22,042 research outputs found
Indoor localization of a mobile robot using sensor fusion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Mechatronics with Honours at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Reliable indoor navigation of mobile robots has been a popular research topic in recent years. GPS systems used for outdoor mobile robot navigation can not be used indoor (warehouse, hospital or other buildings) because it requires an unobstructed view of the sky. Therefore a specially designed indoor localization system for mobile robot is needed. This project aims to develop a reliable position and heading angle estimator for real time indoor localization of mobile robots. Two different techniques have been developed and each consisted of three different sensor modules based on infrared sensing, calibrated odometry and calibrated gyroscope. Integration of these three sensor modules is achieved by applying the real time Kalman filter which provides filtered and reliable information of a mobile robot's current location and orientation relative to its environment. Extensive experimental results are provided to demonstrate its improvement over conventional methods like dead reckoning. In addition, a control strategy is developed to control the mobile robot to move along the planned trajectory. The techniques developed in this project have potentials for the application for mobile robots in medical service, health care, surveillances, search and rescue in indoor environments
A Framework for Interactive Teaching of Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots
The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging
coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and
support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of
robots in their environment as long as they keep the control over them. One
important aspect is the control of a robot's workspace. Therefore, we introduce
virtual borders to precisely and flexibly define the workspace of mobile
robots. First, we propose a novel framework that allows a person to
interactively restrict a mobile robot's workspace. To show the validity of this
framework, a concrete implementation based on visual markers is implemented.
Afterwards, the mobile robot is capable of performing its tasks while
respecting the new virtual borders. The approach is accurate, flexible and less
time consuming than explicit robot programming. Hence, even non-experts are
able to teach virtual borders to their robots which is especially interesting
in domains like vacuuming or service robots in home environments.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Tahap penguasaan, sikap dan minat pelajar Kolej Kemahiran Tinggi MARA terhadap mata pelajaran Bahasa Inggeris
Kajian ini dilakukan untuk mengenal pasti tahap penguasaan, sikap dan minat pelajar
Kolej Kemahiran Tinggi Mara Sri Gading terhadap Bahasa Inggeris. Kajian yang
dijalankan ini berbentuk deskriptif atau lebih dikenali sebagai kaedah tinjauan. Seramai
325 orang pelajar Diploma in Construction Technology dari Kolej Kemahiran Tinggi
Mara di daerah Batu Pahat telah dipilih sebagai sampel dalam kajian ini. Data yang
diperoleh melalui instrument soal selidik telah dianalisis untuk mendapatkan
pengukuran min, sisihan piawai, dan Pekali Korelasi Pearson untuk melihat hubungan
hasil dapatan data. Manakala, frekuensi dan peratusan digunakan bagi mengukur
penguasaan pelajar. Hasil dapatan kajian menunjukkan bahawa tahap penguasaan
Bahasa Inggeris pelajar adalah berada pada tahap sederhana manakala faktor utama yang
mempengaruhi penguasaan Bahasa Inggeris tersebut adalah minat diikuti oleh sikap.
Hasil dapatan menggunakan pekali Korelasi Pearson juga menunjukkan bahawa terdapat
hubungan yang signifikan antara sikap dengan penguasaan Bahasa Inggeris dan antara
minat dengan penguasaan Bahasa Inggeris. Kajian menunjukkan bahawa semakin positif
sikap dan minat pelajar terhadap pengajaran dan pembelajaran Bahasa Inggeris semakin
tinggi pencapaian mereka. Hasil daripada kajian ini diharapkan dapat membantu pelajar
dalam meningkatkan penguasaan Bahasa Inggeris dengan memupuk sikap positif dalam
diri serta meningkatkan minat mereka terhadap Bahasa Inggeris dengan lebih baik. Oleh
itu, diharap kajian ini dapat memberi panduan kepada pihak-pihak yang terlibat dalam
membuat kajian yang akan datang
Symbiotic Navigation in Multi-Robot Systems with Remote Obstacle Knowledge Sharing
Large scale operational areas often require multiple service robots for coverage and task parallelism. In such scenarios, each robot keeps its individual map of the environment and serves specific areas of the map at different times. We propose a knowledge sharing mechanism for multiple robots in which one robot can inform other robots about the changes in map, like path blockage, or new static obstacles, encountered at specific areas of the map. This symbiotic information sharing allows the robots to update remote areas of the map without having to explicitly navigate those areas, and plan efficient paths. A node representation of paths is presented for seamless sharing of blocked path information. The transience of obstacles is modeled to track obstacles which might have been removed. A lazy information update scheme is presented in which only relevant information affecting the current task is updated for efficiency. The advantages of the proposed method for path planning are discussed against traditional method with experimental results in both simulation and real environments
A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter
Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings
Fault-tolerant formation driving mechanism designed for heterogeneous MAVs-UGVs groups
A fault-tolerant method for stabilization and navigation of 3D heterogeneous formations is proposed in this paper. The presented Model Predictive Control (MPC) based approach enables to deploy compact formations of closely cooperating autonomous aerial and ground robots in surveillance scenarios without the necessity of a precise external localization. Instead, the proposed method relies on a top-view visual relative localization provided by the micro aerial vehicles flying above the ground robots and on a simple yet stable visual based navigation using images from an onboard monocular camera. The MPC based schema together with a fault detection and recovery mechanism provide a robust solution applicable in complex environments with static and dynamic obstacles. The core of the proposed leader-follower based formation driving method consists in a representation of the entire 3D formation as a convex hull projected along a desired path that has to be followed by the group. Such an approach provides non-collision solution and respects requirements of the direct visibility between the team members. The uninterrupted visibility is crucial for the employed top-view localization and therefore for the stabilization of the group. The proposed formation driving method and the fault recovery mechanisms are verified by simulations and hardware experiments presented in the paper
Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation
This article describes a simple monocular navigation system for a mobile robot based on the map-and-replay technique. The presented method is robust and easy to implement and does not require sensor calibration or structured environment, and its computational complexity is independent of the environment size. The method can navigate a robot while sensing only one landmark at a time, making it more robust than other monocular approaches. The aforementioned properties of the method allow even low-cost robots to effectively act in large outdoor and indoor environments with natural landmarks only. The basic idea is to utilize a monocular vision to correct only the robot's heading, leaving distance measurements to the odometry. The heading correction itself can suppress the odometric error and prevent the overall position error from diverging. The influence of a map-based heading estimation and odometric errors on the overall position uncertainty is examined. A claim is stated that for closed polygonal trajectories, the position error of this type of navigation does not diverge. The claim is defended mathematically and experimentally. The method has been experimentally tested in a set of indoor and outdoor experiments, during which the average position errors have been lower than 0.3 m for paths more than 1 km long
Wavefront Propagation and Fuzzy Based Autonomous Navigation
Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the two major issues in any
navigation system. Wavefront propagation algorithm, as a good path planner, can
be used to determine an optimal path. Obstacle avoidance can be achieved using
possibility theory. Combining these two functions enable a robot to
autonomously navigate to its destination. This paper presents the approach and
results in implementing an autonomous navigation system for an indoor mobile
robot. The system developed is based on a laser sensor used to retrieve data to
update a two dimensional world model of therobot environment. Waypoints in the
path are incorporated into the obstacle avoidance. Features such as ageing of
objects and smooth motion planning are implemented to enhance efficiency and
also to cater for dynamic environments
Learning Deployable Navigation Policies at Kilometer Scale from a Single Traversal
Model-free reinforcement learning has recently been shown to be effective at
learning navigation policies from complex image input. However, these
algorithms tend to require large amounts of interaction with the environment,
which can be prohibitively costly to obtain on robots in the real world. We
present an approach for efficiently learning goal-directed navigation policies
on a mobile robot, from only a single coverage traversal of recorded data. The
navigation agent learns an effective policy over a diverse action space in a
large heterogeneous environment consisting of more than 2km of travel, through
buildings and outdoor regions that collectively exhibit large variations in
visual appearance, self-similarity, and connectivity. We compare pretrained
visual encoders that enable precomputation of visual embeddings to achieve a
throughput of tens of thousands of transitions per second at training time on a
commodity desktop computer, allowing agents to learn from millions of
trajectories of experience in a matter of hours. We propose multiple forms of
computationally efficient stochastic augmentation to enable the learned policy
to generalise beyond these precomputed embeddings, and demonstrate successful
deployment of the learned policy on the real robot without fine tuning, despite
environmental appearance differences at test time. The dataset and code
required to reproduce these results and apply the technique to other datasets
and robots is made publicly available at rl-navigation.github.io/deployable
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