An innovative vision system for industrial applications

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Tecnología Electrónica y de las Comunicaciones. Fecha de lectura: 20-11-2015A pesar de que los sistemas de visión por computadora ocupan un puesto predominante en nuestra sociedad, su estructura no sigue ningún estándar. La implementación de aplicaciones de visión requiere de plataformas de alto rendimiento tales como GPUs o FPGAs y el uso de sensores de imagen con características muy distintas a las de la electrónica de consumo. En la actualidad, cada fabricante y equipo de investigación desarrollan sus plataformas de visión de forma independiente y sin ningún tipo de intercompatibilidad. En esta tesis se presenta una nueva plataforma de visión por computador utilizable en un amplio espectro de aplicaciones. Las características de dicha plataforma se han definido tras la implementación de tres aplicaciones de visión, basadas en: SOC, FPGA y GPU, respectivamente. Como resultado, se ha definido una plataforma modular con los siguientes componentes intercambiables: Sensor, procesador de imágenes ”al vuelo”, unidad de procesado principal, acelerador hardware y pila de software. Asimismo, se presenta un algoritmo para realizar transformaciones geométricas, sintetizable en FPGA y con una latencia de tan solo 90 líneas horizontales. Todos los elementos software de esta plataforma están desarrollados con licencias de Software Libre; durante el trascurso de esta tesis se han contribuido y aceptado más de 200 cambios a distintos proyectos de Software Libre, tales como: Linux, YoctoProject y U-boot, entre otros, promoviendo el ecosistema necesario para la creación de una comunidad alrededor de esta tesis.Tras la implementación de la plataforma en un producto comercial, Qtechnology QT5022, y su uso en varias aplicaciones industriales se ha demostrado que es posible el uso de una plataforma genérica de visión que permita reutilizar elementos y comparar resultados objetivamenteDespite the fact that computer vision systems place an important role in our society, its structure does not follow any standard. The implementation of computer vision application require high performance platforms, such as GPUs or FPGAs, and very specialized image sensors. Nowadays, each manufacturer and research lab develops their own vision platform independently without considering any inter-compatibility. This Thesis introduces a new computer vision platform that can be used in a wide spectrum of applications. The characteristics of the platform has been defined after the implementation of three different computer vision applications, based on: SOC, FPGA and GPU respectively. As a result, a new modular platform has been defined with the following interchangeably elements: Sensor, Image Processing Pipeline, Processing Unit, Acceleration unit and Computer Vision Stack. This thesis also presents an FPGA synthetizable algorithm for performing geometric transformations on the fly, with a latency under 90 horizontal lines. All the software elements of this platform have an Open Source licence; over the course of this thesis, more than 200 patches have been contributed and accepted into different Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel, Yocto Project and U-boot, among others, promoting the required ecosystem for the creation of a community around this novel system. The platform has been validated in an industrial product, Qtechnology QT5022, used on diverse industrial applications; demonstrating the great advantages of a generic computer vision system as a platform for reusing elements and comparing results objectivel

Diseño de un laboratorio de robótica autónoma

Versión electrónica de la ponencia presentada en VII Congreso Tecnologías Aplicadas a la Enseñanza de la Electrónica, TAEE 2006, celebrado en Madrid en 2006En este trabajo se presenta una nueva plataforma hardware/software destinada a la realización de prácticas de robótica autónoma que se está aplicando actualmente en titulaciones de Ingeniería Informática y de Telecomunicación, pero que es lo suficientemente abierta en su concepción y manejo para ser utilizada en otro tipo de estudios superiores. El diseño abierto de esta plataforma permite al alumno centrarse, bien en el desarrollo de algoritmos y pruebas de software, utilizando cualquier lenguaje y bajo cualquier SO o bien centrarse en el diseño e implementación de nuevos sistemas periféricos sensores o de control

Plataforma para el diseño de drivers software de alto y bajo nivel para dispositivos hardware

Versión electrónica de la ponencia presentada en el Congreso de Tecnologías Aplicadas a la Enseñanza de la Electrónica en 2006, celebrado en ZaragozaSe presenta una plataforma hardware que permite la experimentación en varias materias dentro de la electrónica y en el ámbito académico de un centro de enseñanza superior. Por ejemplo materias relacionadas con el control de dispositivos electrónicos desde el PC, el diseño de drivers, la programación de microcontroladores o el uso de protocolos de comunicación serie y paralelo. Con esta plataforma se facilita la modificación de las prácticas a realizar curso tras curso en los diferentes laboratorios donde se aplique y sobre todo sin necesidad de dotar cada año al laboratorio de un nuevo mate

Hardware Independent Architecture for Autonomous Colaborative Agents

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, held in Barcelona on 2005We describe a modular mobile robot test system. This architecture allows easy inclusion of user hardware and communication modules. A client-server, XML/RPC based approach makes the system easy to program and neutral in respect to the operating system and the programming language used. The hardware modules are included using a hardware independent protocol. This feature of the system makes it very flexible and easy to use and reconfigure. The architecture by itself has support for many different communication modalities

Low cost indoor ultrasonic positioning implemented in FPGA

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A. Sánchez, S. Elvira, Á. de Castro, G. Gonzalez-de-Rivera, R. Ribalda, J. Garrido, "Low cost indoor ultrasonic positioning implemented in FPGA", 35th Annual Conference of IEEEIndustrial Electronics, 2009. IECON '09, Porto (Portugal), 2009, pp. 2709 - 2714This paper presents a low cost indoor ultrasonic-based positioning system. This system allows the mobile nodes of a Wireless Sensor Network to know their location using radiofrequency and ultrasonics. To achieve this goal, a matrix of transmitting anchor points is installed whereas the mobile nodes receive these transmitted signals and estimate the time-of-flight of the ultrasonic signals. Using two time-of-flight measurements and trilateration equations, the location of the mobile nodes can be inferred in a 2-D space.This work has been partially supported by the CCG08-UAM/TIC-4258 project of the Comunidad de Madrid and UAM

Biometric system verification close to "real world" conditions

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_31Proceedings of Joint COST 2101 and 2102 International Conference, BioID_MultiComm 2009, Madrid, Spain.In this paper we present an autonomous biometric device developed in the framework of a national project. This system is able to capture speech, hand-geometry, online signature and face, and can open a door when the user is positively verified. Nevertheless the main purpose is to acquire a database without supervision (normal databases are collected in the presence of a supervisor that tells you what to do in front of the device, which is an unrealistic situation). This system will permit us to explain the main differences between what we call "real conditions" as opposed to "laboratory conditions".This work has been supported by FEDER and MEC, TEC2006-13141-C03/TCM, and COST-2102

A generic software platform for controlling collaborative robotic system using XML-RPC

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. G. G. de Rivera, R. Ribalda, J. Colás, and J. Garrido, "A generic software platform for controlling collaborative robotic system using XML-RPC", in 2005 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics. Proceedings, Monterey (United States), 2005, pp. 1336 - 1341This paper describes a software platform used for controlling any set of collaborative robots. The platform is specially designed for users without special skills on hardware design or communication topics. The platform provides a standard to simplify the addition of new hardware devices. The system runs over Linux operating system; it is accessible through different programming languages. Calls among architecture processes are performed using XML-RPC. Data transport is TCP-IP based; therefore the system is accessible from a conventional Internet link. Some experiments are performed in order to detect the programming languages that better fit in the architecture and the better web server for operating. It was found that php, in comparison with C language, reduces more than three times the speed of call processing, and more that seven times in comparison with c-sharp language (MONO implementation). Using CGI to access an Apache server is twice faster than using s standalone serve