The optimization of functions to find the best solution according to one or several objectives has a central role in many engineering and research fields. Recently, a new family of optimization algorithms, named Quality-Diversity optimization, has been introduced, and contrasts with classic algorithms. Instead of searching for a single solution, Quality-Diversity algorithms are searching for a large collection of both diverse and high-performing solutions. The role of this collection is to cover the range of possible solution types as much as possible, and to contain the best solution for each type. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we present a unifying framework of Quality-Diversity optimization algorithms that covers the two main algorithms of this family (Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites and the Novelty Search with Local Competition), and that highlights the large variety of variants that can be investigated within this family. Secondly, we propose algorithms with a new selection mechanism for Quality-Diversity algorithms that outperforms all the algorithms tested in this paper. Lastly, we present a new collection management that overcomes the erosion issues observed when using unstructured collections. These three contributions are supported by extensive experimental comparisons of Quality-Diversity algorithms on three different experimental scenarios.
While this definition is shared with the existing literature, we also stress the importance of the coverage regularity of the produced collections. In the vast majority of the applications presented previously, not only is the coverage of importance but its uniformity is as well. For example, in the locomotion tasks, an even coverage of all possible turning abilities of the robot is required to allow the execution of arbitrary trajectories @cite_5 .
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Software testing and retesting occurs continuously during the software development lifecycle to detect errors as early as possible. The sizes of test suites grow as software evolves. Due to resource constraints, it is important to prioritize the execution of test cases so as to increase chances of early detection of faults. Prior techniques for test case prioritization are based on the total number of coverage requirements exercised by the test cases. In this paper, we present a new approach to prioritize test cases based on the coverage requirements present in the relevant slices of the outputs of test cases. We present experimental results comparing the effectiveness of our prioritization approach with that of existing techniques that only account for total requirement coverage, in terms of ability to achieve high rate of fault detection. Our results present interesting insights into the effectiveness of using relevant slices for test case prioritization. Program coverage is used across many stages of software development. While common during testing, program coverage has also found use outside the test lab, in production software. However, production software has stricter requirements on run-time overheads, and may limit possible program instrumentation. Thus, optimizing the placement of probes to gather program coverage is important. We introduce and study the problem of customized program coverage optimization. We generalize previous work that optimizes for complete coverage instrumentation with a system that adapts optimization to customizable program coverage requirements. Specifically, our system allows a user to specify desired coverage locations and to limit legal instrumentation locations. We prove that the problem of determining optimal coverage probes is NP-hard, and we present a solution based on mixed integer linear programming. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, we also provide two practical approximation approaches. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approximations across a diverse set of benchmarks, and show that our techniques can substantially reduce instrumentation while allowing the user immense freedom in defining coverage requirements. When naive instrumentation is dense or expensive, our optimizations succeed in lowering execution time overheads. We introduce a new problem of continuous, coverage-aware trajectory optimization under localization and sensing uncertainty. In this problem, the goal is to plan a path from a start state to a goal state that maximizes the coverage of a user-specified region while minimizing the control costs of the robot and the probability of collision with the environment. We present a principled method for quantifying the coverage sensing uncertainty of the robot. We use this sensing uncertainty along with the uncertainty in robot localization to develop C-OPT, a coverage-optimization algorithm which optimizes trajectories over belief-space to find locally optimal coverage paths. We highlight the applicability of our approach in multiple simulated scenarios inspired by surveillance, UAV crop analysis, and search-and-rescue tasks. We also present a case study on a physical, differential-drive robot. We also provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of the paths generated by our approach. Barrier coverage in visual camera sensor networks (visual barrier coverage) has important real-world applications like battlefield surveillance, environmental monitoring, and protection of government property. Cost-effective deployment, a fundamental issue of visual barrier coverage, considers how to deploy the fewest camera sensors along the barrier to detect intruders (e.g., capture faces) with desirable performance. Existing visual barrier coverage approaches like full-view coverage require numerous camera sensors for capturing intruders' faces deterministically for any trajectory and facing angle. However, intruders' trajectories and facing angles are bounded and deterministic intruder detection requires many camera sensors for rare intrusion cases. Certain practical applications can tolerate limited intrusion mis-detection given budget limitations. This paper proposes local face-view barrier coverage, a novel concept that achieves statistical barrier coverage in camera sensor networks leveraging intruders' trajectory lengths l along the barrier and head rotation angles δ. Using (l, δ) and other parameters, we derive a rigorous probability bound for intruder detection for local face-view barrier coverage via a feasible deployment pattern. Our detection probability bound and deployment pattern can guide practical camera sensor network deployments with camera sensor budgets. Extensive evaluations show that local face-view barrier coverage requires up to 50 fewer camera sensors than full-view barrier coverage.