11,763 research outputs found
A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter
Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings
RUR53: an Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Navigation, Recognition and Manipulation
This paper proposes RUR53: an Unmanned Ground Vehicle able to autonomously
navigate through, identify, and reach areas of interest; and there recognize,
localize, and manipulate work tools to perform complex manipulation tasks. The
proposed contribution includes a modular software architecture where each
module solves specific sub-tasks and that can be easily enlarged to satisfy new
requirements. Included indoor and outdoor tests demonstrate the capability of
the proposed system to autonomously detect a target object (a panel) and
precisely dock in front of it while avoiding obstacles. They show it can
autonomously recognize and manipulate target work tools (i.e., wrenches and
valve stems) to accomplish complex tasks (i.e., use a wrench to rotate a valve
stem). A specific case study is described where the proposed modular
architecture lets easy switch to a semi-teleoperated mode. The paper
exhaustively describes description of both the hardware and software setup of
RUR53, its performance when tests at the 2017 Mohamed Bin Zayed International
Robotics Challenge, and the lessons we learned when participating at this
competition, where we ranked third in the Gran Challenge in collaboration with
the Czech Technical University in Prague, the University of Pennsylvania, and
the University of Lincoln (UK).Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in Advanced Robotics,
published by Taylor & Franci
SkiMap: An Efficient Mapping Framework for Robot Navigation
We present a novel mapping framework for robot navigation which features a
multi-level querying system capable to obtain rapidly representations as
diverse as a 3D voxel grid, a 2.5D height map and a 2D occupancy grid. These
are inherently embedded into a memory and time efficient core data structure
organized as a Tree of SkipLists. Compared to the well-known Octree
representation, our approach exhibits a better time efficiency, thanks to its
simple and highly parallelizable computational structure, and a similar memory
footprint when mapping large workspaces. Peculiarly within the realm of mapping
for robot navigation, our framework supports realtime erosion and
re-integration of measurements upon reception of optimized poses from the
sensor tracker, so as to improve continuously the accuracy of the map.Comment: Accepted by International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 2017. This is the submitted version. The final published version may
be slightly differen
Learning to Prevent Monocular SLAM Failure using Reinforcement Learning
Monocular SLAM refers to using a single camera to estimate robot ego motion
while building a map of the environment. While Monocular SLAM is a well studied
problem, automating Monocular SLAM by integrating it with trajectory planning
frameworks is particularly challenging. This paper presents a novel formulation
based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) that generates fail safe trajectories
wherein the SLAM generated outputs do not deviate largely from their true
values. Quintessentially, the RL framework successfully learns the otherwise
complex relation between perceptual inputs and motor actions and uses this
knowledge to generate trajectories that do not cause failure of SLAM. We show
systematically in simulations how the quality of the SLAM dramatically improves
when trajectories are computed using RL. Our method scales effectively across
Monocular SLAM frameworks in both simulation and in real world experiments with
a mobile robot.Comment: Accepted at the 11th Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics
and Image Processing (ICVGIP) 2018 More info can be found at the project page
at https://robotics.iiit.ac.in/people/vignesh.prasad/SLAMSafePlanner.html and
the supplementary video can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=420QmM_Z8v
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Neural Networks in Mobile Robot Motion
This paper deals with a path planning and intelligent control of an
autonomous robot which should move safely in partially structured environment.
This environment may involve any number of obstacles of arbitrary shape and
size; some of them are allowed to move. We describe our approach to solving the
motion-planning problem in mobile robot control using neural networks-based
technique. Our method of the construction of a collision-free path for moving
robot among obstacles is based on two neural networks. The first neural network
is used to determine the "free" space using ultrasound range finder data. The
second neural network "finds" a safe direction for the next robot section of
the path in the workspace while avoiding the nearest obstacles. Simulation
examples of generated path with proposed techniques will be presented.Comment: 9 Page
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