Luigi Palopoli

Stefano Divan, Daniele Fontanelli, Luigi Palopoli

We show a control algorithm to guide a robotic walking assistant along a planned path. The control strategy exploits the electromechanical brakes mounted on the back wheels of the walker. In order to reduce the hardware requirements we adopt a Bang Bang approach relying of four actions (with saturated value for the braking torques).When the platform is far away from the path, we execute an approach phase in which the walker converges toward the platform with a specified angle. When it comes in proximity of the platform, the control strategy switches to a path tracking mode, which uses the four control actions to converge toward the path with an angle which is a function of the state. This way it is possible to control the vehicle in feedback, secure a gentle convergence of the user to the planned path and her steady progress towards the destination.

Fabrizio Angiulli, Rachel Ben-Eliyahu-Zohary, Fabio Fassetti et al.

Designing algorithms capable of efficiently constructing minimal models of CNFs is an important task in AI. This paper provides new results along this research line and presents new algorithms for performing minimal model finding and checking over positive propositional CNFs and model minimization over propositional CNFs. An algorithmic schema, called the Generalized Elimination Algorithm (GEA) is presented, that computes a minimal model of any positive CNF. The schema generalizes the Elimination Algorithm (EA) [BP97], which computes a minimal model of positive head-cycle-free (HCF) CNF theories. While the EA always runs in polynomial time in the size of the input HCF CNF, the complexity of the GEA depends on the complexity of the specific eliminating operator invoked therein, which may in general turn out to be exponential. Therefore, a specific eliminating operator is defined by which the GEA computes, in polynomial time, a minimal model for a class of CNF that strictly includes head-elementary-set-free (HEF) CNF theories [GLL06], which form, in their turn, a strict superset of HCF theories. Furthermore, in order to deal with the high complexity associated with recognizing HEF theories, an "incomplete" variant of the GEA (called IGEA) is proposed: the resulting schema, once instantiated with an appropriate elimination operator, always constructs a model of the input CNF, which is guaranteed to be minimal if the input theory is HEF. In the light of the above results, the main contribution of this work is the enlargement of the tractability frontier for the minimal model finding and checking and the model minimization problems.

Fabrizio Angiulli, Fabio Fassetti, Luigi Palopoli et al.

The outlying property detection problem is the problem of discovering the properties distinguishing a given object, known in advance to be an outlier in a database, from the other database objects. In this paper, we analyze the problem within a context where numerical attributes are taken into account, which represents a relevant case left open in the literature. We introduce a measure to quantify the degree the outlierness of an object, which is associated with the relative likelihood of the value, compared to the to the relative likelihood of other objects in the database. As a major contribution, we present an efficient algorithm to compute the outlierness relative to significant subsets of the data. The latter subsets are characterized in a "rule-based" fashion, and hence the basis for the underlying explanation of the outlierness.