Towards a cloud‑based automated surveillance system using wireless technologies

Cloud Computing can bring multiple benefits for Smart Cities. It permits the easy creation of centralized knowledge bases, thus straightforwardly enabling that multiple embedded systems (such as sensor or control devices) can have a collaborative, shared intelligence. In addition to this, thanks to its vast computing power, complex tasks can be done over low-spec devices just by offloading computation to the cloud, with the additional advantage of saving energy. In this work, cloud’s capabilities are exploited to implement and test a cloud-based surveillance system. Using a shared, 3D symbolic world model, different devices have a complete knowledge of all the elements, people and intruders in a certain open area or inside a building. The implementation of a volumetric, 3D, object-oriented, cloud-based world model (including semantic information) is novel as far as we know. Very simple devices (orange Pi) can send RGBD streams (using kinect cameras) to the cloud, where all the processing is distributed and done thanks to its inherent scalability. A proof-of-concept experiment is done in this paper in a testing lab with multiple cameras connected to the cloud with 802.11ac wireless technology. Our results show that this kind of surveillance system is possible currently, and that trends indicate that it can be improved at a short term to produce high performance vigilance system using low-speed devices. In addition, this proof-of-concept claims that many interesting opportunities and challenges arise, for example, when mobile watch robots and fixed cameras would act as a team for carrying out complex collaborative surveillance strategies.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-PJunta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

Automated sequence and motion planning for robotic spatial extrusion of 3D trusses

While robotic spatial extrusion has demonstrated a new and efficient means to fabricate 3D truss structures in architectural scale, a major challenge remains in automatically planning extrusion sequence and robotic motion for trusses with unconstrained topologies. This paper presents the first attempt in the field to rigorously formulate the extrusion sequence and motion planning (SAMP) problem, using a CSP encoding. Furthermore, this research proposes a new hierarchical planning framework to solve the extrusion SAMP problems that usually have a long planning horizon and 3D configuration complexity. By decoupling sequence and motion planning, the planning framework is able to efficiently solve the extrusion sequence, end-effector poses, joint configurations, and transition trajectories for spatial trusses with nonstandard topologies. This paper also presents the first detailed computation data to reveal the runtime bottleneck on solving SAMP problems, which provides insight and comparing baseline for future algorithmic development. Together with the algorithmic results, this paper also presents an open-source and modularized software implementation called Choreo that is machine-agnostic. To demonstrate the power of this algorithmic framework, three case studies, including real fabrication and simulation results, are presented.Comment: 24 pages, 16 figure

Image based visual servoing using algebraic curves applied to shape alignment

Visual servoing schemes generally employ various image features (points, lines, moments etc.) in their control formulation. This paper presents a novel method for using boundary information in visual servoing. Object boundaries are modeled by algebraic equations and decomposed as a unique sum of product of lines. We propose that these lines can be used to extract useful features for visual servoing purposes. In this paper, intersection of these lines are used as point features in visual servoing. Simulations are performed with a 6 DOF Puma 560 robot using Matlab Robotics Toolbox for the alignment of a free-form object. Also, experiments are realized with a 2 DOF SCARA direct drive robot. Both simulation and experimental results are quite promising and show potential of our new method

Interval Analysis and Reliability in Robotics

A robot is typical of systems that are inherently submitted to uncertainties although they should be highly reliable (i.e. for a robot used in surgical applications). The sources of uncertainties are the manufacturing tolerances of the mechanical parts constituting the robot which make the real robot always different from its theoretical model and control errors. We exhibit properties of a robot that are sensitive to the uncertainties and we present methods, using mainly interval analysis, that allow one to manage these uncertainties to ensure the reliability of the robot