Difference between revisions of "Master Level Course Projects"

The focus will be on the implementation of new hybrid algorithms able to combine estimation of distribution algorithms with different approaches available in the evolutionary computation literature, such as genetic algorithms and evolutionary strategies, together with other local search techniques. Good coding (C/C++) abilities are required. Some background in combinatorial optimization form the "Fondamenti di Ricerca Operativa" is desirable. The project could require some effort in order to build and consolidate some background in MCMC techniques, such as Gibbs and Metropolis samplers [4]. The project could be extended to master thesis, according to interesting and novel directions of research that will emerge in the first part of the work.

Picture taken from http://www.genetic-programming.org

Bibliography

• [1] Pelikan, Martin; Goldberg, David; Lobo, Fernando (1999), A Survey of Optimization by Building and Using Probabilistic Models, Illinois: Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (IlliGAL), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• [2] Larrañga, Pedro; & Lozano, Jose A. (Eds.). Estimation of distribution algorithms: A new tool for evolutionary computation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 2002.
• [3] Lozano, J. A.; Larrañga, P.; Inza, I.; & Bengoetxea, E. (Eds.). Towards a new evolutionary computation. Advances in estimation of distribution algorithms. Springer, 2006.
• [4] Pelikan, Martin; Sastry, Kumara; & Cantu-Paz, Erick (Eds.). Scalable optimization via probabilistic modeling: From algorithms to applications. Springer, 2006.

Tools and instruments

Matlab, C/C++

Bibliography

Mario Terzano, Liborio Parrino. Atlas, rules, and recording techniques for the scoring of cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) in human sleep, Sleep Medicine 2 (2001) 537–553. [3]

This project consists in develop one of the solutions proposed in literature and extended the LURCH software to include this kind of interface.

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux

References:

• Phinx project [4]

Tools and instruments

C++, C, BCI2000

Linux

Bibliography

R. Blatt et al. Brain Control of a Smart Wheelchair [5]

The project aims at reproducing algorithms for ErrP detection from the literature.

Tools and instruments

Matlab

Bibliography

P.W. Ferrez, J. Millán. You Are Wrong! Automatic Detection of Interaction Errors from Brain Waves [6]

G. Schalk et al. EEG-based communication: presence of an error potential [7]

The idea is to use one or more calibrated camera to estimate the position and the trajectories of the moving objects in the scene. The skills required for this project are:

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Linux o.s.
• Geometry/Image processing
• Probabilistic robotics/IMAD

The project can be turned into a thesis extending the algorithm for a generic outdoor environment.

The idea is to use a calibrated camera to recognize the shelves, estimate the scale and improve the image quality. The skills required for this project are:

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux
• Geometry/Image processing

It can be used in algorithms for tasks like matching different views of an object or scene (e.g. for stereo vision) and object recognition. The aim of this work is to integrate in an existent framework the existing solution proposed in literature.

Skills

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux
• Geometry/Image processing

References:

• Oxford website [8]
• Hess website [9]
• Feature FAST [10]

Improvements could be the basis for a tesi.

Skills

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux
• Geometry/Image processing

References:

• Visual SLAM by Single Catadioptric Stereo [11]
• Catadioptric reconstruction [12]

The aim of this tesina/project is to implement a trinocular algorithm based on SUGR, a library for Uncertain Projective Geometry.

Skills

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux
• Geometry/Image processing

Skills

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux
• Geometry/Image processing

The idea is create an images database indexer that allows to make query using images or strings.

Skills

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Matlab (optionally)
• Linux

References:

• CBIR system definition [13]
• Image database [14]

• NEURAL-BASED VISION SYSTEM - In this project we experiment different models of the neural structure of the visual cortex. In particular we collect couples of images with different fixation point and we reconstruct disparity, depth, shape recognition. A stereo disparity map is already available.
• RECOGNITION OF HAND MOTIONS - Develop a system able to recognize the hand gestures from images of people. Use this for robot interfacing.
• SEMANTIC MODELLING OF ACTIONS - Construct a semantic representation of actions to be matched against the data obtained from video/movements analysis.

• DATA MINING FOR RULE INDUCTION - The project is about analysing large data sets to discover correlations between substructures and properties. CDK and WEKA are possible software to use.
• IReNNS: LEARNING FROM STRUCTURES - This project will develop IReNNS, a recurrent neural net package, and develop new applications.
• REC analysis in WEKA - The project is about theory and the implementation in Java of REC diagrams. A Matlab tool is available at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~bij2/rec.html.
• HOW TO TEACH SCIENCE - Propose a web site to teach University students a scientific topic using active participation and virtual experimentation.
• CAUSAL REASONING - In this project we will develop the theory of causality proposed by Pearl and apply it to examples in biological sciences.

Other topics coming soon.

The project will focus on the understanding of the problem and on the implementation of different algorithms, so (C/C++ or Matlab or R) coding will be required. Since the approach will be based on statistical models, the student is supposed to be comfortable with notions that come from probability and statistics courses.

Picture taken from http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

Bibliography

• [1] Felsenstein 2003: Inferring Phylogenies
• [2] Semple and Steel 2003: Phylogenetics: The mathematics of phylogenetics
• [3] Louis J. Billera, Susan P. Holmes and and Karen Vogtmann Geometry of the space of phylogenetic trees. Advances in Applied Math 27, 733-767 (2001)

The problems that will be proposed are still unknown. As soon as the domains will be published, the work will start by analyzing their main characteristics and, then we will identify which RL algorithms are most suited for solving such problems. After an implementation phase, the project will required a long experimental period to tune the parameters of the learning algorithms in order to improve the performance as much as possible.

References

• Drivatar in Forza Motorsport
• TORCS
• CIG@PoliMI
• Daniele Loiacono's AI&R Lab Projects

Picutre taken from [16]

references

• Galactic Arm Race
• TORCS
• CIG@PoliMI
• J. Togelius, R. De Nardi and S. Lucas. Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games
• Daniele Loiacono's AI&R Lab Projects

Our projects and theses on this topic involve two different games: Unreal Tournament 2004 and TORCS. Please contact us for additional information.

References

• Drivatar in Forza Motorsport
• TORCS
• Botprize
• Daniele Loiacono's AI&R Lab Projects

Several theses and projects are available on this topic and involve different games: TORCS, Unreal Tournament and Quake Live. Please contact us for additional information.

References

• TORCS
• Quake Live
• Daniele Loiacono's AI&R Lab Projects

While browsing the Web, a user should be able to visualize the annotations relative to the page they are visiting, and to add new annotations as well.

The purpose of this project is to develop translation tools for different social annotation systems, collect their data in a common format (expressed using an ontology), and show them through a unique user interface, able to display different annotations (i.e. geo coordinates, dates, tags, etc.) in different ways. Moreover, tests and evaluations should be performed on this aggregator to show how efficient the queries are when performed on-the-fly or from an intermediate knowledge base.

Aim of this project is to expand a traditional search engine with semantic information, so that also documents containing words related to the ones in the query can be retrieved. Existing thesauri and ontologies can be used, as well as more dynamic and collaborative sources of knowledge such as user tags and wikipedia pages and categories.

Starting points for this work can be the projects "SeQuEx - Semantic Query Expansion" and "Enriching search results with semantic metadata".

Goal of this project is to develop a Facebook application to analyze a user's network of friends and automatically detect groups to suggest lists.

In the project "Wikipedia Category Map" a tool has been developed to extract the graph of Wikipedia categories, to store it in RDF format and to interactively visualize and explore it. Aim of this project is to analyze the resulting graph for the extraction of semantic relationships; for example it is possible to define metrics of distance between topics in the graph, which can be useful for various purposes in information retrieval.

Aim of this project is to design and develop a software tool to extract this kind of information from a single social network platform (decided by the student). It may be required also some kind of analysis or visual representation of the collected data.

One possible example is the annotation of mp3 files available on the Web. They can be classified in genres or associated to datatype properties, such as rating, title, length and release date... also exploiting data already available in http://musicbrainz.org/

The thesis will explore some of the aspects of the problem, eventually participating to the production of prototypes to be tested with real users. The thesis gives the possibility to develop a robot with special requirements, and to work with gesture interpretation by using devices such as Kinect or the WII Mote. The work is done in an interdisciplinary group including care givers and designers.

The robot first exhibition has been at Robotica 2009, within HI-Tech Expo at Fiera di Milano, on November 23-25, 2009. Here, the robot had to go around in an area delimited by a white stripe and contact verbally and with gestures people entering the area, in order to attract them to the booth.

Behaviors and gestures have still to be developed to come to an interesting and robust demo at next Robotica, or at other ehibits (e.g. at the Museo della Scienza of Milan).

In order to speed up the development and the maintenance of embedded applications, a way to update the firmware on a microcontroller without the need of connecting cables or programmers can be very handy. We are developing a framework for rapid prototyping of low-cost robots, with smart devices that exchange data on a CAN bus network. The CAN bus bootloader is one of the components we need for this project, enabling remote firmware upgrades of all the devices connected to the CAN network.

This project aims to develop a CAN bus bootloader for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, and eventually for other architectures.

When developing embedded applications it is frequently needed to look at *hardware register content* in order to *debug the code*. All commercial development suites offer register views that show their contents as well as the meaning of each bit. Open source development solutions currently lack this feature, meaning that you have to look to the correct memory location and map the content to the corresponding register bits manually. This seems to be one of the most limiting issues when developing embedded application using open source solutions.

This project aims to fill this gap, developing an Eclipse plug-in that shows the register contents in a tree viewer, like most commercial suites do.

In a context of smart modules that have to cooperate by exchanging data to reach their common goal, the communication protocol and middleware are core components. This project is about the middleware component, a publish/subscribe system that takes care of managing topics, publisher and subscribers, and of marshaling data before sending it. This project aims at porting the LCM marshaling and middleware library, developed at MIT and used in the Grand Challenge competition, to embedded systems, in order to exploit the existing LCM tools and to be compliant with an existing and efficient technology.

The project consists in:

• stripping non necessary features of LCM to match the constraints of an embedded system and of the communication protocol
• adding necessary features, like the concept of deadline (and priority as a consequence), that are mandatory for a real time distributed system
• building a gateway, on an embedded platform, that acts as gateway between the standard-LCM world and the embededd-LCM network

The projects has to be developed in ANSI C, and experience with embedded platforms is a plus.

The aim of the project is first to improve the current design of the PIC-based board, and realize a new working prototype, and then to implement and evaluate different algorithms able to estimate more precisely the x,y and theta odometric data from the mice readings. Experience with PIC-based systems and some experience with electronics circuits is a plus. Students are supposed to redesign the electronic board, improve the firmware of the PIC, and work on the algorithm that estimates the robot position on the PC. It would be also interesting to evaluate the possibility to embed the optimization and estimation algorithms in the firmware of the PIC in order to produce a stand-alone device.

Ask the tutors of the project for extra material, such as data-sheets and other documentation.

• implementing embedded algorithms for the estimation of the IMU attitude to be compared with the actual one (e.g., Kalman filter, DCM, Madgwick, etc.)
• developing a, easy to use, procedure for the calibration of IMU parameters
• making a comparison with commercial units using a robot arm as testbed
• validate the accuracy of the IMU on a flying platform
• integrate the measurements from a GPS to reduce drift and provide accurate positiong (this will make it definitely a MS thesis)

Material

• electronic board and eclipse based C development toolkit for ARM processors
• papers describing the algorithms we are interested in implementing

Expected outcome:

• few different AHRS algorithms with comparative results
• user-friendly procedure to calibrate the IMU
• a sistem which integrated IMU and GPS to provide accurate positioning

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• C programming on ARM microcontroller
• background on kalman filtering and attitude estimation

When developing embedded applications it is common the need to test some algorithm in some fast way, without to re-program the whole firmware every time. PAWN (http://www.compuphase.com/pawn/) is a *simple and lightweight scripting language with a C-like syntax*. Execution speed, stability, simplicity and a small footprint were essential design criteria for both the language and the abstract machine, making PAWN suitable for embedded applications.

This project aims to port the abstract machine to ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, add a set of functions to interface with the underlying hardware peripherals and then to embed it as ChibiOS/RT (http://www.chibios.org) thread.

• Implementation of mechanical and electronical parts of the robots for the management of the ball and kicking
• Design of robot behaviors (fuzzy systems)
• Coordination of robots
• New sensors

These projects allow to experiment with real mobile robots. Participation to the championships is a unique experience (2000 people, with 800 robots playing all sort of games...)

The project can be turned into a thesis by facing different problems in depth.

TiltOne is a robot with only two wheels that can stand in vertical position following an unstable equilibrium point. The control is applied by commanding an amount of torque to the wheels, allowing the robot to mantain it's gravity center vertical aligned to the wheel axis.

The aim of the project proposal is to implement and compare different control solutions, based on classical approach (as PID and LQR control) and Machine Learning approach (as Reinforcement Learning control policies), that allow the robot to move following a given trajectory at a given speed.

Inertial Measurement Unit and a Fire-i Camera. The pro ject will be focus on the problem to estimate both unknown rotation between the two devices and the extrinsic/intrinsic parameters of the camera. This algorithm allows to use the system for SLAM or robotics applications, like a wereable device for autonomous navigation or augmented reality.

Tools and instruments

Matlab/C++

Links

Matlab Toolbox for mutual calibration [17]

List of pubblications[18]

After a deepen bibliography research, the work will be focused on developing one of these algorithms into an existing framework and, only for tesi option, investigate possible improvements.

The algorithms interested are based on [19]:

• Extended Kalman Filter [20]
• Unscented Kalman Filter [21]
• FastSLAM [22]
• GraphSLAM [23]

Tools and instruments

Matlab/C++

• BIOINSPIRED ROBOT HEAD FOR VISION - design and build a robot head able to host 2 cameras with 2dof of freedom each to create a human-like vision system. The movements can be obtained using 4 McKibben actuators for each camera, or electric actuators.
• NEW HARDWARE FOR MAXIMUMOne - the humanoid robot is moved by more than 20 actuators and needs input from all of them. The new architecture FPGA based will move the arm and the head.
• SIMULATOR OF HUMANOID ROBOT - complete the simulator of MaximumOne with all the dof. The simulator will use the same Matlab algorithms of the controller.
• INTEGRATING MANIPULATION AND VISION ON MAXIMUMOne - develop a natural vision system that uses the neck and the eyes movements to follow objects and to concentrate on grasping targets. The integration can be done in matlab/Simulink and integrated in the MaximumOne model.
• MANIPULATION ONTOLOGIES - develop an ontology approach to find the right way to grasp an object , considering both the object and the hand characteristics.
• PATH PLANNING AND COLLISION AVOIDANCE IN OOPS - Randomized path planning is a strategy to produce paths for complex devices. An open source project (OOPS) is available; the project is about integrating path planning with a robot simulator.

All the projects can be turned into a thesis.

• KINEMATIC/DYNAMIC MODEL OF WARUGADAR - develop a complete kinematic analysis of a quadruped robot, useful for planning the foot position on uneven terrains. The dynamic model will be useful for learning different gaits.
• GAIT GENERATION AND CONTROL FOR WARUGADAR - Study Central Pattern Generation, develop a CPG implementation in Matlab or Python. Adapt the method to a quadruped robot (Warugadar).
• ROBO FISH - Continue the development of hardware and software for the robotic fish Zoidberg2, and study a fish colony.
• EMBOT WALKING - complete the robot with 4 wheels used as feet. Control it and experiment.
• ROBOTIC EXPERIMENTS WITH BIOLOID - using Bioloid experiments hw and gaits, develop software for the humanoid challenges at ICRA2010.

All the projects can be turned into a thesis.

• ADVANCED EMG ANALYSIS - To develop prosthesis and therapeutic tools we need to analyze EMG signals according to position, velocity, force. Starting from signal acquisition develop in Matlab a model for force and velocity control.
• HAND PROSTHESIS DESIGN - Define a virtual model of the hand prosthesis (actuation and sensors) and develop a controller based on multi-class classification of electro-myographic signals.

All the projects can be turned into a thesis.