In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.

In animal monitoring applications, both animal detection and their movement prediction are major tasks. While a variety of animal monitoring strategies exist, most of them rely on mounting devices. However, in real world, it is difficult to find these animals and install mounting devices. In this paper, we propose an animal monitoring application by utilizing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The objective of the application is to detect locations of endangered species in large-scale wildlife areas and monitor movement of animals without any attached devices. In this application, sensors deployed throughout the observation area are responsible for gathering animal information. The UAV flies above the observation area and collects the information from sensors. To achieve the information efficiently, we propose a path planning approach for the UAV based on a Markov decision process (MDP) model. The UAV receives a certain amount of reward from an area if some animals are detected at that location. We solve the MDP using Q-learning such that the UAV prefers going to those areas that animals are detected before. Meanwhile, the UAV explores other areas as well to cover the entire network and detects changes in the animal positions. We first define the mathematical model underlying the animal monitoring problem in terms of the value of information (VoI) and rewards. We propose a network model including clusters of sensor nodes and a single UAV that acts as a mobile sink and visits the clusters. Then, one MDP-based path planning approach is designed to maximize the VoI while reducing message delays. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated using two real-world movement datasets of zebras and leopard. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms greedy and random heuristics as well as the path planning based on the solution of the traveling salesman problem.
Internet of Things Applications: Animal Monitoring with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) [1]. A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multiview RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MITPrinceton Team system that took 3rdand 4thplace in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/andyz/apc2016.
Multi-view Self-supervised Deep Learning for 6D Pose Estimation in the Amazon Picking Challenge

Most real-world dynamic systems are composed of different components that often evolve at very different rates. In traditional temporal graphical models, such as dynamic Bayesian networks, time is modeled at a fixed granularity, generally selected based on the rate at which the fastest component evolves. Inference must then be performed at this fastest granularity, potentially at significant computational cost. Continuous Time Bayesian Networks (CTBNs) avoid time-slicing in the representation by modeling the system as evolving continuously over time. The expectation-propagation (EP) inference algorithm of Nodelman et al. (2005) can then vary the inference granularity over time, but the granularity is uniform across all parts of the system, and must be selected in advance. In this paper, we provide a new EP algorithm that utilizes a general cluster graph architecture where clusters contain distributions that can overlap in both space (set of variables) and time. This architecture allows different parts of the system to be modeled at very different time granularities, according to their current rate of evolution. We also provide an information-theoretic criterion for dynamically re-partitioning the clusters during inference to tune the level of approximation to the current rate of evolution. This avoids the need to hand-select the appropriate granularity, and allows the granularity to adapt as information is transmitted across the network. We present experiments demonstrating that this approach can result in significant computational savings.
Reasoning at the Right Time Granularity