17,353 research outputs found
Meso-scale FDM material layout design strategies under manufacturability constraints and fracture conditions
In the manufacturability-driven design (MDD) perspective, manufacturability of the product or system is the most important of the design requirements. In addition to being able to ensure that complex designs (e.g., topology optimization) are manufacturable with a given process or process family, MDD also helps mechanical designers to take advantage of unique process-material effects generated during manufacturing. One of the most recognizable examples of this comes from the scanning-type family of additive manufacturing (AM) processes; the most notable and familiar member of this family is the fused deposition modeling (FDM) or fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. This process works by selectively depositing uniform, approximately isotropic beads or elements of molten thermoplastic material (typically structural engineering plastics) in a series of pre-specified traces to build each layer of the part. There are many interesting 2-D and 3-D mechanical design problems that can be explored by designing the layout of these elements. The resulting structured, hierarchical material (which is both manufacturable and customized layer-by-layer within the limits of the process and material) can be defined as a manufacturing process-driven structured material (MPDSM). This dissertation explores several practical methods for designing these element layouts for 2-D and 3-D meso-scale mechanical problems, focusing ultimately on design-for-fracture. Three different fracture conditions are explored: (1) cases where a crack must be prevented or stopped, (2) cases where the crack must be encouraged or accelerated, and (3) cases where cracks must grow in a simple pre-determined pattern. Several new design tools, including a mapping method for the FDM manufacturability constraints, three major literature reviews, the collection, organization, and analysis of several large (qualitative and quantitative) multi-scale datasets on the fracture behavior of FDM-processed materials, some new experimental equipment, and the refinement of a fast and simple g-code generator based on commercially-available software, were developed and refined to support the design of MPDSMs under fracture conditions. The refined design method and rules were experimentally validated using a series of case studies (involving both design and physical testing of the designs) at the end of the dissertation. Finally, a simple design guide for practicing engineers who are not experts in advanced solid mechanics nor process-tailored materials was developed from the results of this project.U of I OnlyAuthor's request
Automatic Interaction and Activity Recognition from Videos of Human Manual Demonstrations with Application to Anomaly Detection
This paper presents a new method to describe spatio-temporal relations
between objects and hands, to recognize both interactions and activities within
video demonstrations of manual tasks. The approach exploits Scene Graphs to
extract key interaction features from image sequences, encoding at the same
time motion patterns and context. Additionally, the method introduces an
event-based automatic video segmentation and clustering, which allows to group
similar events, detecting also on the fly if a monitored activity is executed
correctly. The effectiveness of the approach was demonstrated in two
multi-subject experiments, showing the ability to recognize and cluster
hand-object and object-object interactions without prior knowledge of the
activity, as well as matching the same activity performed by different
subjects.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE RAS International Symposium on
Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), for associated video see
https://youtu.be/Ftu_EHAtH4
Towards Autonomous Selective Harvesting: A Review of Robot Perception, Robot Design, Motion Planning and Control
This paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in selective
harvesting robots (SHRs) and their potential for addressing the challenges of
global food production. SHRs have the potential to increase productivity,
reduce labour costs, and minimise food waste by selectively harvesting only
ripe fruits and vegetables. The paper discusses the main components of SHRs,
including perception, grasping, cutting, motion planning, and control. It also
highlights the challenges in developing SHR technologies, particularly in the
areas of robot design, motion planning and control. The paper also discusses
the potential benefits of integrating AI and soft robots and data-driven
methods to enhance the performance and robustness of SHR systems. Finally, the
paper identifies several open research questions in the field and highlights
the need for further research and development efforts to advance SHR
technologies to meet the challenges of global food production. Overall, this
paper provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in
developing SHRs and highlights the need for more research in this field.Comment: Preprint: to be appeared in Journal of Field Robotic
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
Human Semantic Segmentation using Millimeter-Wave Radar Sparse Point Clouds
This paper presents a framework for semantic segmentation on sparse
sequential point clouds of millimeter-wave radar. Compared with cameras and
lidars, millimeter-wave radars have the advantage of not revealing privacy,
having a strong anti-interference ability, and having long detection distance.
The sparsity and capturing temporal-topological features of mmWave data is
still a problem. However, the issue of capturing the temporal-topological
coupling features under the human semantic segmentation task prevents previous
advanced segmentation methods (e.g PointNet, PointCNN, Point Transformer) from
being well utilized in practical scenarios. To address the challenge caused by
the sparsity and temporal-topological feature of the data, we (i) introduce
graph structure and topological features to the point cloud, (ii) propose a
semantic segmentation framework including a global feature-extracting module
and a sequential feature-extracting module. In addition, we design an efficient
and more fitting loss function for a better training process and segmentation
results based on graph clustering. Experimentally, we deploy representative
semantic segmentation algorithms (Transformer, GCNN, etc.) on a custom dataset.
Experimental results indicate that our model achieves mean accuracy on the
custom dataset by and outperforms the state-of-the-art
algorithms. Moreover, to validate the model's robustness, we deploy our model
on the well-known S3DIS dataset. On the S3DIS dataset, our model achieves mean
accuracy by , outperforming baseline algorithms
Neural Architecture Search: Insights from 1000 Papers
In the past decade, advances in deep learning have resulted in breakthroughs
in a variety of areas, including computer vision, natural language
understanding, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. Specialized,
high-performing neural architectures are crucial to the success of deep
learning in these areas. Neural architecture search (NAS), the process of
automating the design of neural architectures for a given task, is an
inevitable next step in automating machine learning and has already outpaced
the best human-designed architectures on many tasks. In the past few years,
research in NAS has been progressing rapidly, with over 1000 papers released
since 2020 (Deng and Lindauer, 2021). In this survey, we provide an organized
and comprehensive guide to neural architecture search. We give a taxonomy of
search spaces, algorithms, and speedup techniques, and we discuss resources
such as benchmarks, best practices, other surveys, and open-source libraries
Loop Closure Detection Based on Object-level Spatial Layout and Semantic Consistency
Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems face challenges
in detecting loop closure under the circumstance of large viewpoint changes. In
this paper, we present an object-based loop closure detection method based on
the spatial layout and semanic consistency of the 3D scene graph. Firstly, we
propose an object-level data association approach based on the semantic
information from semantic labels, intersection over union (IoU), object color,
and object embedding. Subsequently, multi-view bundle adjustment with the
associated objects is utilized to jointly optimize the poses of objects and
cameras. We represent the refined objects as a 3D spatial graph with semantics
and topology. Then, we propose a graph matching approach to select
correspondence objects based on the structure layout and semantic property
similarity of vertices' neighbors. Finally, we jointly optimize camera
trajectories and object poses in an object-level pose graph optimization, which
results in a globally consistent map. Experimental results demonstrate that our
proposed data association approach can construct more accurate 3D semantic
maps, and our loop closure method is more robust than point-based and
object-based methods in circumstances with large viewpoint changes
Self-Ordering Point Clouds
In this paper we address the task of finding representative subsets of points
in a 3D point cloud by means of a point-wise ordering. Only a few works have
tried to address this challenging vision problem, all with the help of hard to
obtain point and cloud labels. Different from these works, we introduce the
task of point-wise ordering in 3D point clouds through self-supervision, which
we call self-ordering. We further contribute the first end-to-end trainable
network that learns a point-wise ordering in a self-supervised fashion. It
utilizes a novel differentiable point scoring-sorting strategy and it
constructs an hierarchical contrastive scheme to obtain self-supervision
signals. We extensively ablate the method and show its scalability and superior
performance even compared to supervised ordering methods on multiple datasets
and tasks including zero-shot ordering of point clouds from unseen categories
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