Related papers: Efficient Decision-Making by Volume-Conserving Phy…
Economists often estimate economic models on data and use the point estimates as a stand-in for the truth when studying the model's implications for optimal decision-making. This practice ignores model ambiguity, exposes the decision…
In natural perception, different items (objects) in a scene are rarely equally relevant to the observer. The brain improves performance by directing attention to the most relevant items, for example the ones most likely to be probed. For a…
We propose an efficient algorithm for estimation of possibility based qualitative expected utility. It is useful for decision making mechanisms where each possible decision is assigned a multi-attribute possibility distribution. The…
Many methods have been developed for planning the motion of robotic arms for picking and placing, ranging from local optimization to global search techniques, which are effective for sparsely placed objects. Dense clutter, however, still…
This paper addresses an optimal control problem for a robot that has to find and collect a finite number of objects and move them to a depot in minimum time. The robot has fourth-order dynamics that change instantaneously at any pick-up or…
Using linearized elasticity as a convenient mechanical framework, we show that volumetric growth can be formulated as an optimization-driven process in which the growth tensor is determined implicitly by constrained optimization rather than…
An agent who lacks preferences and instead makes decisions using criteria that are costly to create should select efficient sets of criteria, where the cost of making a given number of choice distinctions is minimized. Under mild…
In warehouse and manufacturing environments, manipulation platforms are frequently deployed at conveyor belts to perform pick and place tasks. Because objects on the conveyor belts are moving, robots have limited time to pick them up. This…
We consider a variant of bin packing called multiple-choice vector bin packing. In this problem we are given a set of items, where each item can be selected in one of several $D$-dimensional incarnations. We are also given $T$ bin types,…
Robotic manipulation behavior should be robust to disturbances that violate high-level task-structure. Such robustness can be achieved by constantly monitoring the environment to observe the discrete high-level state of the task. This is…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
A problem of minimization of delivery and storage costs of a product is considered under constraints on volumes of delivery from each of the suppliers. It is required to determine optimal volumes and times of product shipments. The problem…
In the online general knapsack problem, an algorithm is presented with an item $x=(s,v)$ of size $s$ and value $v$ and must irrevocably choose to pack such an item into the knapsack or reject it before the next item appears. The goal is to…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
This paper presents a robotic in-hand manipulation technique that can be applied to pick an object too large to grasp in a prehensile manner, by taking advantage of its contact interactions with a curved, passive end-effector, and two flat…
Motivation: With the growth of big data, variable selection has become one of the major challenges in statistics. Although many methods have been proposed in the literature their performance in terms of recall and precision are limited in a…
We study an extension of the classical Bin Packing Problem, where each item consumes the bin capacity during a given time window that depends on the item itself. The problem asks for finding the minimum number of bins to pack all the items…
Robots operating in human-centered environments should have the ability to understand how objects function: what can be done with each object, where this interaction may occur, and how the object is used to achieve a goal. To this end, we…
Modeling the dynamics of flexible objects has become an emerging topic in the community as these objects become more present in many applications, e.g., soft robotics. Due to the properties of flexible materials, the movements of soft…