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Olfaction sensing in autonomous robotics faces challenges in dynamic operations, energy efficiency, and edge processing. It necessitates a machine learning algorithm capable of managing real-world odor interference, ensuring resource efficiency for mobile robotics, and accurately estimating gas features for critical tasks such as odor mapping, localization, and alarm generation. This paper introduces a hybrid approach that exploits neuromorphic computing in combination with probabilistic inference to address these demanding requirements. Our approach implements a combination of a convolutional spiking neural network for feature extraction and a Bayesian spiking neural network for odor detection and identification. The developed algorithm is rigorously tested on a dataset for sensor drift compensation for robustness evaluation. Additionally, for efficiency evaluation, we compare the energy consumption of our model with a non-spiking machine learning algorithm under identical dataset and operating conditions. Our approach demonstrates superior efficiency alongside comparable accuracy outcomes., Comment: 7 Pages, Conference

RGB-D sensors face multiple challenges operating under open-field environments because of their sensitivity to external perturbations such as radiation or rain. Multiple works are approaching the challenge of perceiving the 3D position of objects using monocular cameras. However, most of these works focus mainly on deep learning-based solutions, which are complex, data-driven, and difficult to predict. So, we aim to approach the problem of predicting the 3D objects' position using a Gaussian viewpoint estimator named best viewpoint estimator (BVE) powered by an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The algorithm proved efficient on the tasks and reached a maximum average Euclidean error of about 32 mm. The experiments were deployed and evaluated in MATLAB using artificial Gaussian noise. Future work aims to implement the system in a robotic system., Comment: Accepted to ICINCO - 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics

This work addresses limitations in recent 3D tracking-by-detection methods, focusing on identifying legitimate trajectories and addressing state estimation drift in Kalman filters. Current methods rely heavily on threshold-based filtering of false positive detections using detection scores to prevent ghost trajectories. However, this approach is inadequate for distant and partially occluded objects, where detection scores tend to drop, potentially leading to false positives exceeding the threshold. Additionally, the literature generally treats detections as precise localizations of objects. Our research reveals that noise in detections impacts localization information, causing trajectory drift for occluded objects and hindering recovery. To this end, we propose a novel online track validity mechanism that temporally distinguishes between legitimate and ghost tracks, along with a multi-stage observational gating process for incoming observations. This mechanism significantly improves tracking performance, with a $6.28\%$ in HOTA and a $17.87\%$ increase in MOTA. We also introduce a refinement to the Kalman filter that enhances noise mitigation in trajectory drift, leading to more robust state estimation for occluded objects. Our framework, RobMOT, outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning approaches, across various detectors, achieving up to a $4\%$ margin in HOTA and $6\%$ in MOTA. RobMOT excels under challenging conditions, such as prolonged occlusions and tracking distant objects, with up to a 59\% improvement in processing latency.

Robotic technologies have been an indispensable part for improving human productivity since they have been helping humans in completing diverse, complex, and intensive tasks in a fast yet accurate and efficient way. Therefore, robotic technologies have been deployed in a wide range of applications, ranging from personal to industrial use-cases. However, current robotic technologies and their computing paradigm still lack embodied intelligence to efficiently interact with operational environments, respond with correct/expected actions, and adapt to changes in the environments. Toward this, recent advances in neuromorphic computing with Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have demonstrated the potential to enable the embodied intelligence for robotics through bio-plausible computing paradigm that mimics how the biological brain works, known as "neuromorphic artificial intelligence (AI)". However, the field of neuromorphic AI-based robotics is still at an early stage, therefore its development and deployment for solving real-world problems expose new challenges in different design aspects, such as accuracy, adaptability, efficiency, reliability, and security. To address these challenges, this paper will discuss how we can enable embodied neuromorphic AI for robotic systems through our perspectives: (P1) Embodied intelligence based on effective learning rule, training mechanism, and adaptability; (P2) Cross-layer optimizations for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing; (P3) Representative and fair benchmarks; (P4) Low-cost reliability and safety enhancements; (P5) Security and privacy for neuromorphic computing; and (P6) A synergistic development for energy-efficient and robust neuromorphic-based robotics. Furthermore, this paper identifies research challenges and opportunities, as well as elaborates our vision for future research development toward embodied neuromorphic AI for robotics., Comment: To appear at the 18th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), December 2024, Dubai, UAE

Performing tasks in agriculture, such as fruit monitoring or harvesting, requires perceiving the objects' spatial position. RGB-D cameras are limited under open-field environments due to lightning interferences. So, in this study, we state to answer the research question: "How can we use and control monocular sensors to perceive objects' position in the 3D task space?" Towards this aim, we approached histogram filters (Bayesian discrete filters) to estimate the position of tomatoes in the tomato plant through the algorithm MonoVisual3DFilter. Two kernel filters were studied: the square kernel and the Gaussian kernel. The implemented algorithm was essayed in simulation, with and without Gaussian noise and random noise, and in a testbed at laboratory conditions. The algorithm reported a mean absolute error lower than 10 mm in simulation and 20 mm in the testbed at laboratory conditions with an assessing distance of about 0.5 m. So, the results are viable for real environments and should be improved at closer distances.

In addition to its crucial impact on customer satisfaction, last-mile delivery (LMD) is notorious for being the most time-consuming and costly stage of the shipping process. Pressing environmental concerns combined with the recent surge of e-commerce sales have sparked renewed interest in automation and electrification of last-mile logistics. To address the hurdles faced by existing robotic couriers, this paper introduces a customer-centric and safety-conscious LMD system for small urban communities based on AI-assisted autonomous delivery robots. The presented framework enables end-to-end automation and optimization of the logistic process while catering for real-world imposed operational uncertainties, clients' preferred time schedules, and safety of pedestrians. To this end, the integrated optimization component is modeled as a robust variant of the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, where routes are constructed under uncertain travel times with an objective to minimize the total latency of deliveries (i.e., the overall waiting time of customers, which can negatively affect their satisfaction). We demonstrate the proposed LMD system's utility through real-world trials in a university campus with a single robotic courier. Implementation aspects as well as the findings and practical insights gained from the deployment are discussed in detail. Lastly, we round up the contributions with numerical simulations to investigate the scalability of the developed mathematical formulation with respect to the number of robotic vehicles and customers.

Persistent multi-object tracking (MOT) allows autonomous vehicles to navigate safely in highly dynamic environments. One of the well-known challenges in MOT is object occlusion when an object becomes unobservant for subsequent frames. The current MOT methods store objects information, like objects' trajectory, in internal memory to recover the objects after occlusions. However, they retain short-term memory to save computational time and avoid slowing down the MOT method. As a result, they lose track of objects in some occlusion scenarios, particularly long ones. In this paper, we propose DFR-FastMOT, a light MOT method that uses data from a camera and LiDAR sensors and relies on an algebraic formulation for object association and fusion. The formulation boosts the computational time and permits long-term memory that tackles more occlusion scenarios. Our method shows outstanding tracking performance over recent learning and non-learning benchmarks with about 3% and 4% margin in MOTA, respectively. Also, we conduct extensive experiments that simulate occlusion phenomena by employing detectors with various distortion levels. The proposed solution enables superior performance under various distortion levels in detection over current state-of-art methods. Our framework processes about 7,763 frames in 1.48 seconds, which is seven times faster than recent benchmarks. The framework will be available at https://github.com/MohamedNagyMostafa/DFR-FastMOT., Comment: \c{opyright} 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

A major challenge in machine learning is resilience to out-of-distribution data, that is data that exists outside of the distribution of a model's training data. Training is often performed using limited, carefully curated datasets and so when a model is deployed there is often a significant distribution shift as edge cases and anomalies not included in the training data are encountered. To address this, we propose the Input Optimisation Network, an image preprocessing model that learns to optimise input data for a specific target vision model. In this work we investigate several out-of-distribution scenarios in the context of semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles, comparing an Input Optimisation based solution to existing approaches of finetuning the target model with augmented training data and an adversarially trained preprocessing model. We demonstrate that our approach can enable performance on such data comparable to that of a finetuned model, and subsequently that a combined approach, whereby an input optimization network is optimised to target a finetuned model, delivers superior performance to either method in isolation. Finally, we propose a joint optimisation approach, in which input optimization network and target model are trained simultaneously, which we demonstrate achieves significant further performance gains, particularly in challenging edge-case scenarios. We also demonstrate that our architecture can be reduced to a relatively compact size without a significant performance impact, potentially facilitating real time embedded applications.

Purpose: Visual perception enables robots to perceive the environment. Visual data is processed using computer vision algorithms that are usually time-expensive and require powerful devices to process the visual data in real-time, which is unfeasible for open-field robots with limited energy. This work benchmarks the performance of different heterogeneous platforms for object detection in real-time. This research benchmarks three architectures: embedded GPU -- Graphical Processing Units (such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2 GB and 4 GB, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2), TPU -- Tensor Processing Unit (such as Coral Dev Board TPU), and DPU -- Deep Learning Processor Unit (such as in AMD-Xilinx ZCU104 Development Board, and AMD-Xilinx Kria KV260 Starter Kit). Method: The authors used the RetinaNet ResNet-50 fine-tuned using the natural VineSet dataset. After the trained model was converted and compiled for target-specific hardware formats to improve the execution efficiency. Conclusions and Results: The platforms were assessed in terms of performance of the evaluation metrics and efficiency (time of inference). Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) were the slowest devices, running at 3 FPS to 5 FPS, and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were the fastest devices, running at 14 FPS to 25 FPS. The efficiency of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is irrelevant and similar to NVIDIA Jetson TX2. TPU and GPU are the most power-efficient, consuming about 5W. The performance differences, in the evaluation metrics, across devices are irrelevant and have an F1 of about 70 % and mean Average Precision (mAP) of about 60 %.

In transportation networks, where traffic lights have traditionally been used for vehicle coordination, intersections act as natural bottlenecks. A formidable challenge for existing automated intersections lies in detecting and reasoning about uncertainty from the operating environment and human-driven vehicles. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware intelligent intersection system for autonomous vehicles (AVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). We cast the problem as a novel class of Multi-agent Chance-Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path (MCC-SSP) problems and devise an exact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that is scalable in the number of agents' interaction points (e.g., potential collision points at the intersection). In particular, when the number of agents within an interaction point is small, which is often the case in intersections, the ILP has a polynomial number of variables and constraints. To further improve the running time performance, we show that the collision risk computation can be performed offline. Additionally, a trajectory optimization workflow is provided to generate risk-aware trajectories for any given intersection. The proposed framework is implemented in CARLA simulator and evaluated under a fully autonomous intersection with AVs only as well as in a hybrid setup with a signalized intersection for HVs and an intelligent scheme for AVs. As verified via simulations, the featured approach improves intersection's efficiency by up to $200\%$ while also conforming to the specified tunable risk threshold.

The paper proposes in-memory computing (IMC) solution for the design and implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) based cryptographic algorithm. This research aims at increasing the cyber security of autonomous driverless cars or robotic autonomous vehicles. The memristor (MR) designs are proposed in order to emulate the AES algorithm phases for efficient in-memory processing. The main features of this work are the following: a memristor 4bit state element is developed and used for implementing different arithmetic operations for AES hardware prototype; A pipeline AES design for massive parallelism and compatibility targeting MR integration; An FPGA implementation of AES-IMC based architecture with MR emulator. The AES-IMC outperforms existing architectures in both higher throughput, and energy efficiency. Compared with the conventional AES hardware, AES-IMC shows ~30% power enhancement with comparable throughput. As for state-of-the-art AES based NVM engines, AES-IMC has comparable power dissipation, and ~62% increased throughput. By enabling the cost-effective real-time deployment of the AES, the IMC architecture will prevent unintended accidents with unmanned devices caused by malicious attacks, including hijacking and unauthorized robot control., Comment: 14 pages, 18 figures, 4 tables, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Journal

Person-tracking robots have many applications, such as in security, elderly care, and socializing robots. Such a task is particularly challenging when the person is moving in a Uniform crowd. Also, despite significant progress of trackers reported in the literature, state-of-the-art trackers have hardly addressed person following in such scenarios. In this work, we focus on improving the perceptivity of a robot for a person following task by developing a robust and real-time applicable object tracker. We present a new robot person tracking system with a new RGB-D tracker, Deep Tracking with RGB-D (DTRD) that is resilient to tricky challenges introduced by the uniform crowd environment. Our tracker utilizes transformer encoder-decoder architecture with RGB and depth information to discriminate the target person from similar distractors. A substantial amount of comprehensive experiments and results demonstrate that our tracker has higher performance in two quantitative evaluation metrics and confirms its superiority over other SOTA trackers.

Robustly tracking a person of interest in the crowd with a robotic platform is one of the cornerstones of human-robot interaction. The robot platform which is limited by the computational power, rapid movements, and occlusions of the target requires an efficient and robust framework to perform tracking. This paper proposes a deep learning framework for tracking a person using a mobile robot with a stereo camera. The proposed system detects a person based on its head, then utilizes the low-cost, high-speed regression network-based tracker to track the person of interest in real-time. The visual servoing of the mobile robot has been designed using a PID controller which utilizes tracker output and depth estimation of the person in subsequent frames, hence providing smooth and adaptive movement of the robot based on target movement. The proposed system has been tested in a real environment, thus proving its effectiveness., Comment: Presented Conference Paper

Over the past few decades, interest in algorithms for face recognition has been growing rapidly and has even surpassed human-level performance. Despite their accomplishments, their practical integration with a real-time performance-hungry system is not feasible due to high computational costs. So in this paper, we explore the recent, fast, and accurate face recognition system that can be easily integrated with real-time devices, and tested the algorithms on robot hardware platforms to confirm their robustness and speed., Comment: Poster

The goal of this work is to apply a denoising image transformer to remove the distortion from underwater images and compare it with other similar approaches. Automatic restoration of underwater images plays an important role since it allows to increase the quality of the images, without the need for more expensive equipment. This is a critical example of the important role of the machine learning algorithms to support marine exploration and monitoring, reducing the need for human intervention like the manual processing of the images, thus saving time, effort, and cost. This paper is the first application of the image transformer-based approach called "Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer" to underwater images. This approach is tested on the UFO-120 dataset, containing 1500 images with the corresponding clean images.

Gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) is vulnerable to low water temperature, which may occur in the Southern Europe and Mediterranean region during Winter. Fish are poikilothermic animals, so feed intake, digestion, metabolism and ultimately growth are affected by water temperature. This study aimed to evaluate growth performance, feed utilisation, nutrient apparent digestibility, and N losses to the environment in seabream juveniles reared under low temperature (13 degrees Celsius). Three isolipid and isoenergetic diets were formulated: a commercial-like diet (COM) with 44% crude protein and 27.5% fishmeal; and 2 diets with 42% CP (ECO and ECOSup), reduced FM inclusion, and 15% poultry meal. ECOSup diet was supplemented with a mix of feed additives intended to promote fish growth and feed intake. The ECO diets presented lower production costs than the COM diet and included more sustainable ingredients. Seabream juveniles (154.5 g) were randomly assigned to triplicate tanks and fed the diets for 84 days. Fish fed the ECOSup and COM diets attained a similar final body weight. ECOSup fed fish presented significantly higher HSI than COM fed fish, probably due to higher hepatic glycogen reserves. The VSI of ECOSup fed fish were significantly lower compared to COM fed fish, which is a positive achievement from a consumer point of view. Nutrient digestibility was similar in ECOSup and COM diets. Feeding fish with the ECO diets resulted in lower faecal N losses when compared to COM fed fish. Feeding seabream with an eco-friendly diet with a mix of feed additives promoted growth, improved fish nutritional status and minimised N losses to the environment whilst lowering production costs. Nutritional strategies that ultimately promote feed intake and diet utilisation are valuable tools that may help conditioning fish to sustain growth even under adverse conditions.

The development of robotic solutions for agriculture requires advanced perception capabilities that can work reliably in any crop stage. For example, to automatise the tomato harvesting process in greenhouses, the visual perception system needs to detect the tomato in any life cycle stage (flower to the ripe tomato). The state-of-the-art for visual tomato detection focuses mainly on ripe tomato, which has a distinctive colour from the background. This paper contributes with an annotated visual dataset of green and reddish tomatoes. This kind of dataset is uncommon and not available for research purposes. This will enable further developments in edge artificial intelligence for in situ and in real-time visual tomato detection required for the development of harvesting robots. Considering this dataset, five deep learning models were selected, trained and benchmarked to detect green and reddish tomatoes grown in greenhouses. Considering our robotic platform specifications, only the Single-Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and YOLO architectures were considered. The results proved that the system can detect green and reddish tomatoes, even those occluded by leaves. SSD MobileNet v2 had the best performance when compared against SSD Inception v2, SSD ResNet 50, SSD ResNet 101 and YOLOv4 Tiny, reaching an F1-score of 66.15%, an mAP of 51.46% and an inference time of 16.44 ms with the NVIDIA Turing Architecture platform, an NVIDIA Tesla T4, with 12 GB. YOLOv4 Tiny also had impressive results, mainly concerning inferring times of about 5 ms., Comment: Dataset at DOI:10.25747/pc1e-nk92

A significant barrier to deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) on a massive scale is safety assurance. Several technical challenges arise due to the uncertain environment in which AVs operate such as road and weather conditions, errors in perception and sensory data, and also model inaccuracy. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for risk-aware AVs capable of reasoning about uncertainty and deliberately bounding the risk of collision below a given threshold. We discuss key challenges in the area, highlight recent research developments, and propose future research directions in three subsystems. First, a perception subsystem that detects objects within a scene while quantifying the uncertainty that arises from different sensing and communication modalities. Second, an intention recognition subsystem that predicts the driving-style and the intention of agent vehicles (and pedestrians). Third, a planning subsystem that takes into account the uncertainty, from perception and intention recognition subsystems, and propagates all the way to control policies that explicitly bound the risk of collision. We believe that such a white-box approach is crucial for future adoption of AVs on a large scale.