Abstract

Researchers quantify vegetation characteristics using phytosociology studies. The data collected from vegetation surveys, such as tree girth and height measurements, are used to calculate various phytosociological attributes like frequency, density, basal cover, important value index, etc. In general, they are calculated using an Excel spreadsheet and a lengthy mathematical process. There are a few open-source or free software available to compute some of these parameters. However, they are not user friendly for most researchers. Also, these software primarily doesn’t compute basic phytosociological attributes. In view of these constraints and to ease researchers work, we have developed a simple tool, “PAT” Phytosociology Analysis Tool,” that computes the maximum attributes from the field collected vegetation data. The PAT GUI is simple. PAT computes results using standard formulas after users upload a csv file in the required format. Users can download the table's results and figures in PNG format.

Abstract

The task of headline generation within the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) holds immense significance, as it strives to distill the true essence of textual content into concise and attention-grabbing summaries. While noteworthy progress has been made in headline generation for widely spoken languages like English, there persist numerous challenges when it comes to generating headlines in lowresource languages, such as the rich and diverse Indian languages. A prominent obstacle that specifically hinders headline generation in Indian languages is the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. To address this crucial gap, we proudly present Mukhyansh, an extensive multilingual dataset, tailored for Indian language headline generation. Comprising an impressive collection of over 3.39 million article-headline pairs, Mukhyansh spans across eight prominent Indian languages, namely Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati. We present a comprehensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art baseline models. Additionally, through an empirical analysis of existing works, we demonstrate that Mukhyansh outperforms all other models, achieving an impressive average ROUGE-L score of 31.43 across all 8 languages

Abstract

The collapse of buildings due to an earthquake is the leading cause of higher life loss and economic loss. it is not possible to prevent earthquake from occurring,but it disastrous effects can be minimized considerably through measure of scientific methods and understanding

Abstract

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable long text from structured input data, where the source is typically a high-resource language and the target is a low or medium resource language. We define the Cross-Lingual Fact to Long Text Generation (XFLT) as a novel natural language generation (NLG) task that involves generating descriptive and human-readable long text in a target language from structured input data (such as fact triples) in a source language. XFLT is challenging because of (a) hallucinatory nature of the state-of-the-art NLG models, (b) lack of good quality training data, and (c) lack of a suitable cross-lingual NLG metric. Unfortunately previous work focuses on different related problem settings (cross-lingual facts to short text or monolingual graph to text) and has made no efforts to handle hallucinations. In this paper, we contribute a novel dataset, XLALIGN with over 64,000 paragraphs across 12 different languages, and English facts. We propose a novel solution to the XFLT task which addresses these challenges by training multilingual Transformer-based encoder-decoder models with coverage prompts and grounded decoding. Further, it improves on the XFLT quality by defining task-specific reward functions and training on them using reinforcement learning. On XLALIGN, we compare this novel solution with several strong baselines using a new metric, cross-lingual PARENT. We also make our code and data publicly available

Abstract

Crosstalk, in a sensor matrix, is the unwanted signal obtained at a sensor pixel that is not directly related to the stimulus. This paper presents a novel approach towards quantifying the crosstalk characteristics of a sensor matrix. The method involves obtaining the normalized sum of all the neighbouring pixel readings, weighted by their distance from the stimulated pixel. We have used this methodology to characterise the crosstalk for a 5×5 velostat-based flexible pressure sensing matrix that uses a crossbar electrode architecture. The measure thus obtained is a dimensionless value between 0 to 1, 0 indicating no crosstalk and 1 indicating the maximum possible crosstalk. We characterized sensor matrices with three different pitch lengths: 3mm, 4mm, and 5mm. We observe the crosstalk values to lie between 0.032 to 0.17 across different weights and pitches, which indicates a low measure of crosstalk. The 5 mm pitch matrix displayed the least crosstalk, which was expected due to the larger spacing between the pixels. We also characterised the crosstalk for all 25 pixels of a 4 mm pitch matrix and found the mean to be 0.081±0.002 , within the range from 0.0071 to 0.1656.

Abstract

Polymer-based piezoresistive pressure sensors that possess flexibility and stretchability have received increased recognition in wearable sensing systems. In this paper, we present a flexible pressure sensor designed using polypyrrole-coated cotton (PCC) that was synthesized using in-situ chemical oxidative liquid polymerization. The sensor shows high sensitivity at low-pressure ranges and can measure pressures in the range 160 Pa to 16 kPa. The response time of the sensor was found to be 463 ms. It also exhibits excellent repeatability during continuous loading-unloading for over 1000 cycles. The performance of the sensor was evaluated in terms of resistance change as a function of tensile strain, by applying repeated compression and expansion strains. We report the gauge factor of the resistive sensor to be 0.32 for applied compressive strains from 0% to 99.6%. Such a large compressive strain range can be achieved with cotton because of its fibrous nature. It was observed that there is no change in conductivity, at a given strain, on repeated expansion and compression of the polymer for 20 cycles.

Abstract

Regular plantar pressure monitoring is required for diabetic, wheelchair-bound and bed-ridden individuals. It has been shown that peak plantar pressure for diabetics increases significantly and progressively, and requires regular monitoring for early detection and intervention. Sensor matrices of capacitative, resistive, and piezoelectric transducers are most commonly used for measuring areal pressure. Calibration for such medical devices is crucial for reliability and repeatable results. In this work, we elaborate on the calibration challenges of a 32×32 velostat-based sensor matrix, and demonstrate calibration strategies suitable for a manufactured product. We show that 2N parameters can be used to calibrate an N×N sensor matrix instead of 2N2 . We observe the accuracy of calibration of a 32×32 sensor matrix by comparing the total detected weight of 35 participants at a static load with their reported weight, with 4.2% mean error and 3.1% median error. For participants in the 50–85 kg weight range, the difference was always within ±5%. Further, upon drawing contour plots and using the pressure distribution information, we were able to distinguish participants with possible foot ulcers and flat feet.

Abstract

Bio-inspired structures provide several new possibilities in the area of robotics due to their superiority and diversity in execution. Researchers have been developing various robotic applications with the combination of soft materials such as silicone and various 3D printed materials. These kinds of soft robots can be useful for various human-robotic interactions such as search and rescue, medical surgery and so on. In this work, we present the fabrication and characterization of a small caterpillar-like soft robot (7 cm ×3.5 cm ×3 cm) powered using PneuNet actuation. Due to the limitations of traditional robotics, we believe that such soft material-based robots can be effective in various applications. The fabricated silicone-based PneuNet soft robot, which moves like a caterpillar, has also been embedded with an ESP camera module and LED light to enable applications such as surveillance and search-and-rescue. This soft robotic actuator can also perform tasks on various types of terrains, including ice and water surface. We find that the normalized distance travelled per actuation cycle on gravel to be 0.23 BL.

Abstract

Pressure sensors are subjected to continuous force and stress that may affect the operation of the sensor in the long run. Reliability is a crucial factor that must be considered when designing and fabricating any sensor. It is essential to test the material used in the sensor to assess the reliability of the complete product. In this work, we report the long-term reliability of a flexible pressure sensor mat using a carbon-impregnated polymer, velostat, which is a flexible, light, and thin polymer composite material with piezoresistive properties. We focus on the analysis of the performance of a flexible pressure sensor array under long-term and repeated loading. Tests were performed every fortnight for 210 days. We have observed that the material characteristics of the velostat material change on repeated application of pressure up to a certain time frame. For a given loading, once the material settles, the change in resistance of the material becomes consistent for a given application of pressure. We have also analyzed the changes in the parameters associated with the 2-parameter model, and have analyzed the effect of crosstalk on the sensor matrix for different pitch lengths to select the best pitch that will give us the minimum crosstalk. We have observed that the error rate of the sensor pixels decreased by 53 percentage points in 210 days. The results obtained from the experimental tests for reliability reveal a practical possibility of implementing velostat-based pressure sensors in wearable and healthcare devices and provide steps to take while calibrating an as-fabricated velostat-based sensor.

Abstract

Abstract—Building 3D maps of the environment is central to robot navigation, planning, and interaction with objects in a scene. Most existing approaches that integrate semantic concepts with 3D maps largely remain confined to the closed-set setting: they can only reason about a finite set of concepts, pre-defined at training time. Further, these maps can only be queried using class labels, or in more recent work, using text prompts. We address both these issues with ConceptFusion, a scene representation that is: (i) fundamentally open-set, enabling reasoning beyond a closed set of concepts (ii) inherently multimodal, enabling a diverse range of possible queries to the 3D map, from language, to images, to audio, to 3D geometry, all working in concert. ConceptFusion leverages the open-set capabilities of today’s foundation models that have been pretrained on internet-scale data to reason about concepts across modalities such as natural language, images, and audio. We demonstrate that pixel-aligned open-set features can be fused into 3D maps via traditional SLAM and multi-view fusion approaches. This enables effective zero-shot spatial reasoning, not needing any additional training or finetuning, and retains long-tailed concepts better than supervised approaches, outperforming them by more than 40% margin on 3D IoU. We extensively evaluate ConceptFusion on a number of real-world datasets, simulated home environments, a real-world tabletop manipulation task, and an autonomous driving platform. We showcase new avenues for blending foundation models with 3D open-set multimodal mapping. We encourage the reader to view the demos on our project page: https://concept-fusion.github.io