Real-Time Laser Profile Edge Detection by Voting 1) Abstract:

Today, automobile and aircraft industry uses more and more robust and light-weight parts made of carbon fibres. To achieve high structural properties the carbon fibre mats are stitched in the preforming process using a sewing robot. The goal of this work is to develop an edge tracking system that continuously follows the seams. To work with the black and reflective carbon fibres a laser-scan sensor is used, though online processing of the range data for seam-tracking remains a challenging task. The paper presents a fast and robust two-out-of-three voting image processing method to track the seam and to control the robot motion in real-time. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the fully automated, sensor-guided robotic sewing process.

Curious George: An integrated visual search platform

This paper describes an integrated robot system, known as Curious George, that has demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities to recognize objects in the real world. We describe the capabilities of this system, including: the ability to access web-based training data automatically and in near real-time; the ability to model the visual appearance and 3D shape of a wide variety of object categories; navigation abilities such as exploration, mapping and path following; the ability to decompose the environment based on 3D structure, allowing for attention to be focused on regions of interest; the ability to capture high-quality images of objects in the environment; and finally, the ability to correctly label those objects with high accuracy. The competence of the combined system has been validated by entry into an international competition where Curious George has been among the top performing systems each year. We discuss the implications of such successful object recognition for society, and provide several avenues for potential improvement.