Vision-based hand wheel-chair control

Several studies have shown that people with disabilities benefit substantially from access to a means of independent mobility and assistive technology. Researchers are using technology originally developed for mobile robots to create easier to use wheelchairs. With this kind of technology people with disabilities can gain a degree of independence in performing daily life activities. In this work a computer vision system is presented, able to drive a wheelchair with a minimum number of finger commands. The user hand is detected and segmented with the use of a kinect camera, and fingertips are extracted from depth information, and used as wheelchair commands

Thin film-based sensors

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Neural network in computer vision for RoboCup middle size league

Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is a worldwide competition proposed to advance research in robotics and artificial intelligence. It has a league called RoboCup soccer devoted for soccer robots. Robotic soccer is a challenge because robots are mobile, fully autonomous, multi-agents, and they play on a dynamic environment. Moreover, robots must recognize the game entities, which is a crucial task during a game. A camera is usually used as an input system to recognize ball, opponents, soccer field, and so on. These elements may be recognized applying some tools of computational intelligence, for example an artificial neural network. This paper describes the application of an artificial neural network on middle size robotic football league, where a multilayer perceptron neural network is trained with the backpropagation algorithm, to classify elements on the image. The results show that an artificial neural network successfully classified the entities. They were recognized even when similar color entities were present on the image.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Vision and distance integrated sensor (Kinect) for an autonomous robot

This work presents an application of the Microsoft Kinect camera for an autonomous mobile robot. In order to drive autonomously one main issue is the ability to recognize signalling panels positioned overhead. The Kinect camera can be applied in this task due to its double integrated sensor, namely vision and distance. The vision sensor is used to perceive the signalling panel, while the distance sensor is applied as a segmentation filter, by eliminating pixels by their depth in the object’s background. The approach adopted to perceive the symbol from the signalling panel consists in: a) applying the depth image filter from the Kinect camera; b) applying Morphological Operators to segment the image; c) a classification is carried out with an Artificial Neural Network and a simple Multilayer Perceptron network that can correctly classify the image. This work explores the Kinect camera depth sensor and hence this filter avoids heavy computational algorithms to search for the correct location of the signalling panels. It simplifies the next tasks of image segmentation and classification. A mobile autonomous robot using this camera was used to recognize the signalling panels on a competition track of the Portuguese Robotics Open

Vision-based hand segmentation techniques for human-robot interaction for real-time applications

One of the most important tasks in hand recognition applications for human-robot interaction is hand segmen-tation. This work presents a method that uses a Microsoft Kinect camera, for hand localization and segmenta-tion. One important aspect for robot control besides hand localization is hand orientation, which is used in this work to control robot heading direction (left or right) and linear velocity. The system first calculates hand po-sition, and then a kalman filter is used to estimate displacement and linear velocity in a smoother way. Ex-perimental results show that the system is easy to use, and can be applied on several different human-computer interface applications

Problems and solutions in middle size robot soccer: a review

A review of current scientific and technological problems encountered in building and programming middle size soccer robots is made in this paper. Solutions and solution trends to the problems, as presented by different teams, are also examined. Perceptual systems of individual robots, in particular with respect to object location, communications between robot players, decision making with regard to game strategy and behaviour generation, and, finally, actuation, are the topics dealt with. This makes for a wide perspective on the actual state of the art of middle size soccer robots

Canopy habitat area effect on the arthropod species densities in the Azores: pondering the contribution of tourist species and other life histories

"[…]. We performed a PIAR examining how plant cover area and plant crown structure influence the densities of arthropods in the canopies of one specific island, comparing various distinct natural reserves. Species densities were measured for two functional insect herbivore guilds (sap-sucking and leaf-chewing insects) and the most common predatory assembly in this system (spiders) in three different ways: i) the average number of specimens per plant; ii) the average number of specimens per transect, providing both fine and broad scales of species abundance (see Methods); iii) absolute numbers per reserve. Moreover, we investigated common versus scarce arthropod species distributions between various plant species. […]" (da Introdução)Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal

Whistle sound recognition in a noisy environment

This paper describes the development of an electronic system that automatically recognises the sound of a referee whistle in a nosy environment. It can be directly adapted to any robot on a robotic competition namely robotic football. Experiments have been conducted in order to test the developed system and results are shown

Modelação da rede viária da cidade de Guimarães. Um estudo de caso associado ao impacto da construção de uma nova via

One of the main problems of urban road networks is the imbalance between supply and demand associated with the massive use of motorized transport, which leads to frequent traffic congestion in sensitive areas and structuring road axes of these territories. This phenomenon is one of the causes of increased levels of noise and pollution and lack of road safety in urban centers that directly affect the quality of life of populations. In order to study the impact of several changes in the road network and transportation system of the city of Guimarães, this article presents the procedure for modeling and allocating traffic to the city's road network through the use of PTV Visum software. In this context a possible conclusion of the ring road - main arterial route of the city, by the slope of Monte da Penha, was studied for the morning and afternoon peak hours. In order to carry out this study, the Origin-Destination matrix was estimated for those two periods, which allowed to conclude that the traffic volume in the area of the ring road already constructed will suffer a reduction, while in the city center roads the changes in traffic flows will be insignificant.Modeling of the road network of the city of Guimarães. A case study associated with the impact of a new road. Modelação da rede viária da cidade de Guimarães. Um estudo de caso associado ao impacto da construção de uma nova via. Paulo Ribeiro;[email protected] Universidade do Minho/ CTAC Luís Gonçalves - [email protected] PhD student: Universidade do Minho/ CTAC Abstract One of the main problems of urban road networks is the imbalance between supply and demand associated with the massive use of motorized transport, which leads to frequent traffic congestion in sensitive areas and structuring road axes of these territories. This phenomenon is one of the causes of increased levels of noise and pollution and lack of road safety in urban centers that directly affect the quality of life of populations. In order to study the impact of several changes in the road network and transportation system of the city of Guimarães, this article presents the procedure for modeling and allocating traffic to the city's road network through the use of PTV Visum software. In this context a possible conclusion of the ring road - main arterial route of the city, by the slope of Monte da Penha, was studied for the morning and afternoon peak hours. In order to carry out this study, the Origin-Destination matrix was estimated for those two periods, which allowed to conclude that the traffic volume in the area of the ring road already constructed will suffer a reduction, while in the city center roads the changes in traffic flows will be insignificant. Resumo Um dos principais problemas das redes viárias das cidades é o desequilíbrio existente entre a oferta e procura associado ao uso massivo do transporte motorizado que conduz a frequentes congestionamentos de tráfego em zonas sensíveis e eixos estruturantes destes territórios. Este fenómeno é uma das causas do aumento do nível de ruído e poluição e redução da segurança nos centros urbanos que afeta diretamente a qualidade de vida das populações. De forma a estudar o impacto de várias alterações na cidade de Guimarães é apresentado neste artigo o procedimento de modelação e afetação do tráfego à rede viária da cidade através da utilização do software PTV Visum. Neste âmbito estudou-se uma possível conclusão da Variante - principal via arterial da cidade, pela encosta do Monte da Penha, para a hora de ponto da manhã e da tarde. Para efetuar o seu estudo foi estimada a matriz Origem – Destino para as duas horas de ponta a partir de dados de contagem de tráfego, tendo-se concluído que o volume tráfego no troço da circular já construída sofreu uma redução do tráfego, mas sem que se verificassem grandes alterações nos fluxos das vias do centro da cidadeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Dynamic modeling of a human-inspired robot based on a Newton-Euler approach

This work deals with the modeling process of a new three dimensional human-like robot for an inverse dynamic analysis. This robot intends to be utilized by caregivers to assist persons with reduced mobility (such as the elderly). The model under analysis is composed by 24 rigid bodies: 3 to represent the robot’s base and locomotion, 4 for the lower limbs and torso, 7 for each arm, and 3 for the head. The resulting multibody system has 19 degrees-of-freedom driven by 4 linear actuators and 15 revolute motors. The proposed approach was implemented using an in-house computational code, and validated against a commercial software for a general spatial motion. The outcomes achieved show that the proposed formulation is computationally effective both in terms of efficiency and accuracy. The general findings of this study are promising and useful for the mechanical design and construction of a real human-like robot prototype