Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Tactile reliefs offer many benefits over the more classic raised line drawings or tactile diagrams, as depth, 3D shape, and surface textures are directly perceivable. Although often created for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, a wider range of people may benefit from such multimodal material. However, some reliefs are still difficult to understand without proper guidance or accompanying verbal descriptions, hindering autonomous exploration. In this work, we present a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide (IAG) based on recent low-cost depth cameras that can be operated directly with the hands on relief surfaces during tactile exploration. The interactively explorable, location-dependent verbal and captioned descriptions promise rapid tactile accessibility to 2.5D spatial information in a home or education setting, to online resources, or as a kiosk installation at public places. We present a working prototype, discuss design decisions, and present the results of two evaluation studies: the first with 13 BVI test users and the second follow-up study with 14 test users across a wide range of people with differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition, and communication. The participant-led research method of this latter study prompted new, significant and innovative developments

On the development of a low-cost rigid borescopic fringe projection system

Examining the geometry of complex industrial free form objects, like a blade integrated disk (blisk) of a jet engine compressor, is currently subject to research. High measurement precision and speed are required and the complex geometry poses a challenge for state of the art measurement systems. In order to fulfill typical inspection requirements, the fringe projection methodology was adapted in this work to accomplish the task of fast and precise geometry examination. A low cost borescopic fringe projection system for 3D shape measurement based on consumer electronics combined with state of the art optics was developed. Nevertheless, it is able to provide measurement uncertainties comparable to professional systems. We are using a portable consumer LED-beamer, which we have modified to fit the optics of the borescope and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a 5 megapixel camera to capture the fringe patterns. With this setup and fringe projection algorithms, which have been developed by this institute over the last years, we were able to perform high quality measurements while still being suitable for a compact inspection system. Measurements with high point densities are possible even in narrow areas of parts with complex geometries like blisks. The measuring system and first measurement results will be presented at the conference. © 2015 SPIE.DFG/SFB/87

Kinect Range Sensing: Structured-Light versus Time-of-Flight Kinect

Recently, the new Kinect One has been issued by Microsoft, providing the next generation of real-time range sensing devices based on the Time-of-Flight (ToF) principle. As the first Kinect version was using a structured light approach, one would expect various differences in the characteristics of the range data delivered by both devices. This paper presents a detailed and in-depth comparison between both devices. In order to conduct the comparison, we propose a framework of seven different experimental setups, which is a generic basis for evaluating range cameras such as Kinect. The experiments have been designed with the goal to capture individual effects of the Kinect devices as isolatedly as possible and in a way, that they can also be adopted, in order to apply them to any other range sensing device. The overall goal of this paper is to provide a solid insight into the pros and cons of either device. Thus, scientists that are interested in using Kinect range sensing cameras in their specific application scenario can directly assess the expected, specific benefits and potential problem of either device.Comment: 58 pages, 23 figures. Accepted for publication in Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU

Advances in Human Robot Interaction for Cloud Robotics applications

In this thesis are analyzed different and innovative techniques for Human Robot Interaction. The focus of this thesis is on the interaction with flying robots. The first part is a preliminary description of the state of the art interactions techniques. Then the first project is Fly4SmartCity, where it is analyzed the interaction between humans (the citizen and the operator) and drones mediated by a cloud robotics platform. Then there is an application of the sliding autonomy paradigm and the analysis of different degrees of autonomy supported by a cloud robotics platform. The last part is dedicated to the most innovative technique for human-drone interaction in the User’s Flying Organizer project (UFO project). This project wants to develop a flying robot able to project information into the environment exploiting concepts of Spatial Augmented Realit

Application of augmented reality and robotic technology in broadcasting: A survey

As an innovation technique, Augmented Reality (AR) has been gradually deployed in the broadcast, videography and cinematography industries. Virtual graphics generated by AR are dynamic and overlap on the surface of the environment so that the original appearance can be greatly enhanced in comparison with traditional broadcasting. In addition, AR enables broadcasters to interact with augmented virtual 3D models on a broadcasting scene in order to enhance the performance of broadcasting. Recently, advanced robotic technologies have been deployed in a camera shooting system to create a robotic cameraman so that the performance of AR broadcasting could be further improved, which is highlighted in the paper

High-resolution, real-time three-dimensional shape measurement on graphics processing unit

A three-dimensional (3-D) shape measurement system that can simultaneously achieve 3-D shape acquisition, reconstruction, and display at 30 frames per second (fps) with 480,000 measurement points per frame is presented. The entire processing pipeline was realized on a graphics processing unit (GPU) without the need of substantial central processing unit (CPU) power, making it achievable on a portable device, namely a laptop computer. Furthermore, the system is extremely inexpensive compared with similar state-of-art systems, making it possible to be accessed by the general public. Specifically, advanced GPU techniques such as multipass rendering and offscreen rendering were used in conjunction with direct memory access to achieve the aforementioned performance. The developed system, implementation details, and experimental results to verify the performance of the proposed technique are presented

Robot guidance using machine vision techniques in industrial environments: A comparative review

In the factory of the future, most of the operations will be done by autonomous robots that need visual feedback to move around the working space avoiding obstacles, to work collaboratively with humans, to identify and locate the working parts, to complete the information provided by other sensors to improve their positioning accuracy, etc. Different vision techniques, such as photogrammetry, stereo vision, structured light, time of flight and laser triangulation, among others, are widely used for inspection and quality control processes in the industry and now for robot guidance. Choosing which type of vision system to use is highly dependent on the parts that need to be located or measured. Thus, in this paper a comparative review of different machine vision techniques for robot guidance is presented. This work analyzes accuracy, range and weight of the sensors, safety, processing time and environmental influences. Researchers and developers can take it as a background information for their future works