PP presentatie Scout project data transmission and storage: Wageningen

In het SCOUT (Sensoric data Catching Of highly Useful Terabytes) project wordt onderzocht hoe de verzamelde data verkregen door sensortechnologie in de tomatenteelt het beste verwerkt kunnen worden om een bruikbaar eindproduct op te leveren. In deze PowerPoint presentatie worden de belangrijke parameters en indicatoren van telplanten benoemd en wordt de data architectuur van de sensoren op robots en van de centrale controller beschreven

PP presentatie Robot Rose en 21st Century Skills: Robots en zorg, Slimste Huis Alkmaar

Deze Powerpoint presentatie werd door lector Cock Heemskerk gebruikt voor een lezing over zorgrobots in het Slimste Huis in Alkmaar. Na een korte uitleg over het werkveld van het lectoraat en de wetenschappelijke definitie van een robot wordt nader ingegaan op de inzetbaarheid van zorgrobots anno 2017. De testresultaten van de zorgrobots Alice en ROSE worden duidelijk uiteengezet. Er wordt ingezoomd op de 21ste eeuw vaardigheden van studenten verpleegkunde en die onderzoekers. Tot slot wordt de opbouw en de doelstelling van een klinische les (nagespeelde praktijksituatie) gepresenteerd

Robotic Platform Research PP presentation: final presentation thesis Lucien Fesselet

Greenhouses are in need of new monitoring tools, as they size grow bigger and bigger but still using old labour intensive methods ways of caring for the crop. HiPerGreen is set out to create a new tool, which can drive onto the pre-existing heating pipes to provide a birds eye perspective for image analysis purposes. However, clear images are necessary for consistent usable data. This presentation resumes the steps taken during the reporting: the optimisation of a rail based system towards clear images. This is done through analysis of resulting images, understanding vibrations and oscillations, and finally presents results based on prototyping. Moreover, a re-design of the electronics and hardware was also introduce to facilitate prototyping. The results are promising, laying within the requirements

Improving Guidance Information by means of Metric Optical Flow onboard an UAS PP eindpresentatie: final presentation thesis Mark Ramaker

To better control the growing process of horticulture plants greenhouse growers need an automated way to efficiently and effectively find where diseases are spreading.The HiPerGreen project has done research in using an autonomous quadcopter for this scouting. In order for the quadcopter to be able to scout autonomously accurate location data is needed. Several different methods of obtaining location data have been investigated in prior research. In this research a relative sensor based on optical flow is looked into as a method of stabilizing an absolute measurement based on trilateration. For the optical flow sensor a novel block matching algorithm was developed. Simulated testing showed that Kalman Filter based sensor fusion of both measurements worked to reduce the standard deviation of the absolute measurement from 30 cm to less than 1 cm, while drift due to dead-reckoning was reduced to a maximum of 11 cm from over 36 cm

Cayley-Hamilton for roboticists

The Cayley-Hamilton theorem is an important theorem of linear algebra which is well known and used in system theory. Unfortunately, this powerful result is practically never used in robotics even though it is of extreme relevance. This article is a review of the use of this result for the calculation of general matrix functions which are very common in robotics. It will be shown how any analytic matrix function like exponential, logarithm and more complicated expressions in robotics, can be easily and analytically calculated in an explicit form. Examples are given for the exponential map, inverse of the exponential map, and the derivative of the exponential map. For the first two examples there exist well known expressions in the literature, but the last one is not as easy to compute without the presented method

Self-Supervised Learning for Joint Pushing and Grasping Policies in Highly Cluttered Environments

Robots often face situations where grasping a goal object is desirable but not feasible due to other present objects preventing the grasp action. We present a deep Reinforcement Learning approach to learn grasping and pushing policies for manipulating a goal object in highly cluttered environments to address this problem. In particular, a dual Reinforcement Learning model approach is proposed, which presents high resilience in handling complicated scenes, reaching an average of 98% task completion using primitive objects in a simulation environment. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we performed two extensive sets of experiments in packed objects and a pile of object scenarios with a total of 1000 test runs in simulation. Experimental results showed that the proposed method worked very well in both scenarios and outperformed the recent state-of-the-art approaches. Demo video, trained models, and source code for the results reproducibility purpose are publicly available. https://github.com/Kamalnl92/Self-Supervised-Learning-for-pushing-and-grasping

HiPerGreen: Greenhouse crop scouting by a UAS: HiPerGreen project

In November 2019, the High Performance Greenhouse project (HiPerGreen) was nominated for the RAAK Award 2019, as one of the best applied research projects in the Netherlands. This paper discusses the challenges faced, lessons learned and critical factors in making the project into a success

HiPerGreen: Accurate UAS Flight inside a Greenhouse: HiPerGreen project

This paper describes the concept of a new algorithm to control an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for accurate autonomous indoor flight. Inside a greenhouse, Global Positioning System (GPS) signals are not reliable and not accurate enough. As an alternative, Ultra Wide Band (UWB) is used for localization. The noise is compensated by combining the UWB with the delta position signal from a novel optical flow algorithm through a Kalman Filter (KF). The end result is an accurate and stable position signal with low noise and low drift