SwisTrack - A Flexible Open Source Tracking Software for Multi-Agent Systems

Vision-based tracking is used in nearly all robotic laboratories for monitoring and extracting of agent positions, orientations, and trajectories. However, there is currently no accepted standard software solution available, so many research groups resort to developing and using their own custom software. In this paper, we present Version 4 of SwisTrack, an open source project for simultaneous tracking of multiple agents. While its broad range of pre- implemented algorithmic components allows it to be used in a variety of experimental applications, its novelty stands in its highly modular architecture. Advanced users can therefore also implement additional customized modules which extend the functionality of the existing components within the provided interface. This paper introduces SwisTrack and shows experiments with both marked and marker-less agents

Formation of branching angles at bifurcations of ant trail networks

Ants form dendritic trail networks around the nest to search for and exploit food sources located at the periphery of the network. Studies found these trail networks to be very efficient for the ants in terms of time and energy, which later was found stored in the bifurcation angle (θ) of the branches of these trail networks. It has been observed, that bifurcations are symmetrical when moving from the nest to the food source, while are asymmetrical when moving back towards the nest. The mean bifurcation angles have been found to be 50° - 80° for networks radiating out from the nest. This thesis focuses on the formation of the bifurcation angles and devising a model to illustrate their formation. It has been hypothesized that if the θ is small, the ants continue moving straight in the initial direction, and make the choice for an emerging branch after the bifurcation, thereby increasing θ, whereas it would decrease for large θ values, as the ants turn early to their choice of emerging branch. Also, for large θ values, it will be difficult for the ants to follow the trail. To test this, experiments with multiple individual ants were conducted on chemically marked ‘Y’ shaped paper strips with differing θ. Similarly in a model, simulated ants were run on ‘Y’ shaped trails with differing θ. Results show that the decision point (point at which ants turns for its emerging branch) moves away from the emerging branches with an increase in angle of bifurcation and the average maximum distance increases with the angle of bifurcation. Angles in the range of 20 °- 60° were found to minimize the above constraints, and provide a stable trail network

Mobile robot trajectory analysis with the help of vision system

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. We present a vision-based motion analysis method for single and multiple mobile robots which allows quantifying the robot's behaviour. The method defines how often and for how much each of the robots turn and move straight. The motion analysis relies on the robot trajectories acquired online or offline by an external camera and the algorithm is based on iteratively performed a linear regression to detect straight and curved paths for each robot. The method is experimentally validated with the indoor mobile robotic system. Potential applications include remote robot inspection, rescue robotics and multi-robotic system coordination

Assembly of Configurations in a Networked Robotic System: A Case Study on a Reconfigurable Interactive Table Lamp

In the present study, we are interested in verifying how the progressive addition of constraints on communication and localization impact the performance of a swarm of small robots in shape formation tasks. Identified to be of importance in a swarm-user interaction context, the time required to construct a given spatial configuration is considered as a performance metric. The experimental work reported in this paper starts from global and synchronized localization information, shown to be successful both on a real hardware system and in simulation. In a second step, communication is constrained to a local scale, thus obliging a single designated robot to disseminate the global localization information to the other agents. The reliability of the radio communication channel and its impact upon the performance of the system are considered

Fuzzy-Based Path Analysis

Video surveillance can be a very powerful tool in the fight against crime, by accurately monitoring human activities. Nevertheless, most surveillance systems today provide only a passive form of site monitoring. Extensive video records may be kept to help find the instigator of criminal activities after the crime has been committed but preventive measures usually require human involvement. In addition to this, there is a need for a large amounts of data storage to keep up to several terabytes of video streams that may be needed for later analysis

Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system with applications in urban/indoor precision agriculture. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. By embedding sensing, computation, and communication into the pots, task allocation in the system is de-centrally coordinated, which makes the system scalable and robust against the failure of a centralized agent. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition, and manipulation as well as challenges that lie ahead toward autonomous precision agriculture with multi-robot teams.Swiss National Science Foundation (contract number PBEL2118737)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI SWARMS project W911NF-05-1-0219)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF IIS-0426838)Intel Corporation (EFRI 0735953 Intel)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (UROP program)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MSRP program

VisionBlocks: A Social Computer Vision Framework

Vision Blocks (http://visionblocks.org) is an on demand, in-browser, customizable computer vision application publishing platform for masses. It empowers end-users (consumers)to create novel solutions for themselves that they would not easily obtain off-the-shelf. By transferring design capability to the consumers, we enable creation and dissemination of custom products and algorithms. We adapt a visual programming paradigm to codify vision algorithms for general use. As a proof of-concept, we implement computer vision algorithms such as motion tracking, face detection, change detection and others. We demonstrate their applications on real-time video. Our studies show that end users (non programmers) only need 50% more time to build such systems when compared to the most experienced researchers. We made progress towards closing the gap between researchers and consumers by finding that users rate the intuitiveness of the approach in a level 6% less than researchers. We discuss different application scenarios where such study will be useful and argue its benefit for computer vision research community. We believe that enabling users with ability to create application will be first step towards creating social computer vision applications and platform.Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Research Fellowship

Indoor Navigation Research with the Khepera III Mobile Robot: An Experimental Baseline with a Case-study on Ultra-wideband Positioning

Recent substantial progress in the domain of indoor positioning systems and a growing number of indoor location-based applications are creating the need for systematic, efficient, and precise experimental methods able to assess the localization and perhaps also navigation performance of a given device. With hundreds of Khepera III robots in academic use today, this platform has an important potential for single- and multi-robot localization and navigation research. In this work, we develop a necessary set of models for mobile robot navigation with the Khepera III platform, and quantify the robot’s localization performance based on extensive experimental studies. Finally, we validate our experimental approach to localization research by considering the evaluation of an ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning system. We successfully show how the robotic platform can provide precise performance analyses, ultimately proposing a powerful approach towards advancements in indoor positioning technology