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Event cameras are increasingly popular in robotics due to beneficial features such as low latency, energy efficiency, and high dynamic range. Nevertheless, their downstream task performance is greatly influenced by the optimization of bias parameters. These parameters, for instance, regulate the necessary change in light intensity to trigger an event, which in turn depends on factors such as the environment lighting and camera motion. This paper introduces feedback control algorithms that automatically tune the bias parameters through two interacting methods: 1) An immediate, on-the-fly \textit{fast} adaptation of the refractory period, which sets the minimum interval between consecutive events, and 2) if the event rate exceeds the specified bounds even after changing the refractory period repeatedly, the controller adapts the pixel bandwidth and event thresholds, which stabilizes after a short period of noise events across all pixels (\textit{slow} adaptation). Our evaluation focuses on the visual place recognition task, where incoming query images are compared to a given reference database. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of our algorithms' adaptive feedback control in real-time. To do so, we collected the QCR-Fast-and-Slow dataset that contains DAVIS346 event camera streams from 366 repeated traversals of a Scout Mini robot navigating through a 100 meter long indoor lab setting (totaling over 35km distance traveled) in varying brightness conditions with ground truth location information. Our proposed feedback controllers result in superior performance when compared to the standard bias settings and prior feedback control methods. Our findings also detail the impact of bias adjustments on task performance and feature ablation studies on the fast and slow adaptation mechanisms., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, paper accepted to the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)

We introduce an optimization technique to discriminate signal and background in any phenomenological study based on the cut and count-based method. The core ideas behind this algorithm is the introduction of a ranking scheme that can quantitatively assess the relative importance of various observables involved in a new physics process, and a more methodical way of choosing what cuts to impose. The technique is an iterative process that works with the help of the MadAnalysis5 interface. Working in the context of a simple BSM scenario with a heavy Higgs boson that decays to four leptons via ZZ, we demonstrate how automating the cut and count process in this specific way results in an enhanced discovery potential compared with the more traditional way of imposing cuts.

In this paper, we explore the collider phenomenology of the charged Higgs boson in the context of a generic Beyond Standard Model scenario with extended gauge and scalar sectors. In such scenarios, the charged Higgs boson can decay via the $W^{'}Z/ WZ^{'}$ channels. We formulate a search strategy for the $H^{\pm}$ in the channel $\sigma(g b \rightarrow H^{\pm}t)\mathcal{BR}(H^{\pm} \rightarrow W' Z)$ considering the interesting cascade decay chain $H^{\pm} \rightarrow W^{'} Z \rightarrow W^{\pm} Z Z$. We find that the charged Higgs can be discovered in final states with multiple hard leptons and/ or b-quarks which future LHC experiments with sufficiently large luminosity ($\mathcal{L} = 1000 fb^{-1}$ and above) can probe.

In this paper, we present BirdSLAM, a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for the challenging scenario of autonomous driving platforms equipped with only a monocular camera. BirdSLAM tackles challenges faced by other monocular SLAM systems (such as scale ambiguity in monocular reconstruction, dynamic object localization, and uncertainty in feature representation) by using an orthographic (bird's-eye) view as the configuration space in which localization and mapping are performed. By assuming only the height of the ego-camera above the ground, BirdSLAM leverages single-view metrology cues to accurately localize the ego-vehicle and all other traffic participants in bird's-eye view. We demonstrate that our system outperforms prior work that uses strictly greater information, and highlight the relevance of each design decision via an ablation analysis., Comment: Accepted in VISIGRAPP (VISAPP) 2021

In this paper, we tackle the problem of multibody SLAM from a monocular camera. The term multibody, implies that we track the motion of the camera, as well as that of other dynamic participants in the scene. The quintessential challenge in dynamic scenes is unobservability: it is not possible to unambiguously triangulate a moving object from a moving monocular camera. Existing approaches solve restricted variants of the problem, but the solutions suffer relative scale ambiguity (i.e., a family of infinitely many solutions exist for each pair of motions in the scene). We solve this rather intractable problem by leveraging single-view metrology, advances in deep learning, and category-level shape estimation. We propose a multi pose-graph optimization formulation, to resolve the relative and absolute scale factor ambiguities involved. This optimization helps us reduce the average error in trajectories of multiple bodies over real-world datasets, such as KITTI. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first practical monocular multi-body SLAM system to perform dynamic multi-object and ego localization in a unified framework in metric scale., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2020 (IV2020)