159 research outputs found
Visual servoing of aerial manipulators
The final publication is available at link.springer.comThis chapter describes the classical techniques to control an aerial manipulator by means of visual information and presents an uncalibrated image-based visual servo method to drive the aerial vehicle. The proposed technique has the advantage that it contains mild assumptions about the principal point and skew values of the camera, and it does not require prior knowledge of the focal length, in contrast to traditional image-based approaches.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Exploring Convolutional Networks for End-to-End Visual Servoing
Present image based visual servoing approaches rely on extracting hand
crafted visual features from an image. Choosing the right set of features is
important as it directly affects the performance of any approach. Motivated by
recent breakthroughs in performance of data driven methods on recognition and
localization tasks, we aim to learn visual feature representations suitable for
servoing tasks in unstructured and unknown environments. In this paper, we
present an end-to-end learning based approach for visual servoing in diverse
scenes where the knowledge of camera parameters and scene geometry is not
available a priori. This is achieved by training a convolutional neural network
over color images with synchronised camera poses. Through experiments performed
in simulation and on a quadrotor, we demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of
our approach for a wide range of camera poses in both indoor as well as outdoor
environments.Comment: IEEE ICRA 201
Robot eye-hand coordination learning by watching human demonstrations: a task function approximation approach
We present a robot eye-hand coordination learning method that can directly
learn visual task specification by watching human demonstrations. Task
specification is represented as a task function, which is learned using inverse
reinforcement learning(IRL) by inferring differential rewards between state
changes. The learned task function is then used as continuous feedbacks in an
uncalibrated visual servoing(UVS) controller designed for the execution phase.
Our proposed method can directly learn from raw videos, which removes the need
for hand-engineered task specification. It can also provide task
interpretability by directly approximating the task function. Besides,
benefiting from the use of a traditional UVS controller, our training process
is efficient and the learned policy is independent from a particular robot
platform. Various experiments were designed to show that, for a certain DOF
task, our method can adapt to task/environment variances in target positions,
backgrounds, illuminations, and occlusions without prior retraining.Comment: Accepted in ICRA 201
Autonomous Tissue Scanning under Free-Form Motion for Intraoperative Tissue Characterisation
In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is
required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue.
However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of deformation is a
challenging task for the surgeon. Recently, robot-assisted local tissue
scanning has been investigated for motion stabilisation of imaging probes to
facilitate the capturing of good quality images and reduce the surgeon's
cognitive load. Nonetheless, these approaches require the tissue surface to be
static or deform with periodic motion. To eliminate these assumptions, we
propose a visual servoing framework for autonomous tissue scanning, able to
deal with free-form tissue deformation. The 3D structure of the surgical scene
is recovered and a feature-based method is proposed to estimate the motion of
the tissue in real-time. A desired scanning trajectory is manually defined on a
reference frame and continuously updated using projective geometry to follow
the tissue motion and control the movement of the robotic arm. The advantage of
the proposed method is that it does not require the learning of the tissue
motion prior to scanning and can deal with free-form deformation. We deployed
this framework on the da Vinci surgical robot using the da Vinci Research Kit
(dVRK) for Ultrasound tissue scanning. Since the framework does not rely on
information from the Ultrasound data, it can be easily extended to other
probe-based imaging modalities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ICRA 202
Deep Forward and Inverse Perceptual Models for Tracking and Prediction
We consider the problems of learning forward models that map state to
high-dimensional images and inverse models that map high-dimensional images to
state in robotics. Specifically, we present a perceptual model for generating
video frames from state with deep networks, and provide a framework for its use
in tracking and prediction tasks. We show that our proposed model greatly
outperforms standard deconvolutional methods and GANs for image generation,
producing clear, photo-realistic images. We also develop a convolutional neural
network model for state estimation and compare the result to an Extended Kalman
Filter to estimate robot trajectories. We validate all models on a real robotic
system.Comment: 8 pages, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
201
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