Dynamic obstacle detection of road scenes using equi-height mosaicking image

Advisor: Soon Ki Jung. Date and location of PhD thesis defense: 3 December 2013, Kyungpook National UniversityMany automobile companies and researchers have developed various safety systems to reduce fatalities by traffic accidents. In order to prevent traffic accidents by distracted driving, therefore, we present the vehicle and pedestrian detection using a novel image representation called equi-height mosaicking system. Furthermore, we additionally suggest the part-based side detection method using equi-height peripheral mosaicking image to detect approaching vehicles while driving

Instance Segmentation and Object Detection in Road Scenes using Inverse Perspective Mapping of 3D Point Clouds and 2D Images

The instance segmentation and object detection are important tasks in smart car applications. Recently, a variety of neural network-based approaches have been proposed. One of the challenges is that there are various scales of objects in a scene, and it requires the neural network to have a large receptive field to deal with the scale variations. In other words, the neural network must have deep architectures which slow down computation. In smart car applications, the accuracy of detection and segmentation of vehicle and pedestrian is hugely critical. Besides, 2D images do not have distance information but enough visual appearance. On the other hand, 3D point clouds have strong evidence of existence of objects. The fusion of 2D images and 3D point clouds can provide more information to seek out objects in a scene. This paper proposes a series of fronto-parallel virtual planes and inverse perspective mapping of an input image to the planes, to deal with scale variations. I use 3D point clouds obtained from LiDAR sensor and 2D images obtained from stereo cameras on top of a vehicle to estimate the ground area of the scene and to define virtual planes. Certain height from the ground area in 2D images is cropped to focus on objects on flat roads. Then, the point cloud is used to filter out false-alarms among the over-detection results generated by an off-the-shelf deep neural network, Mask RCNN. The experimental result showed that the proposed approach outperforms Mask RCNN without pre-processing on a benchmark dataset, KITTI dataset [9]

Gaze-Based Human-Robot Interaction by the Brunswick Model

We present a new paradigm for human-robot interaction based on social signal processing, and in particular on the Brunswick model. Originally, the Brunswick model copes with face-to-face dyadic interaction, assuming that the interactants are communicating through a continuous exchange of non verbal social signals, in addition to the spoken messages. Social signals have to be interpreted, thanks to a proper recognition phase that considers visual and audio information. The Brunswick model allows to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the interaction using statistical tools which measure how effective is the recognition phase. In this paper we cast this theory when one of the interactants is a robot; in this case, the recognition phase performed by the robot and the human have to be revised w.r.t. the original model. The model is applied to Berrick, a recent open-source low-cost robotic head platform, where the gazing is the social signal to be considered

Manipulador aéreo con brazos antropomórficos de articulaciones flexibles

[Resumen] Este artículo presenta el primer robot manipulador aéreo con dos brazos antropomórficos diseñado para aplicarse en tareas de inspección y mantenimiento en entornos industriales de difícil acceso para operarios humanos. El robot consiste en una plataforma aérea multirrotor equipada con dos brazos antropomórficos ultraligeros, así como el sistema de control integrado de la plataforma y los brazos. Una de las principales características del manipulador es la flexibilidad mecánica proporcionada en todas las articulaciones, lo que aumenta la seguridad en las interacciones físicas con el entorno y la protección del propio robot. Para ello se ha introducido un compacto y simple mecanismo de transmisión por muelle entre el eje del servo y el enlace de salida. La estructura en aluminio de los brazos ha sido cuidadosamente diseñada de forma que los actuadores estén aislados frente a cargas radiales y axiales que los puedan dañar. El manipulador desarrollado ha sido validado a través de experimentos en base fija y en pruebas de vuelo en exteriores.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; DPI2014-5983-C2-1-