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With the potential applications of capsule robots in medical endoscopy, accurate dynamic control of the capsule robot is becoming more and more important. In the scale of a capsule robot, the friction between capsule and the environment plays an essential role in the dynamic model, which is usually difficult to model beforehand. In the paper, a tethered capsule robot system driven by a robot manipulator is built, where a strong magnetic Halbach array is mounted on the robot's end-effector to adjust the state of the capsule. To increase the control accuracy, the friction between capsule and the environment is learned with demonstrated trajectories. With the learned friction model, experimental results demonstrate an improvement of 5.6% in terms of tracking error., Comment: ICRAE 2021 Conference paper

Dynamical System has been widely used for encoding trajectories from human demonstration, which has the inherent adaptability to dynamically changing environments and robustness to perturbations. In this paper we propose a framework to learn a dynamical system that couples position and orientation based on a diffeomorphism. Different from other methods, it can realise the synchronization between positon and orientation during the whole trajectory. Online grasping experiments are carried out to prove its effectiveness and online adaptability., Comment: IEEE ICRA 2021 Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Data-driven and Analytical Physics-based Grasping and Manipulation II

The rise of deep learning has greatly transformed the pipeline of robotic grasping from model-based approach to data-driven stream. Along this line, a large scale of grasping data either collected from simulation or from real world examples become extremely important. In this paper, we present our recent work on data generation in simulation for a bin-picking scene. 77 objects from the YCB object data sets are used to generate the dataset with PyBullet, where different environment conditions are taken into account including lighting, camera pose, sensor noise and so on. In all, 100K data samples are collected in terms of ground truth segmentation, RGB, 6D pose and point cloud. All the data examples including the source code are made available online., Comment: 3 pages, workshop

The ability to segment unknown objects in cluttered scenes has a profound impact on robot grasping. The rise of deep learning has greatly transformed the pipeline of robotic grasping from model-based approach to data-driven stream, which generally requires a large scale of grasping data either collected in simulation or from real-world examples. In this paper, we proposed a sim-to-real framework to transfer the object segmentation model learned in simulation to the real-world. First, data samples are collected in simulation, including RGB, 6D pose, and point cloud. Second, we also present a GAN-based unknown object segmentation method through domain adaptation, which consists of an image translation module and an image segmentation module. The image translation module is used to shorten the reality gap and the segmentation module is responsible for the segmentation mask generation. We used the above method to perform segmentation experiments on unknown objects in a bin-picking scenario. Finally, the experimental result shows that the segmentation model learned in simulation can be used for real-world data segmentation., Comment: 6 pages

Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims at separating small targets from clutter backgrounds. With the advances of deep learning, CNN-based methods have yielded promising results in generic object detection due to their powerful modeling capability. However, existing CNN-based methods cannot be directly applied for infrared small targets since pooling layers in their networks could lead to the loss of targets in deep layers. To handle this problem, we propose a dense nested attention network (DNANet) in this paper. Specifically, we design a dense nested interactive module (DNIM) to achieve progressive interaction among high-level and low-level features. With the repeated interaction in DNIM, infrared small targets in deep layers can be maintained. Based on DNIM, we further propose a cascaded channel and spatial attention module (CSAM) to adaptively enhance multi-level features. With our DNANet, contextual information of small targets can be well incorporated and fully exploited by repeated fusion and enhancement. Moreover, we develop an infrared small target dataset (namely, NUDT-SIRST) and propose a set of evaluation metrics to conduct comprehensive performance evaluation. Experiments on both public and our self-developed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of probability of detection (Pd), false-alarm rate (Fa), and intersection of union (IoU)., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)

Domain adaptation methods face performance degradation in object detection, as the complexity of tasks require more about the transferability of the model. We propose a new perspective on how CNN models gain the transferability, viewing the weights of a model as a series of motion patterns. The directions of weights, and the gradients, can be divided into domain-specific and domain-invariant parts, and the goal of domain adaptation is to concentrate on the domain-invariant direction while eliminating the disturbance from domain-specific one. Current UDA object detection methods view the two directions as a whole while optimizing, which will cause domain-invariant direction mismatch even if the output features are perfectly aligned. In this paper, we propose the domain-specific suppression, an exemplary and generalizable constraint to the original convolution gradients in backpropagation to detach the two parts of directions and suppress the domain-specific one. We further validate our theoretical analysis and methods on several domain adaptive object detection tasks, including weather, camera configuration, and synthetic to real-world adaptation. Our experiment results show significant advance over the state-of-the-art methods in the UDA object detection field, performing a promotion of $10.2\sim12.2\%$ mAP on all these domain adaptation scenarios., Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2021

In the last few years, the interest in knowledge bases has grown exponentially in both the research community and the industry due to their essential role in AI applications. Entity alignment is an important task for enriching knowledge bases. This paper provides a comprehensive tutorial-type survey on representative entity alignment techniques that use the new approach of representation learning. We present a framework for capturing the key characteristics of these techniques, propose two datasets to address the limitation of existing benchmark datasets, and conduct extensive experiments using the proposed datasets. The framework gives a clear picture of how the techniques work. The experiments yield important results about the empirical performance of the techniques and how various factors affect the performance. One important observation not stressed by previous work is that techniques making good use of attribute triples and relation predicates as features stand out as winners., Comment: to appear in VLDB Journal, 2022

The hot component of the circum-galactic medium (CGM) around star forming galaxies is detected as diffuse X-ray emission. The X-ray spectra from the CGM depend on the temperature and metallicity of the emitting plasma, providing important information about the feeding and feedback of the galaxy. The observed spectra are commonly fitted using simple 1-Temperature (1-T) or 2-T models. However, the actual temperature distribution of the gas can be complex because of the interaction between galactic outflows and halo gas. Here we demonstrate this by analysing 3-D hydrodynamical simulations of the CGM with a realistic outflow model. We investigate the physical properties of the simulated hot CGM, which shows a broad distribution in density, temperature, and metallicity. By constructing and fitting the simulated spectra, we show that, while the 1-T and 2-T models are able to fit the synthesized spectra reasonably well, the inferred temperature(s) does not bear much physical meaning. Instead, we propose a log-normal distribution as a more physical model. The log-normal model better fits the simulated spectra while reproducing the gas temperature distribution. We also show that when the star formation rate is high, the spectra inside the bi-conical outflows are distinct from that outside, as outflows are generally hotter and more metal-enriched. Finally, we produce mock spectra for future missions with the eV-level spectral resolution, such as Athena, Lynx, HUBS and XRISM., Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Mapping operator motions to a robot is a key problem in teleoperation. Due to differences between workspaces, such as object locations, it is particularly challenging to derive smooth motion mappings that fulfill different goals (e.g. picking objects with different poses on the two sides or passing through key points). Indeed, most state-of-the-art methods rely on mode switches, leading to a discontinuous, low-transparency experience. In this paper, we propose a unified formulation for position, orientation and velocity mappings based on the poses of objects of interest in the operator and robot workspaces. We apply it in the context of bilateral teleoperation. Two possible implementations to achieve the proposed mappings are studied: an iterative approach based on locally-weighted translations and rotations, and a neural network approach. Evaluations are conducted both in simulation and using two torque-controlled Franka Emika Panda robots. Our results show that, despite longer training times, the neural network approach provides faster mapping evaluations and lower interaction forces for the operator, which are crucial for continuous, real-time teleoperation., Comment: Accepted for publication at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)

The present paper discusses ways of incorporating two digital tools, Desire2Learn (D2L) and Google Docs, in language teaching and learning. Data were collected from four French language modules offered at the University of Calgary. Through the analysis of the tutor's observations and module evaluations, this paper explores the effectiveness of these tools in helping learners and instructors to move beyond the walls of the classrooms, and to work towards creating an active and learner-oriented environment. Results obtained reveal that both tools contributed to creating an inclusive learning environment and facilitated student participation and instructor's feedback. The author suggests that some pedagogical interventions could be applied to enhance the effectiveness of these tools. [For the complete volume, "Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: A Look at New Trends," see ED594807.]