27,543 research outputs found
Human-Robot Control Strategies for the NASA/DARPA Robonaut
The Robotic Systems Technology Branch at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) is currently developing robot systems to reduce the Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) and planetary exploration burden on astronauts. One such system, Robonaut, is capable of interfacing with external Space Station systems that currently have only human interfaces. Robonaut is human scale, anthropomorphic, and designed to approach the dexterity of a space-suited astronaut. Robonaut can perform numerous human rated tasks, including actuating tether hooks, manipulating flexible materials, soldering wires, grasping handrails to move along space station mockups, and mating connectors. More recently, developments in autonomous control and perception for Robonaut have enabled dexterous, real-time man-machine interaction. Robonaut is now capable of acting as a practical autonomous assistant to the human, providing and accepting tools by reacting to body language. A versatile, vision-based algorithm for matching range silhouettes is used for monitoring human activity as well as estimating tool pose
Learning Human Pose Estimation Features with Convolutional Networks
This paper introduces a new architecture for human pose estimation using a
multi- layer convolutional network architecture and a modified learning
technique that learns low-level features and higher-level weak spatial models.
Unconstrained human pose estimation is one of the hardest problems in computer
vision, and our new architecture and learning schema shows significant
improvement over the current state-of-the-art results. The main contribution of
this paper is showing, for the first time, that a specific variation of deep
learning is able to outperform all existing traditional architectures on this
task. The paper also discusses several lessons learned while researching
alternatives, most notably, that it is possible to learn strong low-level
feature detectors on features that might even just cover a few pixels in the
image. Higher-level spatial models improve somewhat the overall result, but to
a much lesser extent then expected. Many researchers previously argued that the
kinematic structure and top-down information is crucial for this domain, but
with our purely bottom up, and weak spatial model, we could improve other more
complicated architectures that currently produce the best results. This mirrors
what many other researchers, like those in the speech recognition, object
recognition, and other domains have experienced
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