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Eric Timmons

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3 papers

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Best-first Enumeration Based on Bounding Conflicts, and its Application to Large-scale Hybrid Estimation (Extended Abstract)

Eric Timmons
Brian C. Williams

State estimation methods based on hybrid discrete and continuous state models have emerged as a method of precisely computing belief states for real world systems, however they have difficulty scaling to systems with more than a handful of components. Classical, consistency based diagnosis methods scale to this level by combining best-first enumeration and conflict-directed search. While best-first methods have been developed for hybrid estimation, conflict-directed methods have thus far been elusive as conflicts summarize constraint violations, but probabilistic hybrid estimation is relatively unconstrained. In this paper we present an approach (A*BC) that unifies best-first enumeration and conflict-directed search in relatively unconstrained problems through the concept of "bounding" conflicts, an extension of conflicts that represent tighter bounds on the cost of regions of the search space. Experiments show that an A*BC powered state estimator produces estimates up to an order of magnitude faster than the current state of the art, particularly on large systems.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Learning Hybrid Models with Guarded Transitions

Pedro Santana
Spencer Lane
Eric Timmons
Brian Williams
Carlos Forster

Innovative methods have been developed for diagnosis, activity monitoring, and state estimation that achieve high accuracy through the use of stochastic models involving hybrid discrete and continuous behaviors. A key bottleneck is the automated acquisition of these hybrid models, and recent methods have focused predominantly on Jump Markov processes and piecewise autoregressive models. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm capable of performing unsupervised learning of guarded Probabilistic Hybrid Automata (PHA) models, which extends prior work by allowing stochastic discrete mode transitions in a hybrid system to have a functional dependence on its continuous state. Our experiments indicate that guarded PHA models can yield significant performance improvements when used by hybrid state estimators, particularly when diagnosing the true discrete mode of the system, without any noticeable impact on their real-time performance.

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AAAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

A Scheduler for Actions with Iterated Durations

James Paterson
Eric Timmons
Brian Williams

A wide range of robotic missions contain actions that exhibit looping behavior. Examples of these actions include picking fruit in agriculture, pick-and-place tasks in manufacturing and search patterns in robotic search or survey missions. These looping actions often have a range of acceptable values for the number of loops and a preference function over them. For example, during robotic survey missions, the information gain is expected to increase with the number of loops in a search pattern. Since these looping actions also take time, which is typically bounded, there is a challenge of maximizing utility while respecting time constraints. In this paper, we introduce the Looping Temporal Problem with Preference (LTPP) as a simple parameterized extension of a simple temporal problem. In addition, we introduce a scheduling algorithm for LTPPs which leverages the structure of the problem to find the optimal solution efficiently. We show more than an order of magnitude improvement in run-time over current scheduling techniques and framing a LTPP as a MINLP.

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