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RGB-D cameras are crucial in robotic perception, given their ability to produce images augmented with depth data. However, their limited FOV often requires multiple cameras to cover a broader area. In multi-camera RGB-D setups, the goal is typically to reduce camera overlap, optimizing spatial coverage with as few cameras as possible. The extrinsic calibration of these systems introduces additional complexities. Existing methods for extrinsic calibration either necessitate specific tools or highly depend on the accuracy of camera motion estimation. To address these issues, we present PeLiCal, a novel line-based calibration approach for RGB-D camera systems exhibiting limited overlap. Our method leverages long line features from surroundings, and filters out outliers with a novel convergence voting algorithm, achieving targetless, real-time, and outlier-robust performance compared to existing methods. We open source our implementation on https://github.com/joomeok/PeLiCal.git.

In the literature, points and conics have been major features for camera geometric calibration. Although conics are more informative features than points, the loss of the conic property under distortion has critically limited the utility of conic features in camera calibration. Many existing approaches addressed conic-based calibration by ignoring distortion or introducing 3D spherical targets to circumvent this limitation. In this paper, we present a novel formulation for conic-based calibration using moments. Our derivation is based on the mathematical finding that the first moment can be estimated without bias even under distortion. This allows us to track moment changes during projection and distortion, ensuring the preservation of the first moment of the distorted conic. With an unbiased estimator, the circular patterns can be accurately detected at the sub-pixel level and can now be fully exploited for an entire calibration pipeline, resulting in significantly improved calibration. The entire code is readily available from https://github.com/ChaehyeonSong/discocal.

A circuit-cocircuit intersection, or a CCI for short, of a matroid is the intersection of a circuit and a cocircuit. Oxley conjectured (1992) that a matroid with a CCI of size $k\ge4$ has a CCI of size $k-2$. We show that the conjecture holds for $k\le7$., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

Transparent objects are encountered frequently in our daily lives, yet recognizing them poses challenges for conventional vision sensors due to their unique material properties, not being well perceived from RGB or depth cameras. Overcoming this limitation, thermal infrared cameras have emerged as a solution, offering improved visibility and shape information for transparent objects. In this paper, we present TRansPose, the first large-scale multispectral dataset that combines stereo RGB-D, thermal infrared (TIR) images, and object poses to promote transparent object research. The dataset includes 99 transparent objects, encompassing 43 household items, 27 recyclable trashes, 29 chemical laboratory equivalents, and 12 non-transparent objects. It comprises a vast collection of 333,819 images and 4,000,056 annotations, providing instance-level segmentation masks, ground-truth poses, and completed depth information. The data was acquired using a FLIR A65 thermal infrared (TIR) camera, two Intel RealSense L515 RGB-D cameras, and a Franka Emika Panda robot manipulator. Spanning 87 sequences, TRansPose covers various challenging real-life scenarios, including objects filled with water, diverse lighting conditions, heavy clutter, non-transparent or translucent containers, objects in plastic bags, and multi-stacked objects. TRansPose dataset can be accessed from the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/transpose-dataset, Comment: The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)

In this study, a new concept of a wheelchair-towing robot for the facile electrification of manual wheelchairs is introduced. The development of this concept includes the design of towing robot hardware and an autonomous driving algorithm to ensure the safe transportation of patients to their intended destinations inside the hospital. We developed a novel docking mechanism to facilitate easy docking and separation between the towing robot and the manual wheelchair, which is connected to the front caster wheel of the manual wheelchair. The towing robot has a mecanum wheel drive, enabling the robot to move with a high degree of freedom in the standalone driving mode while adhering to kinematic constraints in the docking mode. Our novel towing robot features a camera sensor that can observe the ground ahead which allows the robot to autonomously follow color-coded wayfinding lanes installed in hospital corridors. This study introduces dedicated image processing techniques for capturing the lanes and control algorithms for effectively tracing a path to achieve autonomous path following. The autonomous towing performance of our proposed platform was validated by a real-world experiment in which a hospital environment with colored lanes was created., Comment: Submitted to Intelligent Service Robotics

Oxley conjectured (1992) that if a matroid has a circuit-cocircuit intersection of size $k\ge4$, it has a circuit-cocircuit intersection of size $k-2$. We show that this conjecture holds for $k\le6$., Comment: 5 pages

We show Kantor's conjecture (1974) holds in rank 4. This proves both the sticky matroid conjecture of Poljak and Turzik (1982) and the whole Kantor's conjecture, due to an argument of Bachem, Kern, and Bonin, and an equivalence argument of Hochstattler and Wilhelmi, respectively., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

We give a criterion for modular extension of rank-4 hypermodular matroids, and prove a weakening of Kantor's conjecture for rank-4 realizable matroids. This proves the sticky matroid conjecture and Kantor's conjecture for realizable matroids due to an argument of Bachem, Kern, and Bonin, and due to an equivalence argument of Hochstattler and Wilhelmi, respectively., Comment: 9 pages; v4: correction of typo

A biconvex polytope is a classical and tropical convex hull of finitely many points. Given a biconvex polytope, for each vertex of it we construct a directed bigraph and a gammoid so that the collection of base polytopes of those gammoids is a matroid subdivision of the hypersimplex, thereby proving a biconvex polytope arises as a cell of a tropical linear space. Our construction provides manually feasible guidelines for subdividing the hypersimplex into base polytopes, without resorting to computers. We work out the rank-4 case as a demonstration. We also show there is an injection from the vertices of any (k-1)-dimensional biconvex polytope into the degree-(k-1) monomials in k indeterminates., Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures

A matroid is a machine capturing linearity of mathematical objects and producing combinatorial structures. Matroid structure arises everywhere since linearity is a ubiquitous concept. One natural way to obtain matroids is by considering hyperplane arrangements, which give rise to convex polytopes called matroid polytopes. Much research has been conducted on these three areas: matroids, matroid polytopes, and hyperplane arrangements. However, substantial gaps in our knowledge remain, and the correspondence diagram between those areas needs to be more extensive. For instance, currently, there is no matroid counterpart of a matroid subdivision, and only some matroid subdivisions are associated with stable hyperplane arrangements. Moreover, we need a deeper understanding of the face structure of a matroid polytope and how to glue or subdivide base polytopes; the latter requires overcoming Mnev's universality theorem. Another interesting question is whether the birational geometry of hyperplane arrangements can be implemented over matroids. In this paper, we develop a theory that integrates the three areas into a trinity relationship and provide solutions to the aforementioned questions while answering as many as possible., Comment: 71 pages, 58 figures

A quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) insulator coupled to an s-wave superconductor is predicted to harbor a topological superconducting phase, the elementary excitations of which (i.e. Majorana fermions) can form topological qubits upon non-Abelian braiding operations. A recent transport experiment interprets the half-quantized two-terminal conductance plateau as the presence of chiral Majorana fermions in a millimeter-size QAH-Nb hybrid structure. However, there are concerns about this interpretation because non-Majorana mechanisms can also generate similar signatures, especially in a disordered QAH system. Here, we fabricated QAH-Nb hybrid structures and studied the QAH-Nb contact transparency and its effect on the corresponding two-terminal conductance. When the QAH film is tuned to the metallic regime by electric gating, we observed a sharp zero-bias enhancement in the differential conductance, up to 80% at zero magnetic field. This large enhancement suggests high probability of Andreev reflection and transparent interface between the magnetic topological insulator (TI) and Nb layers. When the magnetic TI film is in the QAH state with well-aligned magnetization, we found that the two-terminal conductance is always half-quantized. Our experiment provides a comprehensive understanding of the superconducting proximity effect observed in QAH-superconductor hybrid structures and shows that the half-quantized conductance plateau is unlikely to be induced by chiral Majorana fermions., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures. Comments are welcome. Supplementary materials will be provided upon request

The rigid double-torus torsional oscillator (TO) is constructed to reduce any elastic effects in-herent to complicate TO structures, allowing explicit probing for a genuine supersolid signature. We investigated the frequency- and temperature-dependent response of the rigid double-torus TO containing solid 4He with 0.6 ppb 3He and 300 ppb 3He. We did not find evidence to support the frequency-independent contribution proposed to be a property of supersolid helium. The frequency-dependent contribution which comes from the simple elastic effect of solid helium coupled to TO is essentially responsible for the entire response. The magnitude of the period drop is linearly proportional to ${f}^{2}$, indicating that the responses observed in this TO are mostly caused by the overshoot of `soft' solid helium against the wall of the torus. Dissipation of the rigid TO is vastly suppressed compared to those of non-rigid TOs., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

We investigate the origin of a resonant period drop of a torsional oscillator (TO) containing solid ${}^{4}$He by inspecting its relation to a change in elastic modulus. To understand this relationship directly, we measure both phenomena simultaneously using a TO with a pair of concentric piezoelectric transducers inserted in its annulus. Although the temperature, ${}^{3}$He concentration, and frequency dependence are essentially the same, a marked discrepancy in the drive amplitude dependence is observed. We find that this discrepancy originates from the anisotropic response of polycrystalline solid ${}^{4}$He connected with low-angle grain boundaries by studying the shear modulus parallel to and perpendicular to the driving direction.

Populating a database with unstructured information is a long-standing problem in industry and research that encompasses problems of extraction, cleaning, and integration. Recent names used for this problem include dealing with dark data and knowledge base construction (KBC). In this work, we describe DeepDive, a system that combines database and machine learning ideas to help develop KBC systems, and we present techniques to make the KBC process more efficient. We observe that the KBC process is iterative, and we develop techniques to incrementally produce inference results for KBC systems. We propose two methods for incremental inference, based respectively on sampling and variational techniques. We also study the tradeoff space of these methods and develop a simple rule-based optimizer. DeepDive includes all of these contributions, and we evaluate DeepDive on five KBC systems, showing that it can speed up KBC inference tasks by up to two orders of magnitude with negligible impact on quality.

Knowledge base construction (KBC) is the process of populating a knowledge base, i.e., a relational database together with inference rules, with information extracted from documents and structured sources. KBC blurs the distinction between two traditional database problems, information extraction and information integration. For the last several years, our group has been building knowledge bases with scientific collaborators. Using our approach, we have built knowledge bases that have comparable and sometimes better quality than those constructed by human volunteers. In contrast to these knowledge bases, which took experts a decade or more human years to construct, many of our projects are constructed by a single graduate student. Our approach to KBC is based on joint probabilistic inference and learning, but we do not see inference as either a panacea or a magic bullet: inference is a tool that allows us to be systematic in how we construct, debug, and improve the quality of such systems. In addition, inference allows us to construct these systems in a more loosely coupled way than traditional approaches. To support this idea, we have built the DeepDive system, which has the design goal of letting the user "think about features---not algorithms." We think of DeepDive as declarative in that one specifies what they want but not how to get it. We describe our approach with a focus on feature engineering, which we argue is an understudied problem relative to its importance to end-to-end quality.

It was conjectured in \cite{Namikawa_ExtendedTorelli} that the Torelli map $M_g\to A_g$ associating to a curve its jacobian extends to a regular map from the Deligne-Mumford moduli space of stable curves $\bar{M}_g$ to the (normalization of the) Igusa blowup $\bar{A}_g^{\rm cent}$. A counterexample in genus $g=9$ was found in \cite{AlexeevBrunyate}. Here, we prove that the extended map is regular for all $g\le8$, thus completely solving the problem in every genus., Comment: To appear in Experimental Mathematics