Image-based supervision of a periodically working machine

Most industrial robots perform a periodically repeating choreography. Our aim is to detect disturbances of such a periodic process by a visual inspection system that can be trained with a minimum of human effort and interaction. We present a solution that monitors the robot with a time-of-flight 3D camera. Our system can be trained using a few unperturbed cycles of the periodic process. More specifically, principal components are used to find a low-dimensional approximation of each frame, and a One-Class Support Vector Machine is used for one-class learning. We propose a novel scheme for automatic parameter tuning, which exploits the fact that successive images of the training class should be close in feature space. We present exemplary results for a miniature robot setup. The proposed strategy does not require prior information on the dimensions of the machine or its maneuvering range. The entire system is appearance-based and hence does not need access to the robot's internal coordinate

Goal accomplishment tracking for automatic supervision of plan execution

It is common practice to break down plans into a series of goals or sub-goals in order to facilitate plan execution, thereby only burdening the individual agents responsible for their execution with small, easily achievable objectives at any one time, or providing a simple way of sharing these objectives amongst a group of these agents. Ensuring that plans are executed correctly is an essential part of any team management. To allow proper tracking of an agent's progress through a pre-planned set of goals, it is imperative to keep track of which of these goals have already been accomplished. This centralised approach is essential when the agent is part of a team of humans and/or robots, and goal accomplishment is not always being tracked at a low level. This paper presents a framework for an automated supervision system to keep track of changes in world states so as to chart progress through a pre-planned set of goals. An implementation of this framework on a mobile service robot is presented, and applied in an experiment which demonstrates its feasibility

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie