As these controllers become more intelligent and take on more autonomy in the system, the traditional approach of representing the human-machine interface as a human controlling a tool becomes limiting. One possible approach to improve the understanding of these interfaces is to model them as collaborative, multi-agent systems through the lens of joint action. The field of joint action has been commonly applied to two human partners who are trying to work jointly together to achieve a task, such as singing or moving a table together, by effecting coordinated change in their shared environment. In this work, we compare different prosthesis controllers (proportional electromyography with sequential switching, pattern recognition, and adaptive switching) in terms of how they present the hallmarks of joint action. The results of the comparison lead to a new perspective for understanding how existing myoelectric systems relate to each other, along with recommendations for how to improve these systems by increasing the collaborative communication between each partner.

A "heart attack" or myocardial infarction (MI), occurs when an artery supplying blood to the heart is abruptly occluded. The "gold standard" method for imaging MI is Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), with intravenously administered gadolinium-based contrast (late gadolinium enhancement). However, no "gold standard" fully automated method for the quantification of MI exists. In this work, we propose an end-to-end fully automatic system (MyI-Net) for the detection and quantification of MI in MRI images. This has the potential to reduce the uncertainty due to the technical variability across labs and inherent problems of the data and labels. Our system consists of four processing stages designed to maintain the flow of information across scales. First, features from raw MRI images are generated using feature extractors built on ResNet and MoblieNet architectures. This is followed by the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) to produce spatial information at different scales to preserve more image context. High-level features from ASPP and initial low-level features are concatenated at the third stage and then passed to the fourth stage where spatial information is recovered via up-sampling to produce final image segmentation output into: i) background, ii) heart muscle, iii) blood and iv) scar areas. New models were compared with state-of-art models and manual quantification. Our models showed favorable performance in global segmentation and scar tissue detection relative to state-of-the-art work, including a four-fold better performance in matching scar pixels to contours produced by clinicians.

Increasing popularity of deep-learning-powered applications raises the issue of vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attacks. In other words, hardly perceptible changes in input data lead to the output error in neural network hindering their utilization in applications that involve decisions with security risks. A number of previous works have already thoroughly evaluated the most commonly used configuration - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) against different types of adversarial attacks. Moreover, recent works demonstrated transferability of the some adversarial examples across different neural network models. This paper studied robustness of the new emerging models such as SpinalNet-based neural networks and Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT) on image classification problem of CIFAR-10 dataset. Each architecture was tested against four White-box attacks and three Black-box attacks. Unlike VGG and SpinalNet models, attention-based CCT configuration demonstrated large span between strong robustness and vulnerability to adversarial examples. Eventually, the study of transferability between VGG, VGG-inspired SpinalNet and pretrained CCT 7/3x1 models was conducted. It was shown that despite high effectiveness of the attack on the certain individual model, this does not guarantee the transferability to other models.

Spectrum coexistence is essential for next generation (NextG) systems to share the spectrum with incumbent (primary) users and meet the growing demand for bandwidth. One example is the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band, where the 5G and beyond communication systems need to sense the spectrum and then access the channel in an opportunistic manner when the incumbent user (e.g., radar) is not transmitting. To that end, a high-fidelity classifier based on a deep neural network is needed for low misdetection (to protect incumbent users) and low false alarm (to achieve high throughput for NextG). In a dynamic wireless environment, the classifier can only be used for a limited period of time, i.e., coherence time. A portion of this period is used for learning to collect sensing results and train a classifier, and the rest is used for transmissions. In spectrum sharing systems, there is a well-known tradeoff between the sensing time and the transmission time. While increasing the sensing time can increase the spectrum sensing accuracy, there is less time left for data transmissions. In this paper, we present a generative adversarial network (GAN) approach to generate synthetic sensing results to augment the training data for the deep learning classifier so that the sensing time can be reduced (and thus the transmission time can be increased) while keeping high accuracy of the classifier. We consider both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh channels, and show that this GAN-based approach can significantly improve both the protection of the high-priority user and the throughput of the NextG user (more in Rayleigh channels than AWGN channels).