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Multi-fingered robot grasping is a challenging problem that is difficult to tackle using hand-coded programs. In this paper we present an imitation learning approach for learning and generalizing grasping skills based on human demonstrations. To this end, we split the task of synthesizing a grasping motion into three parts: (1) learning efficient grasp representations from human demonstrations, (2)...
This paper introduces a new mechanism for achieving tunable stiffness, named layer jamming, and presents a hollow snake-like manipulator having tunable stiffness capability. The layer jamming mechanism is composed of multiple layers of thin Mylar film, and makes use of amplified friction between the films by applying vacuum pressure. In contrast to other tunable stiffness technology, such as particle...
This paper analyzed petroleum equipment in existence, one novel petroleum equipment joint which can switch on or shut off pipeline automatically when petroleum equipment units are connected or separated is designed, this kind of joint can assure petroleum is not leaked from pipeline when petroleum equipment units are connected or separated.
This paper discusses a dynamic nonprehensile manipulation of a thin flexible object where the object rotates on a plate. We have found that a thin flexible object shows bipedal-gaited motions when rotating on the vibrating plate and that the maximal angular velocity of the object is achieved by an appropriate plate motion with respect to the object's physical parameters. Based on such an object's...
This paper deals with a finite element evaluation of new kind of robotic arm based on a complete inflatable structure. Soft robotics and particularly inflatable robotics are now considered as a credible alternative to classical structures for a wide field of robotics. As they are made of textile materials, inflatable robots allow compact packaging and easier robot deployment. Moreover, they could...
It is essential to get disabled people involved and connected to each other and to the rest of the society. Games can be used for this purpose as well as encouraging them to be active physically. However, many of the current interactive games interact with users through voice commands which could be a problem for the deaf/mute people. Microsoft Kinect opens a new aspect for the gaming industry. This...
Reducing the energy dissipation can improve the movement efficiency of a snake-like robot. Avoiding side slipping is the main way to reduce the energy dissipation. A creeping control method for the snake-like robot, named optimal passive creeping, is proposed. This method makes the robot avoid slipping by inputting the proper torque which is adjusted by its body shape. The purpose of the control method...
Pictorial Structures (PS) define a probabilistic model of 2D articulated objects in images. Typical PS models assume an object can be represented by a set of rigid parts connected with pairwise constraints that define the prior probability of part configurations. These models are widely used to represent non-rigid articulated objects such as humans and animals despite the fact that such objects have...
State-of-the-art methods for human detection and pose estimation require many training samples for best performance. While large, manually collected datasets exist, the captured variations w.r.t. appearance, shape and pose are often uncontrolled thus limiting the overall performance. In order to overcome this limitation we propose a new technique to extend an existing training set that allows to explicitly...
We address the problem of segmenting and recognizing objects in real world images, focusing on challenging articulated categories such as humans and other animals. For this purpose, we propose a novel design for region-based object detectors that integrates efficiently top-down information from scanning-windows part models and global appearance cues. Our detectors produce class-specific scores for...
In this paper we propose an approach to holistic scene understanding that reasons jointly about regions, location, class and spatial extent of objects, presence of a class in the image, as well as the scene type. Learning and inference in our model are efficient as we reason at the segment level, and introduce auxiliary variables that allow us to decompose the inherent high-order potentials into pairwise...
Fitting an articulated model to image data is often approached as an optimization over both model pose and model-to-image correspondence. For complex models such as humans, previous work has required a good initialization, or an alternating minimization between correspondence and pose. In this paper we investigate one-shot pose estimation: can we directly infer correspondences using a regression function...
Markerless 3D human pose detection from a single image is a severely underconstrained problem because different 3D poses can have similar image projections. In order to handle this ambiguity, current approaches rely on prior shape models that can only be correctly adjusted if 2D image features are accurately detected. Unfortunately, although current 2D part detector algorithms have shown promising...
In this paper, we propose a coding unit (CU) depth-based adaptive loop filter (ALF) decision method to reduce the encoder complexity. In high efficiency video coding (HEVC), ALF is designed based on Wiener filter to minimize the distortion between the original frame and the coded frame. In order to design the optimal filter for each CU, the filter design process is repeated 12 times per CU. The repetition...
We present a general method of estimating a snake robot's motion over flat ground using only knowledge of the robot's shape changes over time. Estimating world motion of snake robots is often difficult because of the complex way a robot's cyclic shape changes (gaits) interact with the surrounding environment. By using the virtual chassis to separate the robot's internal shape changes from its external...
In state estimation, we often want the maximum likelihood estimate of the current state. For the commonly used joint multivariate Gaussian distribution over the state space, this can be efficiently found using a Kalman filter. However, in complex environments the state space is often highly constrained. For example, for objects within a refrigerator, they cannot interpenetrate each other or the refrigerator...
Vibration-induced solder joint failure is one of the common failure modes in microelectronics used in the automotive and the aerospace industries. In most of these applications, printed wiring boards (PWBs) with multiple surface-mount components are attached to a base frame through either sockets, clamps, or receptacles. Since the base frame is typically attached to the vehicle, the vehicle's vibration...
In this paper, we address the problem determining the connectivity of a robot's free configuration space. Our method iteratively builds a constructive proof that two configurations lie in disjoint components of the free configuration space. Our algorithm first generates samples that correspond to configurations for which the robot is in collision with an obstacle. These samples are then weighted by...
Caging is a method to make an object inescapable from a closed region by rigid bodies. Position-controlled robot hands can capture an object and manipulate it via caging without force sensing or force control. However, the object in caging is freely movable in the closed region, which may not be allowed in some applications. In such cases, grasping is required. In this paper, we propose a new simple...
Extracting and labeling sulcal curves on the human cerebral cortex is important for many neuroscience studies, however manually annotating the sulcal curves is a time-consuming task. In this paper, we present an automatic sulcal curve extraction method by registering a set of dense landmark points representing the sulcal curves to the subject cortical surface. A Markov random field is used to model...
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