Sensing, Actuation, and Computation
Fall 2010, 12:30-1:45pm, WeFr,
Instructor:
Steve LaValle, University of Illinois (UIUC)
Final Projects Due By Sunday, Dec. 19, 5pm
Submit by sending email with pdf or web page.
Class presentation guidelines: PDF
Motivation:
Interaction with the physical world through our machines becomes
increasingly important as we expand the frontiers of computer science,
the Internet, and information technology. We are faced with new
challenges as we design engineering systems to solve problems such as
environmental monitoring, security sweeping and surveillance,
automated transportation, and even household maintenance.
In such cyber-physical systems, information arrives directly from
sensors. Furthermore, physical devices may be commanded to move
around to improve information gathering capabilities or accomplish
physical tasks. Successful design and deployment of such systems
depends on understanding the interplay between sensing,
actuation, and computation. By considering these
together, one central theme emerges: Understand the information
requirements of a particular task so that the complexity of the
overall system can be reduced. This offers many benefits, such as
improving robustness and reducing costs.
This course provides fundamental concepts for reasoning about the
information spaces that arise in these systems. Inferences are made
from sensing and actuation information in combination with geometric,
topological, or statistical models. This leads to approaches that do
not require full state estimation. They instead work by directly
manipulating information states. In many cases, the sensing
requirements may be dramatically reduced. This leads sensor-based
algorithms and even theoretical computation models that depart from
standard Turing machines.
Topics:
Sensor models, visibility sensors, sensor networks,
inference problems, information spaces, actuation models, minimalist
planning, visual sweeps, searching with limited information,
pursuit-evasion games, sensor-based navigation tasks, coordinate-free
models, stochastic models, nontraditional communication models,
sensor-centric models of computation, decidability and complexity for
actuated sensor systems.
Course Calendar:
Class #
| Date
| Lecture Topic
| Reading
| Annoucements
|
Week 1
|
1 | 8/25 | Course overview
|   | handout given
|
2 | 8/27 | Physical characteristics of sensors
| Fraden, Ch. 1,2 |  
|
Week 2
|
3 | 9/1 | Sensor examples, physical state spaces
| Sec 2, 3.1 of TR |
|
4 | 9/3 | Physical state spaces
| Sec 3.1 of TR |
|
Week 3
|
5 | 9/8 | Bodies, fields, time
| Sec 3.1 of TR |
|
6 | 9/10 | Virtual sensor models
| Sec 3.2 of TR |
|
Week 4
|
7 | 9/15 | Virtual sensor models
| 3.2,3.3 of TR |
|
  | 9/17 | CLASS CANCELED
|   |
|
Week 5
|
8 | 9/22 | Virtual sensor models
| Sec 3.2 of TR |
|
9 | 9/24 | Virtual sensor models
| Sec 3.2 of TR |
|
Week 6
|
10 | 9/29 | Sensor lattices
| Sec 3.4 of TR |
|
11 | 10/1 | Complicated sensor models
| Sec 3.3 of TR |
|
Week 7
|
12 | 10/6 | Spatial filtering
| Sec 4.1 of TR |
|
13 | 10/8 | Temporal filtering
| Sec 4.2 of TR |
|
Week 8
|
14 | 10/13 | Nondet, Bayesian filters
| Sec 4.2 of TR |
|
15 | 10/15 | Combinatorial filters
| Sec 4.3 of TR |
|
Week 9
|
16 | 10/20 | Speaker: Dmitry Yershov
| Paper #23 |
|
17 | 10/22 | Speaker: Katrina Gossman
| Paper #8 |
|
Week 10
|
18 | 10/27 | Speaker: Charlie Mooney
| Paper #18 |
|
19 | 10/29 | Speaker: Syed Bilal Mehdi
| Paper #15 |
|
Week 11
|
20 | 11/3 | Speaker: Leonardo Bobadilla
| Paper #3 |
|
21 | 11/5 | Speaker: Man Ki Yoon
| Paper #25 |
|
Week 12
|
22 | 11/10 | Speaker: Taylor Johnson
| Paper #9 |
|
23 | 11/12 | Speaker: Jung Eun Kim
| Paper #27 |
|
Week 13
|
24 | 11/17 | Speaker: David Caballero
| Paper #29 |
|
25 | 11/19 | Speaker: Devin Bonnie
| Paper #28 |
|
Week 14
|
26 | 12/1 | Speaker: Oscar Sanchez
| Paper #20 |
|
27 | 12/3 | Speaker: Ari Blumenthal
| Paper #21 |
|
Week 15
|
28 | 12/8 | Speaker: Max Katsev
| Paper #6 |
|
Materials Related to Lectures:
- Fraden: Handbook of Modern Sensors: Physics, Designs, and Applications, by Jacob Fraden, 2003.
- The Measurement, Instrumentation and Sensors Handbook, CRC Press, 2630 pages!, 1998.
- TR: Filtering and Planning in Information Spaces (CS UIUC Tech. Report, Oct. 2009)
- Slides on Virtual sensor models, preimages, sensor lattices
Paper List:
- Directional Sensor Placement with Optimal Sensing Range, Field of
View and Orientation, Yahya Esmail Osais, Marc St-Hilaire, Fei R. Yu,
Download
- Active and Passive Acoustics to Locate and Study Fish, David
A. Mann, Anthony D. Hawkins, and J. Michael Jech,
Download
- On Information Invariants in Robotics, B. R. Donald, AIJ, 72:
217-304, 1995. Long Version
Short Version
- On Comparing the Power of Robots, J. M. O'Kane and S. M. LaValle,
International Journal of Robotics Research, 27:1, 5-23,
2008. Download
- Simple robots in polygonal environments: A hierarchy, J. Brunner,
M. Mihalak, S. Suri, E. Vicari and P. Widmayer, Algorithmic Aspects of
Wireless Sensor Networks, pp. 111-124, 2008. Download
- The Power of a Pebble: Exploring and Mapping Directed Graphs,
Michael A. Bender, Antonio Fernandez, Dana Ron, Amit Sahai, and Salil
Vadhan, Information and Computation Volume 176, Issue 1, 10 July 2002,
Pages
1-21, Download
- Attentional Landmarks and Active Gaze Control for Visual SLAM,
S. Fintrop, P. Jensfelt, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 24,
NO. 5, OCTOBER 2008,
pp. 1054-1065.Download
- Cooperative Self-Organization in a Heterogeneous Swarm Robotic
System, F. Ducatelle, G. A. DiCaro, and L. M. Gambardella,
Download
- A Distributed boundary detection algorithm for multi-robot
systems, J. McLurkin and
E. D. Demaine, Download
- Algebraic Approach for Recovering Topology in Distributed Camera
Networks, E. J. Lobaton, P. Ahammad, S. S.
Sastry, Download
- Neighborhood-Based Topology Recognition in Sensor Networks, ekete,
S.P. and Kroller, A. and Pfisterer, D. and Fischer, S. and Buschmann,
C., Download
- Boundary recognition in sensor networks by topological methods,
Wang, Yue and Gao, Jie and Mitchell, Joseph
S.B., Download
- Sensor Network Navigation without Locations, Mo Li, Yunhao Liu,
Jiliang Wang, and Zheng
Yang, Download
- Energy-efficient target tracking with a sensorless robot and a
network of unreliable one-bit proximity sensors, Jason M. O'Kane and
Wenyuan Xu, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation Download
- Sensor-Based Exploration: The Hierarchical Generalized Voronoi
Graph, H. Choset and
J. Burdick, Download
- Indoor Navigation with Uncertainty using Sensor-Based Motions,
M. Khatib, B. Bouilly, T. Simeon,
R. Chatila, Download
- A provably complete exploration strategy by constructing Voronoi
diagrams, J. Kim, F. Zhang, and
M. Egerstedt, Download
- Simple Robots with Minimal Sensing: From Local Visibility to
Global Geometry, S. Suri, E. Vicari, P. Widmayer, Download
- Minimalist counting in sensor networks (Noise Helps),
Y.M. Baryshnikov, E.G. Coffman, K.J. Kwak, and Bill
Moran, Download
- Integrating topological and metric maps for mobile robot
navigation: A statistical approach, S. Thrun, J. Gutmann, D. Fox,
W. Burgard, and B. Kuipers, roceedings of the National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence. JOHN WILEY & SONS LTD, 1998,
pp. 989-996, Download
- Counting targets with mobile sensors in an unknown environment,
B. Gfeller, M. Mihalak, S. Suri, E. Vicari, and P. Widmayer,
Algorithmic Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks, pp. 32-45,
2008, Download
- The complexity of sensing by point sampling, Y-B. Jia and
M. Erdmann, WAFR
1994 Download
- Real-Time Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping with a Single
Camera, A. J. Davison, ICCV 2003, Download
- Tracking a moving object with a binary sensor network (2003) by
Javed Aslam, Zack Butler, Florin Constantin, Valentino Crespi, George
Cybenko, Daniela Rus, Download
- Tracking multiple targets using binary proximity sensors (2007) by
Jaspreet Singh, Rajesh Kumar, Upamanyu Madhow, Subhash Suri, Richard Cagley, Download
- Learning Combinatorial Map Information from Permutations of
Landmarks, B. Tovar, L. Freda and S. M. LaValle, to appear in the
International Journal of Robotics
Research, Download
- Target Counting Under Minimal Sensing: Complexity and Approximations, Sorabh Gandhi, Rajesh Kumar, and Subhash Suri, ALGOSENSORS 2008, Download
- Distributed Coverage with Multi-Robot System, C. Kong, N. Peng, I. Rekleitis
Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Orlando, Florida - May 2006. Download
- Passive Mobile Robot Localization within a Fixed Beacon Field, Carrick Detweiler, John Leonard, Daniela Rus, and Seth Teller, WAFR 2006, Download
Presentation guidelines: PDF