Engineering Commons^™

A Memory Efficient Deep Recurrent Q-Learning Approach For Autonomous Wildfire Surveillance, Jeremy A. Cantor

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous literature demonstrates that autonomous UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have the po- tential to be utilized for wildfire surveillance. This advanced technology empowers firefighters by providing them with critical information, thereby facilitating more informed decision-making processes. This thesis applies deep Q-learning techniques to the problem of control policy design under the objective that the UAVs collectively identify the maximum number of locations that are under fire, assuming the UAVs can share their observations. The prohibitively large state space underlying the control policy motivates a neural network approximation, but prior work used only convolutional layers to extract spatial fire information from …

Automatic Classification And Segmentation Of Patterned Martian Ground Using Deep Learning Techniques, Ruthy Brito

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Science autonomy onboard spacecraft can optimize image return by prioritizing downlink of meaningful data. Martian polygonally cracked ground is actively studied by planetary geologists and may be indicative of subsurface water. Filtering images containing these polygonal features can be used as a case study for science autonomy and to reduce the overhead associated with parsing through Martian surface images. This thesis demonstrates the use of deep learning techniques in the classification of Martian polygonally patterned ground from HiRISE images. Three tasks are considered, a binary classification to identify images containing polygons, multiclass classification distinguishing different polygon types and semantic segmentation …

Modeling And Control Strategies For A Two-Wheel Balancing Mobile Robot, John Alan Moritz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The problem of balancing and autonomously navigating a two-wheel mobile robot is an increasingly active area of research, due to its potential applications in last-mile delivery, pedestrian transportation, warehouse automation, parts supply, agriculture, surveillance, and monitoring. This thesis investigates the design and control of a two-wheel balancing mobile robot using three different control strategies: Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controllers, Sliding Mode Control, and Deep Q-Learning methodology. The mobile robot is modeled using a dynamic and kinematic model, and its motion is simulated in a custom MATLAB/Simulink environment. The first part of the thesis focuses on developing a dynamic and kinematic …

Contrastive Learning For Unsupervised Auditory Texture Models, Christina Trexler

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Sounds with a high level of stationarity, also known as sound textures, have perceptually relevant features which can be captured by stimulus-computable models. This makes texture-like sounds, such as those made by rain, wind, and fire, an appealing test case for understanding the underlying mechanisms of auditory recognition. Previous auditory texture models typically measured statistics from auditory filter bank representations, and the statistics they used were somewhat ad-hoc, hand-engineered through a process of trial and error. Here, we investigate whether a better auditory texture representation can be obtained via contrastive learning, taking advantage of the stationarity of auditory textures to …

Visual Cues For Semi-Autonomous Control Of Transradial Prosthetics, Mena S.A. Kamel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Upper-limb prosthetics are typically driven exclusively by biological signals, mainly electromyography (EMG), where electrodes are placed on the residual part of an amputated limb. In this approach, amputees must control each arm joint iteratively, in a proportional manner. Research has shown that sequential control of prosthetics usually imposes a cognitive burden on amputees, leading to high abandonment rates. This thesis presents a control system for upper-limb prosthetics, leveraging a computer vision module capable of simultaneously predicting objects in a scene, their segmentation mask, and a ranked list of the optimal grasping locations. The proposed system shares control with an amputee, …

Deep Learning Assisted Intelligent Visual And Vehicle Tracking Systems, Liang Xu

Theses and Dissertations

Sensor fusion and tracking is the ability to bring together measurements from multiple sensors of the current and past time to estimate the current state of a system. The resulting state estimate is more accurate compared with the direct sensor measurement because it balances between the state prediction based on the assumed motion model and the noisy sensor measurement. Systems can then use the information provided by the sensor fusion and tracking process to support more-intelligent actions and achieve autonomy in a system like an autonomous vehicle. In the past, widely used sensor data are structured, which can be directly …

Action Recognition Using The Motion Taxonomy, Maxat Alibayev

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the last years, modern action recognition frameworks with deep architectures have achieved impressive results on the large-scale activity datasets. All state-of-the-art models share one common attribute: two-stream architectures. One deep model takes RGB frames, while the other model is fed with pre-computed optical flow vectors. The outputs of both models are combined to be used as a final probability distribution for the action classes. When comparing the results of individual models with the fused model, it is common to see that that latter method is more superior. Researchers explain that phenomena with the fact that optical flow vectors serve …

Application Of Advanced Algorithms And Statistical Techniques For Weed-Plant Discrimination, Saman Akbar Zadeh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Precision agriculture requires automated systems for weed detection as weeds compete with the crop for water, nutrients, and light. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of machine learning methods to classify weeds/crops in agriculture. Statistical methods, support vector machines, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are introduced, investigated and optimized as classifiers to provide high accuracy at high vehicular speed for weed detection.

Initially, Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms are developed for weed-crop discrimination and their accuracies are compared with a conventional data-aggregation method based on the evaluation of discrete Normalised Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVIs) at two different …