The present sequential “mission oriented” approach to robotic planetary exploration, could be changed to an “infrastructure building” approach where a robotic presence is permanent, self sustaining and growing with each mission. We call this self-sustaining robotic ecology approach “robosphere” and discuss the technological issues that need to be addressed before this concept can be realized. O...

Interruptible pure exploration in multi-armed bandits (MABs) is a key component of Monte-Carlo tree search algorithms for sequential decision problems. We introduce Discriminative Bucketing (DB), a novel family of strategies for pure exploration in MABs, which allows for adapting recent advances in non-interruptible strategies to the interruptible setting, while guaranteeing exponential-rate pe...

Metamodelling techniques are used in many engineering applications for efficient exploration of the design space of complex deterministic simulation systems, and for optimisation purposes and sensitivity analysis. This paper presents a new sequential design and rational metamodelling technique which combines adaptive modelling and sampling algorithms.

A deterministic global optimization approach is proposed for nonconvex constrained nonlinear programming problems. Partitioning of the variables, along with the introduction of transformation variables, if necessary, convert the original problem into primal and relaxed dual subproblems that provide valid upper and lower bounds respectively on the global optimum. Theoretical properties are prese...

Hardware-software codesign has been widely accepted as a backbone of future CAD technology. Implementation platform selection is an important component of hardware-software codesign process which selects, for a given computation, the most suitable implementation platform. In this paper, we study the complementary component of hardware-software codesign, algorithm selection. Given a set of speci...

Understanding human behavior in the context of exploration and navigation is an important but challenging problem. Such understanding can help in the design of safe structures and spaces that implicitly aid humans during evacuation or other emergency situations. In particular, the role that memory plays in this process is something that is crucial to understand. In this paper, we develop a nove...

How do infants plan and guide locomotion under challenging conditions? This experiment investigated the real-time process of visual and haptic exploration in 14-month-old infants as they decided whether and how to walk over challenging terrain - a series of bridges varying in width. Infants' direction of gaze was recorded with a head-mounted eye tracker and their haptic exploration and locomoto...

The current study tested the quantity and quality of human exploration learning in a virtual environment. Given the everyday experience of humans with physical object exploration, we document substantial practice gains in the time, force, and number of actions needed to classify the structure of virtual chains, marking the joints as revolute, prismatic, or rigid. In line with current work on sk...

Indexing moving objects usually involves a great amount of updates, caused by objects reporting their current position. In order to keep the present and past positions of the objects in secondary memory, each update introduces an I/O and this process is sometimes creating a bottleneck. In this paper we deal with the problem of minimizing the number of I/Os in such a way that queries concerning ...