AIRA: A Low-cost IR-based Approach Towards Autonomous Precision Drone Landing and NLOS Indoor Navigation

Automatic drone landing is an important step for achieving fully autonomous drones. Although there are many works that leverage GPS, video, wireless signals, and active acoustic sensing to perform precise landing, autonomous drone landing remains an unsolved challenge for palm-sized microdrones that may not be able to support the high computational requirements of vision, wireless, or active audio sensing. We propose AIRA, a low-cost infrared light-based platform that targets precise and efficient landing of low-resource microdrones. AIRA consists of an infrared light bulb at the landing station along with an energy efficient hardware photodiode (PD) sensing platform at the bottom of the drone. AIRA costs under 83 USD, while achieving comparable performance to existing vision-based methods at a fraction of the energy cost. AIRA requires only three PDs without any complex pattern recognition models to accurately land the drone, under $10$cm of error, from up to $11.1$ meters away, compared to camera-based methods that require recognizing complex markers using high resolution images with a range of only up to $1.2$ meters from the same height. Moreover, we demonstrate that AIRA can accurately guide drones in low light and partial non line of sight scenarios, which are difficult for traditional vision-based approaches.

DrHouse: An LLM-empowered Diagnostic Reasoning System through Harnessing Outcomes from Sensor Data and Expert Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform digital healthcare, as evidenced by recent advances in LLM-based virtual doctors. However, current approaches rely on patient's subjective descriptions of symptoms, causing increased misdiagnosis. Recognizing the value of daily data from smart devices, we introduce a novel LLM-based multi-turn consultation virtual doctor system, DrHouse, which incorporates three significant contributions: 1) It utilizes sensor data from smart devices in the diagnosis process, enhancing accuracy and reliability. 2) DrHouse leverages continuously updating medical databases such as Up-to-Date and PubMed to ensure our model remains at diagnostic standard's forefront. 3) DrHouse introduces a novel diagnostic algorithm that concurrently evaluates potential diseases and their likelihood, facilitating more nuanced and informed medical assessments. Through multi-turn interactions, DrHouse determines the next steps, such as accessing daily data from smart devices or requesting in-lab tests, and progressively refines its diagnoses. Evaluations on three public datasets and our self-collected datasets show that DrHouse can achieve up to an 18.8% increase in diagnosis accuracy over the state-of-the-art baselines. The results of a 32-participant user study show that 75% medical experts and 91.7% patients are willing to use DrHouse.

TRAMBA: A Hybrid Transformer and Mamba Architecture for Practical Audio and Bone Conduction Speech Super Resolution and Enhancement on Mobile and Wearable Platforms

We propose TRAMBA, a hybrid transformer and Mamba architecture for acoustic and bone conduction speech enhancement, suitable for mobile and wearable platforms. Bone conduction speech enhancement has been impractical to adopt in mobile and wearable platforms for several reasons: (i) data collection is labor-intensive, resulting in scarcity; (ii) there exists a performance gap between state of-art models with memory footprints of hundreds of MBs and methods better suited for resource-constrained systems. To adapt TRAMBA to vibration-based sensing modalities, we pre-train TRAMBA with audio speech datasets that are widely available. Then, users fine-tune with a small amount of bone conduction data. TRAMBA outperforms state-of-art GANs by up to 7.3% in PESQ and 1.8% in STOI, with an order of magnitude smaller memory footprint and an inference speed up of up to 465 times. We integrate TRAMBA into real systems and show that TRAMBA (i) improves battery life of wearables by up to 160% by requiring less data sampling and transmission; (ii) generates higher quality voice in noisy environments than over-the-air speech; (iii) requires a memory footprint of less than 20.0 MB.

RASP: A Drone-based Reconfigurable Actuation and Sensing Platform Towards Ambient Intelligent Systems

Realizing consumer-grade drones that are as useful as robot vacuums throughout our homes or personal smartphones in our daily lives requires drones to sense, actuate, and respond to general scenarios that may arise. Towards this vision, we propose RASP, a modular and reconfigurable sensing and actuation platform that allows drones to autonomously swap onboard sensors and actuators in only 25 seconds, allowing a single drone to quickly adapt to a diverse range of tasks. RASP consists of a mechanical layer to physically swap sensor modules, an electrical layer to maintain power and communication lines to the sensor/actuator, and a software layer to maintain a common interface between the drone and any sensor module in our platform. Leveraging recent advances in large language and visual language models, we further introduce the architecture, implementation, and real-world deployments of a personal assistant system utilizing RASP. We demonstrate that RASP can enable a diverse range of useful tasks in home, office, lab, and other indoor settings.

LLM-based Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Screening and Psychotherapeutic Intervention via Everyday Smart Devices

Despite the global mental health crisis, access to screenings, professionals, and treatments remains high. In collaboration with licensed psychotherapists, we propose a Conversational AI Therapist with psychotherapeutic Interventions (CaiTI), a platform that leverages large language models (LLM)s and smart devices to enable better mental health self-care. CaiTI can screen the day-to-day functioning using natural and psychotherapeutic conversations. CaiTI leverages reinforcement learning to provide personalized conversation flow. CaiTI can accurately understand and interpret user responses. When the user needs further attention during the conversation, CaiTI can provide conversational psychotherapeutic interventions, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and motivational interviewing (MI). Leveraging the datasets prepared by the licensed psychotherapists, we experiment and microbenchmark various LLMs' performance in tasks along CaiTI's conversation flow and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. With the psychotherapists, we implement CaiTI and conduct 14-day and 24-week studies. The study results, validated by therapists, demonstrate that CaiTI can converse with users naturally, accurately understand and interpret user responses, and provide psychotherapeutic interventions appropriately and effectively. We showcase the potential of CaiTI LLMs to assist the mental therapy diagnosis and treatment and improve day-to-day functioning screening and precautionary psychotherapeutic intervention systems.