4,246 research outputs found
The flight telerobotic servicer and technology transfer
The Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS) project at the Goddard Space Flight Center is developing an advanced telerobotic system to assist in and reduce crew extravehicular activity (EVA) for Space Station Freedom (SSF). The FTS will provide a telerobotic capability in the early phases of the SSF program and will be employed for assembly, maintenance, and inspection applications. The current state of space technology and the general nature of the FTS tasks dictate that the FTS be designed with sophisticated teleoperational capabilities for its internal primary operating mode. However, technologies such as advanced computer vision and autonomous planning techniques would greatly enhance the FTS capabilities to perform autonomously in less structured work environments. Another objective of the FTS program is to accelerate technology transfer from research to U.S. industry
A surgical system for automatic registration, stiffness mapping and dynamic image overlay
In this paper we develop a surgical system using the da Vinci research kit
(dVRK) that is capable of autonomously searching for tumors and dynamically
displaying the tumor location using augmented reality. Such a system has the
potential to quickly reveal the location and shape of tumors and visually
overlay that information to reduce the cognitive overload of the surgeon. We
believe that our approach is one of the first to incorporate state-of-the-art
methods in registration, force sensing and tumor localization into a unified
surgical system. First, the preoperative model is registered to the
intra-operative scene using a Bingham distribution-based filtering approach. An
active level set estimation is then used to find the location and the shape of
the tumors. We use a recently developed miniature force sensor to perform the
palpation. The estimated stiffness map is then dynamically overlaid onto the
registered preoperative model of the organ. We demonstrate the efficacy of our
system by performing experiments on phantom prostate models with embedded stiff
inclusions.Comment: International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR 2018
Space Applications of Automation, Robotics and Machine Intelligence Systems (ARAMIS), phase 2. Volume 1: Telepresence technology base development
The field of telepresence is defined, and overviews of those capabilities that are now available, and those that will be required to support a NASA telepresence effort are provided. Investigation of NASA's plans and goals with regard to telepresence, extensive literature search for materials relating to relevant technologies, a description of these technologies and their state of the art, and projections for advances in these technologies over the next decade are included. Several space projects are examined in detail to determine what capabilities are required of a telepresence system in order to accomplish various tasks, such as servicing and assembly. The key operational and technological areas are identified, conclusions and recommendations are made for further research, and an example developmental program is presented, leading to an operational telepresence servicer
Vision-Based Road Detection in Automotive Systems: A Real-Time Expectation-Driven Approach
The main aim of this work is the development of a vision-based road detection
system fast enough to cope with the difficult real-time constraints imposed by
moving vehicle applications. The hardware platform, a special-purpose massively
parallel system, has been chosen to minimize system production and operational
costs. This paper presents a novel approach to expectation-driven low-level
image segmentation, which can be mapped naturally onto mesh-connected massively
parallel SIMD architectures capable of handling hierarchical data structures.
The input image is assumed to contain a distorted version of a given template;
a multiresolution stretching process is used to reshape the original template
in accordance with the acquired image content, minimizing a potential function.
The distorted template is the process output.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
The Use of Agricultural Robots in Orchard Management
Book chapter that summarizes recent research on agricultural robotics in
orchard management, including Robotic pruning, Robotic thinning, Robotic
spraying, Robotic harvesting, Robotic fruit transportation, and future trends.Comment: 22 page
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
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