Computing camera viewpoints in a robot work-cell

Automatically planning a camera viewpoint for tasks such as inspection in an active robot work-cell is a difficult problem. This paper discusses new methods for computing viewpoints which meet the feature detectability constraints of focus, field-of-view, visibility, and resolution. A theoretical outline of the method is presented, followed by experimental results and a discussion of future work

Swept volumes and their use in viewpoint computation in robot work-cells

This paper discusses the automatic computation of viewpoints for monitoring objects and features in an active robot work-cell. An important step in the authors' algorithm for finding viewpoints is the computation of the volumes swept by polyhedral objects moving through space. A method for approximating these volumes for arbitrarily moving polyhedra is presented. Some swept volume results are presented and methods for integrating these results into the authors' automated machine vision planning (MVP) system are discussed

Reachability-based Trajectory Design with Neural Implicit Safety Constraints

Generating safe motion plans in real-time is a key requirement for deploying robot manipulators to assist humans in collaborative settings. In particular, robots must satisfy strict safety requirements to avoid self-damage or harming nearby humans. Satisfying these requirements is particularly challenging if the robot must also operate in real-time to adjust to changes in its environment.This paper addresses these challenges by proposing Reachability-based Signed Distance Functions (RDFs) as a neural implicit representation for robot safety. RDF, which can be constructed using supervised learning in a tractable fashion, accurately predicts the distance between the swept volume of a robot arm and an obstacle. RDF's inference and gradient computations are fast and scale linearly with the dimension of the system; these features enable its use within a novel real-time trajectory planning framework as a continuous-time collision-avoidance constraint. The planning method using RDF is compared to a variety of state-of-the-art techniques and is demonstrated to successfully solve challenging motion planning tasks for high-dimensional systems faster and more reliably than all tested methods

Image morphological processing

Mathematical Morphology with applications in image processing and analysis has been becoming increasingly important in today\u27s technology. Mathematical Morphological operations, which are based on set theory, can extract object features by suitably shaped structuring elements. Mathematical Morphological filters are combinations of morphological operations that transform an image into a quantitative description of its geometrical structure based on structuring elements. Important applications of morphological operations are shape description, shape recognition, nonlinear filtering, industrial parts inspection, and medical image processing. In this dissertation, basic morphological operations, properties and fuzzy morphology are reviewed. Existing techniques for solving corner and edge detection are presented. A new approach to solve corner detection using regulated mathematical morphology is presented and is shown that it is more efficient in binary images than the existing mathematical morphology based asymmetric closing for corner detection. A new class of morphological operations called sweep mathematical morphological operations is developed. The theoretical framework for representation, computation and analysis of sweep morphology is presented. The basic sweep morphological operations, sweep dilation and sweep erosion, are defined and their properties are studied. It is shown that considering only the boundaries and performing operations on the boundaries can substantially reduce the computation. Various applications of this new class of morphological operations are discussed, including the blending of swept surfaces with deformations, image enhancement, edge linking and shortest path planning for rotating objects. Sweep mathematical morphology is an efficient tool for geometric modeling and representation. The sweep dilation/erosion provides a natural representation of sweep motion in the manufacturing processes. A set of grammatical rules that govern the generation of objects belonging to the same group are defined. Earley\u27s parser serves in the screening process to determine whether a pattern is a part of the language. Finally, summary and future research of this dissertation are provided

Virtual reality based creation of concept model designs for CAD systems

This work introduces a novel method to overcome most of the drawbacks in traditional methods for creating design models. The main innovation is the use of virtual tools to simulate the natural physical environment in which freeform. Design models are created by experienced designers. Namely, the model is created in a virtual environment by carving a work piece with tools that simulate NC milling cutters. Algorithms have been developed to support the approach, in which the design model is created in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment and selection and manipulation of tools can be performed in the virtual space. The desianer\u27s hand movements generate the tool trajectories and they are obtained by recording the position and orientation of a hand mounted motion tracker. Swept volumes of virtual tools are generated from the geometry of the tool and its trajectories. Then Boolean operations are performed on the swept volumes and the initial virtual stock (work piece) to create the design model. Algorithms have been developed as a part of this work to integrate the VR environment with a commercial CAD/CAM system in order to demonstrate the practical applications of the research results. The integrated system provides a much more efficient and easy-to-implement process of freeform model creation than employed in current CAD/CAM software. It could prove to be the prototype for the next-generation CAD/CAM system

Reservoir characterization using experimental design and response surface methodology

This research combines a statistical tool called experimental design/response surface methodology with reservoir modeling and flow simulation for the purpose of reservoir characterization. Very often, it requires large number of reservoir simulation runs for identifying significant reservoir modeling parameters impacting flow response and for history matching. Experimental design/response surface (ED/RS) is a statistical technique, which allows a systematic approach for minimizing the number of simulation runs to meet the two objectives mentioned above. This methodology may be applied to synthetic and field cases using existing statistical software tools. The application of ED/RS methodology for the purpose of reservoir characterization has been applied for two different objectives. The first objective is to address the uncertainties in the identification of the location and transmissibility of flow barriers in a field in the Gulf of Mexico. This objective is achieved by setting up a simple full-factorial design. The range of transmissibility of the barriers is selected using a Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) gives the significance of the location and transmissibility of barriers and comparison with decline-type curve analysis which gives us the most likely scenarios of the location and transmissibility of the flow barriers. The second objective is to identify significant geologic parameters in object-based and pixel-based reservoir models. This study is applied on a synthetic fluvial reservoir, whose characteristic feature is the presence of sinuous sand filled channels within a background of floodplain shale. This particular study reveals the impact of uncertainty in the reservoir modeling parameters on the flow performance. Box-Behnken design is used in this study to reduce the number of simulation runs along with streamline simulation for flow modeling purposes. In the first study, we find a good match between field data and that predicted from streamline simulation based on the most likely scenario. This validates the use of ED to get the most likely scenario for the location and transmissibility of flow barriers. It can be concluded from the second study that ED/RS methodology is a powerful tool along with a fast streamline simulator to screen large number of reservoir model realizations for the purpose of studying the effect of uncertainty of geologic modeling parameters on reservoir flow behavior