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This work focuses on the observation of environmental phenomena that occur as spatial distributions in two and three dimensions, using sensor-enabled mobile vehicle (ground,air or undersea). Algorithms to guide an adaptive exploration of a given region through systematic choice of sampling locations under the constraints imposed by vehicles are presented. Variation sensitive multiresolution sample...
This paper introduces a testbed for sensor and robot network systems, currently composed of 10 cameras and 5 mobile wheeled robots equipped with several sensors for self-localization, obstacle avoidance and vision cameras, and wireless communications. The testbed includes a service-oriented middleware to enable fast prototyping and implementation of algorithms previously tested in simulation, as well...
Despite its appealing concept, a systematic way of designing autonomous decentralized control system is still lacking. In order to alleviate this, we have so far proposed a design scheme for local sensory feedback control based on so-called discrepancy function that extracts the discrepancies between body (i.e., mechanical system), brain (i.e., control system) and environments. This paper intensively...
Biologically-inspired swarm of robots with collaboration towards a common mission has a broad range of applications. However, the required dynamic localization among autonomous robots for such swarm collaboration, though usually implicitly assumed, has not been properly studied. In this paper, we address the roles of multiple antennas in localization and energy-efficient wireless communications for...
We describe here a palpation-based needle insertion method for diagnostic biopsy and treatment of breast cancer. The mechanical palpation probe locates cancerous tissue from force information and reduces tissue displacement during needle insertion. We compared palpation-based needle insertion to normal needle insertion by numerical simulation of a breast tissue model and by experiments in vitro. The...
Tracking multiple people in crowded and cluttered dynamic scenes is a very difficult task in robotic vision due to the highly frequent occlusion and lack of visibility of objects. In this paper, we present a manifold learning based multiple people tracking approach with occlusion reasoning to solve this problem. In our previous work, a new intrinsic variable preserving manifold learning (IVPML) method...
This paper introduces a novel and flexible simulation platform for studying pursuit and evasion in unknown 2-D environments of arbitrary obstacles, in an effort to expand the practical application of pursuit-evasion research. The platform provides realistic simulation of the sensing capability of each robotic agent (either a pursuer or an evader). Each agent uses real-time local sensing to collect...
This paper proposes a sound identification method for a mobile robot in home and office environment. We propose a simple sound database called Pitch-Cluster-Maps(PCMs) based on Vector Quantization approach. Binarized frequency spectrum is used for PCMs codebook generation. It can describe a variety of sound sources, not only voice, from short term sound input. The proposed PCMs sound identification...
This paper presents a low-cost, simple automated mobile platform for 3D environmental digitization. Compared with other customized 3D digitization platforms, all parts in our platform are commercial off-the-shelf. In order to build a 3D model of a salient target, we present a new viewpoint planning method for fast 3D digitization. Within a predefined accuracy, our method can determine the minimum...
We introduce an autonomous planetary exploration software architecture being developed for the purpose of autonomous science target identification and surface sample acquisition. Our motivation is to maximise planetary science data return whilst minimising the need for ground-based human intervention during long duration planetary robotic exploration missions. Our autonomous science target identification...
This video highlights work to date on the Yobotics-IHMC lower body humanoid robot. The robot is a twelve degree-of-freedom robot with force controllable series elastic actuators at each degree of freedom. Control algorithms utilize virtual model control, and foot placement is determined using capture regions. The robot can recover from moderate disturbances and walk on flat ground. Ongoing work is...
In this paper we propose an approach to SLAM suitable for bathymetric mapping by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). AUVs typically do not have access to GPS while underway and the survey areas of interest are unlikely to contain features that can easily be identified and tracked using bathymetric sonar. We demonstrate how the uncertainty in the vehicle state can be modeled using a particle filter...
This paper presents a method of topological modeling in home environments using only low-cost sonar sensors. The proposed method constructs a topological model using sonar gridmap by extracting subregions incrementally. A confidence for each occupied grid is evaluated to obtain reliable regions in a local gridmap, and a convexity measure is used to extract subregions automatically. Through these processes,...
This paper discusses the mechanical kinematics solutions and design aspects of the biped robot SHERPA, a bipedal platform able to walk and carry load. Starting from the analysis of the human lower limbs, we figure out that 6 DOF per leg are fundamental for a correct walking motion and can be adopted in a mechanical design of a humanoid robot. A close investigation of the joints leads us to a novel...
In this paper, parallel link mechanisms for multi drive linear motors (MDLMs) are proposed. The multi drive is a control method for linear motors in which a number of moving parts are individually driven on one stator part. Various configurations of parallel link mechanisms which were constructed for MDLMs are proposed. These mechanisms offer a wide range of motion in addition to the existing characteristics...
This paper outlines the design of a portable manipulator system for use in remote detection and care of hemorrhage using high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). We have developed a kinematically redundant manipulator that uses high fidelity force control for safe interaction with human patients. The manipulator is outfitted with a dual imaging and sonication end-effector for hemorrhage detection...
This paper describes an algorithm for estimating lane boundaries and curbs from a moving vehicle using noisy observations and a probabilistic model of curvature. The primary contribution of this paper is a curve model we call lateral uncertainty, which describes the uncertainty of a curve estimate along the lateral direction at various points on the curve, and does not attempt to capture uncertainty...
Communication time delay has been a major barrier to achieving high performance while maintaining stability in bilateral teleoperation. Building upon the results of our recent work in, a provably stable adaptive controller is proposed for variable delay teleoperation. The controller utilizes a model of the system dynamics and the time delay within a predictive control framework to improve the response...
A mobile robot that accomplishes high level tasks needs to be able to classify the objects in the environment and to determine their location. In this paper, we address the problem of online object detection in 3D laser range data. The object classes are represented by 3D point-clouds that can be obtained from a set of range scans. Our method relies on the extraction of point features from range images...
Currently, there is a high demand for autonomous industrial production systems. This paper outlines the development of a cognitive system for autonomous robotic welding. This system is based on dimensionality reduction techniques and Support Vector Machines, allowing the system to learn to separate between acceptable and unacceptable welding results within one batch, and to transfer this ability to...
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