Related papers: How often should you clean your room?

Tidy-up tasks by service robots in home environments are challenging in robotics applications because they involve various interactions with the environment. In particular, robots are required not only to grasp, move, and release various…

We consider the range mode problem where given a sequence and a query range in it, we want to find items with maximum frequency in the range. We give time- and space- efficient algorithms for this problem. Our algorithms are efficient for…

In the Colored Bin Packing problem a set of items with varying weights and colors must be packed into bins of uniform weight limit such that no two items of the same color may be packed adjacently within a bin. We solve this problem for the…

In this paper, we demonstrate a formulation for optimizing coupled submodular maximization problems with provable sub-optimality bounds. In robotics applications, it is quite common that optimization problems are coupled with one another…

Imagine coating buildings and bridges with smart particles (also coined smart paint) that monitor structural integrity and sense and report on traffic and wind loads, leading to technology that could do such inspection jobs faster and…

We give new approximation algorithms for the submodular joint replenishment problem and the inventory routing problem, using an iterative rounding approach. In both problems, we are given a set of $N$ items and a discrete time horizon of…

Given an undirected graph representing similarities between a set of items and an additive measure evaluating the items, we treat the position of a special subset of items in an ordinal ranking through a collection of combinatorial…

We empirically evaluate the finite-time performance of several simulation-optimization algorithms on a testbed of problems with the goal of motivating further development of algorithms with strong finite-time performance. We investigate if…

We consider assortment optimization over a continuous spectrum of products represented by the unit interval, where the seller's problem consists of determining the optimal subset of products to offer to potential customers. To describe the…

Designing recommendation systems with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To that end, a new combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to generate optimized item selection for experimentation with the goal to…

The purpose of this note is to survey a methodology to solve systems of polynomial equations and inequalities. The techniques we discuss use the algebra of multivariate polynomials with coefficients over a field to create large-scale linear…

This paper is motivated by periodic data transmission in autonomous cars. We considered periodic tasks (with different periods) on one or several machines. After reviewing the literature on the subject, we managed to generalize a result of…

There is a lot of waste in an industrial environment that could cause harmful effects to both the products and the workers resulting in product defects, itchy eyes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, etc. While automative cleaning…

Optimization problems in engineering and applied mathematics are typically solved in an iterative fashion, by systematically adjusting the variables of interest until an adequate solution is found. The iterative algorithms that govern these…

For a robot to personalize physical assistance effectively, it must learn user preferences that can be generally reapplied to future scenarios. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up…

Consider a collection of objects, some of which may be `bad', and a test which determines whether or not a given sub-collection contains no bad objects. The non-adaptive pooling (or group testing) problem involves identifying the bad…

Given a list of N numbers, the maximum can be computed in N iterations. During these N iterations, the maximum gets updated on average as many times as the Nth harmonic number. We first use this fact to approximate the Nth harmonic number…

We introduce and study a class of optimization problems we coin replenishment problems with fixed turnover times: a very natural model that has received little attention in the literature. Nodes with capacity for storing a certain commodity…

The Stable Roommates problems are characterized by the preferences of agents over other agents as roommates. A solution is a partition of the agents into pairs that are acceptable to each other (i.e., they are in the preference lists of…

Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…