10,211 research outputs found
Probabilistic Human Mobility Model in Indoor Environment
Understanding human mobility is important for the development of intelligent
mobile service robots as it can provide prior knowledge and predictions of
human distribution for robot-assisted activities. In this paper, we propose a
probabilistic method to model human motion behaviors which is determined by
both internal and external factors in an indoor environment. While the internal
factors are represented by the individual preferences, aims and interests, the
external factors are indicated by the stimulation of the environment. We model
the randomness of human macro-level movement, e.g., the probability of visiting
a specific place and staying time, under the Bayesian framework, considering
the influence of both internal and external variables. We use two case studies
in a shopping mall and in a college student dorm building to show the
effectiveness of our proposed probabilistic human mobility model. Real
surveillance camera data are used to validate the proposed model together with
survey data in the case study of student dorm.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
(IJCNN) 201
Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots
J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012
Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical
ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range
sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely
been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as
with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities
and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other
sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status
on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial
estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within
a known environment
Closed-loop Bayesian Semantic Data Fusion for Collaborative Human-Autonomy Target Search
In search applications, autonomous unmanned vehicles must be able to
efficiently reacquire and localize mobile targets that can remain out of view
for long periods of time in large spaces. As such, all available information
sources must be actively leveraged -- including imprecise but readily available
semantic observations provided by humans. To achieve this, this work develops
and validates a novel collaborative human-machine sensing solution for dynamic
target search. Our approach uses continuous partially observable Markov
decision process (CPOMDP) planning to generate vehicle trajectories that
optimally exploit imperfect detection data from onboard sensors, as well as
semantic natural language observations that can be specifically requested from
human sensors. The key innovation is a scalable hierarchical Gaussian mixture
model formulation for efficiently solving CPOMDPs with semantic observations in
continuous dynamic state spaces. The approach is demonstrated and validated
with a real human-robot team engaged in dynamic indoor target search and
capture scenarios on a custom testbed.Comment: Final version accepted and submitted to 2018 FUSION Conference
(Cambridge, UK, July 2018
Knowledge Representation for Robots through Human-Robot Interaction
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex
tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of
overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on
the interaction with the user. We propose a multi-modal interaction framework
that allows to effectively acquire knowledge about the environment where the
robot operates. In particular, in this paper we present a rich representation
framework that can be automatically built from the metric map annotated with
the indications provided by the user. Such a representation, allows then the
robot to ground complex referential expressions for motion commands and to
devise topological navigation plans to achieve the target locations.Comment: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics Workshop at ICLP
201
Socially Compliant Navigation through Raw Depth Inputs with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
We present an approach for mobile robots to learn to navigate in dynamic
environments with pedestrians via raw depth inputs, in a socially compliant
manner. To achieve this, we adopt a generative adversarial imitation learning
(GAIL) strategy, which improves upon a pre-trained behavior cloning policy. Our
approach overcomes the disadvantages of previous methods, as they heavily
depend on the full knowledge of the location and velocity information of nearby
pedestrians, which not only requires specific sensors, but also the extraction
of such state information from raw sensory input could consume much computation
time. In this paper, our proposed GAIL-based model performs directly on raw
depth inputs and plans in real-time. Experiments show that our GAIL-based
approach greatly improves the safety and efficiency of the behavior of mobile
robots from pure behavior cloning. The real-world deployment also shows that
our method is capable of guiding autonomous vehicles to navigate in a socially
compliant manner directly through raw depth inputs. In addition, we release a
simulation plugin for modeling pedestrian behaviors based on the social force
model.Comment: ICRA 2018 camera-ready version. 7 pages, video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hw0GD3lkA
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
Wavefront Propagation and Fuzzy Based Autonomous Navigation
Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the two major issues in any
navigation system. Wavefront propagation algorithm, as a good path planner, can
be used to determine an optimal path. Obstacle avoidance can be achieved using
possibility theory. Combining these two functions enable a robot to
autonomously navigate to its destination. This paper presents the approach and
results in implementing an autonomous navigation system for an indoor mobile
robot. The system developed is based on a laser sensor used to retrieve data to
update a two dimensional world model of therobot environment. Waypoints in the
path are incorporated into the obstacle avoidance. Features such as ageing of
objects and smooth motion planning are implemented to enhance efficiency and
also to cater for dynamic environments
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