A method to provide accessibility for visual components to vision impaired

Non-textual graphical information (line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, etc.) are increasingly pervasive in digital scientific literature and business reports which enabling readers to easily acquire the nature of the underlying information . These graphical components are commonly used to present data in an easy-to interpret way. Graphs are frequently used in economics, mathematics and other scientific subjects. In general term data visualization techniques are useless for blind people. Being unable to access graphical information easily is a major obstacle to blind people in pursuing a scientific study and careers .This paper suggests a method to extract implicit information of Bar chart, Pie chart, Line chart and math’s graph components of an electronic document and present them to vision impaired users in audio format. The goal is to provide simple to use, efficient, and available presentation schemes for non textual which can help vision impaired users in comprehending form without needing any further devices or equipments. A software application has been developed based on this research. The output of application is a textual summary of the graphic including the core content of the hypothesized intended message of the graphic designer. The textual summary of the graphic is then conveyed to the user by Text to Speech software .The benefit of this approach is automatic providing the user with the message and knowledge that one would gain from viewing t

Research and development of a rescue robot end-effector

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This report details the research, design, development and testing of an end-effector system for use on an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) robot which is in development in the Robotics and Agents Research Laboratory (RARL) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This is the 5th generation Mobile Robot Platform (MRP) that UCT has developed ... codenamed ‘Ratel’. USAR robots used to be mainly of the observation type, but new robots (including UCT’s Ratel MRP) are being developed to deal with inherently dynamic, complex and unpredictable disaster response situations, particularly related to object manipulation and gripping. In order to actively interact with the environment, a flexible and robust gripping system is vital. [an] end-effector solution ... was developed for the Ratel manipulator arm to fulfil these functions

Visuo-Haptic Grasping of Unknown Objects through Exploration and Learning on Humanoid Robots

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem Greifen unbekannter Objekte durch humanoide Roboter. Dazu werden visuelle Informationen mit haptischer Exploration kombiniert, um Greifhypothesen zu erzeugen. Basierend auf simulierten Trainingsdaten wird außerdem eine Greifmetrik gelernt, welche die Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit der Greifhypothesen bewertet und die mit der größten geschätzten Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit auswählt. Diese wird verwendet, um Objekte mit Hilfe einer reaktiven Kontrollstrategie zu greifen. Die zwei Kernbeiträge der Arbeit sind zum einen die haptische Exploration von unbekannten Objekten und zum anderen das Greifen von unbekannten Objekten mit Hilfe einer neuartigen datengetriebenen Greifmetrik