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Four-wheel independent drive and steering vehicle (4WIDS Vehicle, Swerve Drive Robot) has the ability to move in any direction by its eight degrees of freedom (DoF) control inputs. Although the high maneuverability enables efficient navigation in narrow spaces, obtaining the optimal command is challenging due to the high dimension of the solution space. This paper presents a navigation architecture using the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control algorithm to avoid collisions with obstacles of any shape and reach a goal point. The key idea to make the problem easier is to explore the optimal control input in a reasonably reduced dimension that is adequate for navigation. Through evaluation in simulation, we found that selecting the sampling space of MPPI greatly affects navigation performance. In addition, our proposed controller which switches multiple sampling spaces according to the real-time situation can achieve balanced behavior between efficiency and safety. Source code is available at https://github.com/MizuhoAOKI/mppi_swerve_drive_ros

Sb- and Se-substituted CeOBiS2 single crystals have been successfully grown using CsCl/KCl flux. Sb and Se substitution dependence of the superconductivity on CeOBiS2 was investigated and the superconducting phase diagram at above 0.3 K was described. The non-linear boundary between superconductivity and non-superconductivity was revealed., Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures

Sb-substituted CeOBiS2 single crystals with 0.2-1.0 mm size have been successfully grown using CsCl/KCl flux. Sb substitution strongly suppressed the superconductivity in CeOBiS2, and the substitution of more than approximately 4 atomic percent in Bi-site disappeared the superconductivity at a measurement range of above 0.36 K. Furthermore, the drastic change of c-axis lattice parameter was observed in a neighborhood to Sb substitution amount, which maybe suggests the structural transition in CeOBiS2. The Ce valence state of the obtained single crystals was evaluated. However, the established correlations between Ce valence state and superconductivity could not be revealed.

This paper presents a novel Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) method based on Model Predictive Path Integral control (MPPI), named Stein Variational Guided MPPI (SVG-MPPI), designed to handle rapidly shifting multimodal optimal action distributions. While MPPI can find a Gaussian-approximated optimal action distribution in closed form, i.e., without iterative solution updates, it struggles with the multimodality of the optimal distributions. This is due to the less representative nature of the Gaussian. To overcome this limitation, our method aims to identify a target mode of the optimal distribution and guide the solution to converge to fit it. In the proposed method, the target mode is roughly estimated using a modified Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method and embedded into the MPPI algorithm to find a closed-form "mode-seeking" solution that covers only the target mode, thus preserving the fast convergence property of MPPI. Our simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate that SVG-MPPI outperforms both the original MPPI and other state-of-the-art sampling-based SOC algorithms in terms of path-tracking and obstacle-avoidance capabilities. Source code: https://github.com/kohonda/proj-svg_mppi, Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

Omni-directional images have been used in wide range of applications. For the applications, it would be useful to estimate saliency maps representing probability distributions of gazing points with a head-mounted display, to detect important regions in the omni-directional images. This paper proposes a novel saliency-map estimation model for the omni-directional images by extracting overlapping 2-dimensional (2D) plane images from omni-directional images at various directions and angles of view. While 2D saliency maps tend to have high probability at the center of images (center bias), the high-probability region appears at horizontal directions in omni-directional saliency maps when a head-mounted display is used (equator bias). Therefore, the 2D saliency model with a center-bias layer was fine-tuned with an omni-directional dataset by replacing the center-bias layer to an equator-bias layer conditioned on the elevation angle for the extraction of the 2D plane image. The limited availability of omni-directional images in saliency datasets can be compensated by using the well-established 2D saliency model pretrained by a large number of training images with the ground truth of 2D saliency maps. In addition, this paper proposes a multi-scale estimation method by extracting 2D images in multiple angles of view to detect objects of various sizes with variable receptive fields. The saliency maps estimated from the multiple angles of view were integrated by using pixel-wise attention weights calculated in an integration layer for weighting the optimal scale to each object. The proposed method was evaluated using a publicly available dataset with evaluation metrics for omni-directional saliency maps. It was confirmed that the accuracy of the saliency maps was improved by the proposed method., Comment: Accepted for publication in IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, Vol. E106-D, No. 10, 2023. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/transinf The code is available at https://github.com/islab-sophia/odisal

This study presents a new framework for vehicle motion planning and control based on the automatic generation of model predictive controllers (MPCs) named MPC Builder. In this framework, several components necessary for MPC, such as prediction models, constraints, and cost functions, are prepared in advance. The MPC Builder then generates various MPCs online in a unified manner according to traffic situations. This scheme enabled us to represent various driving tasks with less design effort than typical switched MPC systems. The proposed framework was implemented considering the continuation/generalized minimum residual (C/GMRES) method optimization solver, which can reduce computational costs. Finally, numerical experiments on multiple driving scenarios were presented., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures

We develop a system-level design for the provision of Ancillary Service (AS) for control of electric power grids by in-vehicle batteries, suitably applied to Electric Vehicles (EVs) operated in a sharing service. An architecture for cooperation between transportation and energy management systems is introduced that enables us to design an autonomous Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) for the provision of multi-objective AS: primary frequency control in a transmission grid and voltage amplitude regulation in a distribution grid connected to EVs. The design is based on the ordinary differential equation model of distribution voltage, which has been recently introduced as a new physics-based model, and is utilized in this paper for assessing and regulating the impact of spatiotemporal charging/charging of a large population of EVs to a distribution grid. Effectiveness of the autonomous V2G design is evaluated with numerical simulations of realistic models for transmission and distribution grids with synthetic operation data on EVs in a sharing service. In addition, we present a hardware-in-the-loop test for evaluating its feasibility in a situation where inevitable latency is involved due to power, control, and communication equipments., Comment: 28 pages, 23 figures

In recent years, the deep learning techniques have been applied to the estimation of saliency maps, which represent probability density functions of fixations when people look at the images. Although the methods of saliency-map estimation have been actively studied for 2-dimensional planer images, the methods for omni-directional images to be utilized in virtual environments had not been studied, until a competition of saliency-map estimation for the omni-directional images was held in ICME2017. In this paper, novel methods for estimating saliency maps for the omni-directional images are proposed considering the properties of prior distributions for fixations in the planar images and the omni-directional images., Comment: SMC2018