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This chapter describes the development of an embedded platform constituting the core of an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) system. High level components include an embedded computer, network camera, supervisory module and wireless gateway. A distributed high efficiency power supply complements the low consumption of system components. Innovative design solutions have resulted in a compact, inexpensive...
This paper describes two implementations of a potential field sharing multi-robot system which we term as pessimistic and optimistic. Unlike other multirobot systems in which coordination is designed explicitly, it is an emergent property of our system. The robots perform no reasoning and are purely reactive in nature. We extend our previous work in simulated search and rescue where there was only...
In this paper, a probabilistic based approach is presented by which a single mobile robotic agent might discover targets in an obstacle strewn environment in a strategic manner which minimizes the average time taken to find a target. The approach has been evaluated on simulated environments for the case of finding victims in a disaster area.
We present an approach for indoor mapping and localisation using sparse range data, acquired by a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors. The chapter consists of two main parts. First, a split and merge based method for dividing a given metric map into distinct regions is presented, thus creating a topological map in a metric framework. Spatial information extracted from this map is then used for...
Digital cameras are often used on robots these days. One of the common limitations of these cameras is a relatively small field of view. Consequently, the camera is usually tilted downwards to see the floor immediately in front of the robot in order to avoid obstacles. With the camera tilted, vertical edges no longer appear vertical in the image. This feature can however be used to advantage to discriminate...
Autonomous navigation in walking robots requires that three main tasks be solved: self-localization, obstacle avoidance, and object handling. This report presents a development and application of an optical three-axis tactile sensor mounted on a robotic finger to perform object handling in a humanoid robot navigation system. Previously in this research, we proposed a basic humanoid robot navigation...
Everyday people face traffic congestion in urban areas, raising travel time and stress issues in drivers. Beyond traffic lights synchronization, emerging location-based technologies like GPS and cellular communications suggest some futuristic traffic coordination schemes. Flock traffic navigation (FTN) based on negotiation gives a basic algorithm and showed by simulation that a non-centred solution...
We describe a novel method for classifying terrain in unstructured, natural environments for the purpose of aiding mobile robot navigation. This method operates on range data provided by stereo without the traditional preliminary extraction of geometric features such as height and slope, replacing these measurements with 2D histograms representing the shape and permeability of objects within a local...
Object position tracking is a well-known problem in robotic vision system design. This chapter proposes a new centre-of-mass(COM) object position tracker integrated circuit design using standard low-cost digital CMOS process technology without the need for a floating gate poly2 layer. The proposed COM tracker is designed using an IBM 130-nm CMOS process with a 1V supply voltage and can be used for...
3D range sensors, particularly 3D laser range scanners, enjoy a rising popularity and are used nowadays for many different applications. The resolution 3D range sensors provide in the image plane is typically much lower than the resolution of a modern colour camera. In this chapter we focus on methods to derive a highresolution depth image from a low-resolution 3D range sensor and a colour image....
The design and development of an interactive 3D robotic simulator, as a platform for the study of co-operative robot behaviour, is described in this chapter. The simulator provides a visually realistic 3D world with simulated robot agents and geographical terrain, for the purpose of evaluating the performance of robots in various scenarios. The simulator was developed in C++ using open source packages,...
In this research we develop a robot intended to eliminate the human component in the book retrieval process by autonomously navigating to and retrieving a specific book from a bookshelf. Notably a salient feature of this autonomous robot is the employment of an elementary book detection and identification technique in the formulation of a time-optimal and computationally basic method in contrast to...
This paper discusses a trajectory planning strategy for surveillance mobile robots. This specific kind of mission requires fast scanning of the robot workspace using trajectories resembling non-planned motion for external observers. The proposed trajectory planner is based on the typical behaviour of chaotic dynamical systems. A chaotic behaviour is imparted to the robot using a trajectory-planner...
In previous work, virtual force has been used to simulate the motions of virtual creatures, such as birds or fish, in a crowd. However, how to set up the virtual forces to achieve desired effects remains empirical. In this work, we propose to use a genetic algorithm to generate an optimal set of weighting parameters for composing virtual forces according to the given environment and desired movement...
In the capacitated open pit mining problem, we consider the sequential extraction of blocks in order to maximize the total discounted profit under an extraction capacity during each period of the horizon. We propose a formulation closely related to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem(RCPSP) where the genotype representation of the solution is based on a priority value encoding. We...
We have proposed an automatic adjustment method using genetic algorithms (GA) to adjust the optical axes in laser systems. However, there are still two tasks that need to be solved: (1) long adjustment time and (2) adjustment precision due to observation noise. In order to solve these tasks, we propose a robust and efficient automatic adjustment method for the optical axes of laser systems using stochastic...
This paper presents a novel method which uses a genetic algorithm to evolve the control system of a computer simulated mobile inverted pendulum. During the evolutionary process the best and average fitness, the chromosome and pendulum motion is recorded and analysed. The chromosome is a two dimensional lookup table that relates the current pendulum’s angle and angular velocity to the motor direction...
This chapter presents the real time validation of fixed order robust H2 controller designed for the lateral stabilisation of a micro air vehicle named Sarika2. Digital signal processor (DSP) based onboard computer named flight instrumentation controller (FIC) is designed to operate under automatic or manual mode. FIC gathers data from multitude of sensors and is capable of closed loop control to enable...
When supervising a team of robots, the operator’s task is not only the manipulation of each robot but also achievement of the top goal that is assigned to the entire team of humans and robots. A main goal of this study is development of a design concept based on the ecological interface design for human supervision of a robot team, providing information about states of functions that are necessary...
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