AircraftVerse: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset of Aerial Vehicle Designs

We present AircraftVerse, a publicly available aerial vehicle design dataset. Aircraft design encompasses different physics domains and, hence, multiple modalities of representation. The evaluation of these cyber-physical system (CPS) designs requires the use of scientific analytical and simulation models ranging from computer-aided design tools for structural and manufacturing analysis, computational fluid dynamics tools for drag and lift computation, battery models for energy estimation, and simulation models for flight control and dynamics. AircraftVerse contains 27,714 diverse air vehicle designs - the largest corpus of engineering designs with this level of complexity. Each design comprises the following artifacts: a symbolic design tree describing topology, propulsion subsystem, battery subsystem, and other design details; a STandard for the Exchange of Product (STEP) model data; a 3D CAD design using a stereolithography (STL) file format; a 3D point cloud for the shape of the design; and evaluation results from high fidelity state-of-the-art physics models that characterize performance metrics such as maximum flight distance and hover-time. We also present baseline surrogate models that use different modalities of design representation to predict design performance metrics, which we provide as part of our dataset release. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of this dataset on the use of learning in aircraft design and, more generally, in CPS. AircraftVerse is accompanied by a data card, and it is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. The dataset is hosted at https://zenodo.org/record/6525446, baseline models and code at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/AircraftVerse, and the dataset description at https://aircraftverse.onrender.com/.

Annealing for Distributed Global Optimization

The paper proves convergence to global optima for a class of distributed algorithms for nonconvex optimization in network-based multi-agent settings. Agents are permitted to communicate over a time-varying undirected graph. Each agent is assumed to possess a local objective function (assumed to be smooth, but possibly nonconvex). The paper considers algorithms for optimizing the sum function. A distributed algorithm of the consensus+innovations type is proposed which relies on first-order information at the agent level. Under appropriate conditions on network connectivity and the cost objective, convergence to the set of global optima is achieved by an annealing-type approach, with decaying Gaussian noise independently added into each agent's update step. It is shown that the proposed algorithm converges in probability to the set of global minima of the sum function.

Clustering with Distributed Data

We consider $K$-means clustering in networked environments (e.g., internet of things (IoT) and sensor networks) where data is inherently distributed across nodes and processing power at each node may be limited. We consider a clustering algorithm referred to as networked $K$-means, or $NK$-means, which relies only on local neighborhood information exchange. Information exchange is limited to low-dimensional statistics and not raw data at the agents. The proposed approach develops a parametric family of multi-agent clustering objectives (parameterized by $\rho$) and associated distributed $NK$-means algorithms (also parameterized by $\rho$). The $NK$-means algorithm with parameter $\rho$ converges to a set of fixed points relative to the associated multi-agent objective (designated as `generalized minima'). By appropriate choice of $\rho$, the set of generalized minima may be brought arbitrarily close to the set of Lloyd's minima. Thus, the $NK$-means algorithm may be used to compute Lloyd's minima of the collective dataset up to arbitrary accuracy.