8,484 research outputs found
CES-515 Towards Localization and Mapping of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: A Survey
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been used for a huge number of tasks ranging from commercial, military and research areas etc, while the fundamental function of a successful AUV is its localization and mapping ability. This report aims to review the relevant elements of localization and mapping for AUVs. First, a brief introduction of the concept and the historical development of AUVs is given; then a relatively detailed description of the sensor system used for AUV navigation is provided. As the main part of the report, a comprehensive investigation of the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for AUVs are conducted, including its application examples. Finally a brief conclusion is summarized
EchoFusion: Tracking and Reconstruction of Objects in 4D Freehand Ultrasound Imaging without External Trackers
Ultrasound (US) is the most widely used fetal imaging technique. However, US
images have limited capture range, and suffer from view dependent artefacts
such as acoustic shadows. Compounding of overlapping 3D US acquisitions into a
high-resolution volume can extend the field of view and remove image artefacts,
which is useful for retrospective analysis including population based studies.
However, such volume reconstructions require information about relative
transformations between probe positions from which the individual volumes were
acquired. In prenatal US scans, the fetus can move independently from the
mother, making external trackers such as electromagnetic or optical tracking
unable to track the motion between probe position and the moving fetus. We
provide a novel methodology for image-based tracking and volume reconstruction
by combining recent advances in deep learning and simultaneous localisation and
mapping (SLAM). Tracking semantics are established through the use of a
Residual 3D U-Net and the output is fed to the SLAM algorithm. As a proof of
concept, experiments are conducted on US volumes taken from a whole body fetal
phantom, and from the heads of real fetuses. For the fetal head segmentation,
we also introduce a novel weak annotation approach to minimise the required
manual effort for ground truth annotation. We evaluate our method
qualitatively, and quantitatively with respect to tissue discrimination
accuracy and tracking robustness.Comment: MICCAI Workshop on Perinatal, Preterm and Paediatric Image analysis
(PIPPI), 201
Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots
Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots has been an active research areasince the beginning of the 1990s. This article presents a review of research work in this field,including gas distribution mapping, trail guidance, and the different subtasks of gas sourcelocalisation. Due to the difficulty of modelling gas distribution in a real world environmentwith currently available simulation techniques, we focus largely on experimental work and donot consider publications that are purely based on simulations
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
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