Optimal Camera Placement to measure Distances Conservativly Regarding Static and Dynamic Obstacles

In modern production facilities industrial robots and humans are supposed to interact sharing a common working area. In order to avoid collisions, the distances between objects need to be measured conservatively which can be done by a camera network. To estimate the acquired distance, unmodelled objects, e.g., an interacting human, need to be modelled and distinguished from premodelled objects like workbenches or robots by image processing such as the background subtraction method. The quality of such an approach massively depends on the settings of the camera network, that is the positions and orientations of the individual cameras. Of particular interest in this context is the minimization of the error of the distance using the objects modelled by the background subtraction method instead of the real objects. Here, we show how this minimization can be formulated as an abstract optimization problem. Moreover, we state various aspects on the implementation as well as reasons for the selection of a suitable optimization method, analyze the complexity of the proposed method and present a basic version used for extensive experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

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