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This paper presents the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a semi-humanoid robotic system for autonomous multi-floor navigation. This robot, a Personal Robot 2 named Charlie, is capable of operating an elevator to travel between rooms located on separate floors. Our goal is to create a robotic assistant capable of locating points of interest, manipulating objects, and navigating...
A new method for efficiently mapping three dimensional environments from a platform carrying a single calibrated camera, and simultaneously localizing the platform within this map is presented in this paper. This is the Monocular SLAM problem in robotics, which is equivalent to the problem of extracting Structure from Motion (SFM) in computer vision. A novel formulation of Monocular SLAM which exploits...
Depth computation in robotics is an important step towards providing robust and accurate navigation capabilities to a mobile robot. In this paper we examine the problem of depth estimation with the view to be used in parsimonious systems where fast and accurate measurements are critical. For this purpose we have combined two methods, namely optical flow and least squares in order to infer depth estimates...
This paper addresses the problem of mapping three dimensional environments from a sequence of images taken by a calibrated camera, and simultaneously generating the camera motion trajectory. This is the Monocular SLAM problem in robotics, and is akin to the Structure from Motion (SFM) problem in computer vision. We present a novel map-aided 6-DOF relative pose estimation method based on a new formulation...
Robotics research tends to focus upon either non-contact sensing or machine manipulation, but not both. This paper explores the benefits of combining the two by addressing the problem of classifying unknown objects, such as found in service robot applications. In the proposed approach, an object lies on a flat background, and the goal of the robot is to interact with and classify each object so that...
Occupancy grids have been used for a variety of applications in the field of robotics. These grids have typically been created based on data provided by range sensors such as laser or ultrasound. Current practice is to create the grids based on a probabilistic sensor model such as [1]. The use of stereovision to create occupancy grids is less common. This paper will detail a novel approach to compute...
The paper describes an image stabilization model based on the compensatory Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex. It provides for an anti-shake mechanism that helps ensure that the object being tracked by a camera always remains in focus and does not get blurred due to rotational or translational movements. The model uses memristors in order to develop a multi-directional circuit, which has a function similar to...
Considerable attention has been paid during the last decade to vision-based navigation systems based on optic flow (OF) cues. OF-based systems have been implemented on an increasingly large number of sighted autonomous robotic platforms. Nowadays, the OF is measured using conventional cameras, custom-made sensors and even optical mouse chips. However, very few studies have dealt so far with the reliability...
This paper describes a 3D shape reconstruction method using vision sensors targeted at domestic robotics applications. We propose a new method to fuse stereo disparity map and Shape from “Silhouette” (SFS). What we mean by silhouette in this paper is different from the existing silhouette definition. The silhouette here is not obtained from back projecting the object contour to the image plane but...
This paper presents a study about the influence of visual feedback conditions on robot teleoperation and teleoperators' behavior for path following tasks. To objectively describe this influence we define three parameters: the spatial anticipation, the visuo-motor phase shift and the theoretical optical flow, which can be easily derived from experimental observations. The spatial anticipation is found...
One of the ultimate challenges in robotics is to manipulate an arbitrary object without knowing its exact shape beforehand. The shape is rather acquired on the spot via using a laser range scanner, structure from multiple views; therefore, maybe only partially observed and corrupted by a certain degree of noise. We propose an algorithm to identify available failsafe strategies capable of preventing...
Robust object detection is a critical skill for robotic applications in complex environments like homes and offices. In this paper we propose a method for using multiple cameras to simultaneously view an object from multiple angles and at high resolutions. We show that our probabilistic method for combining the camera views, which can be used with many choices of single-image object detector, can...
Object tracking and segmentation find a wide range of applications in robotics. Tracking and segmentation are difficult in cluttered and dynamic backgrounds. We propose a tracking and segmentation algorithm in which tracking and segmentation are performed consecutively. We separate input images into disjoint patches using an efficient oversegmentation algorithm. Objects and their background are described...
In the event of an emergency due to a fire or other crisis, a necessary but time consuming pre-requisite, that could delay the real rescue operation, is to establish whether the ground or area can be entered safely by human emergency workers. The objective of the VIEW-FINDER project is to develop robots which have the primary task of gathering data. The robots are equipped with sensors that detect...
We present a real-time smoothing methodology for the stabilization of videos captured from small robotic helicopter platforms. We suppress supposedly unintended vibrations considering relative rotation and displacements between successive frames. We propose a similar, an affine or a bilinear transformation to model global motion assuming that camera movement dominates the motion field of aerial footage...
This paper addresses the problem of tracking a planar region of the scene using an uncalibrated omnidirectional camera. Omnidirectional cameras are a popular choice of visual sensors in robotics because the large field of view is well adapted to motion estimation and obstacle avoidance. The novelty of this work resides in simplifying the calibration phase by providing a direct approach to tracking...
In this work, we make use of 3D visual contours carrying geometric as well as appearance information. Between these contours, we define 3D relations that encode structural information relevant to object-level operations such as similarity assessment and grasping. We show that this relational space can also be used as input features for learning which we exemplify for the grasping of unknown objects...
Omnidirectional cameras are a popular choice of visual sensors in robotics because their large field of view is well suited for motion estimation and obstacle avoidance. However their practical use is often burdened by the calibration phase that can be time consuming and require an experienced user. The contribution of this work is a simplification of calibration phase by providing a direct approach...
Human beings do not have well defined shapes neither well defined behaviors. In dense outdoor environments, they are as a consequence hard to detect and algorithms based on a single sensor tend to produce lot of wrong detections. Moreover, many applications require algorithms that work very fast on CPU limited mobile architectures while remaining able to detect, track and classify objects as people...
Estimating the camera pose in stereo vision systems is an important issue in computer vision and robotics. One popular way to handle this problem consists of determining the essential matrix which minimizes the algebraic error obtained from image point correspondences. Unfortunately, this search amounts to solving a nonconvex optimization, and the existing methods either rely on some approximations...
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