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This paper presents an approach for decentralized range-only simultaneous localization and mapping (RO-SLAM) of a network of aerial vehicles and a set of static range-only sensors deployed in the environment. The paper makes use of a multi-hypothesis framework developed by the authors [1] in order to deal with the multiple hypotheses that are present in the early stages of the undelayed RO-SLAM, this...
This paper describes a finite state machine to control an ankle-foot prosthesis with two degrees of freedom (DOF) in the sagittal and frontal planes. Strain gauges were installed in the foot to provide ground reaction torques feedback for impedance and admittance controllers to be used at heel-strike and push-off of the gait, respectively. The quasi-static stiffness of the ankle with the active control...
Robots have been shown to assist in education and development of social skills in children. However, there has been no study yet that benchmarks the effectiveness of robots with respect to traditional playtools found inside a classroom, such as pretend play items and blocks. This paper presents the design, development and testing of robotic puppets, which would be used to support teaching in kindergarten...
Human action representation, recognition and learning is of importance to guarantee a fruitful human-robot cooperation. In this paper, we propose a novel coordinate-free, scale invariant representation of 6D (position and orientation) motion trajectories. The advantages of the proposed invariant representation are twofold. First the performance of gesture recognition can be improved thanks to its...
There is a widely recognized need for improved STEM education and increased technological literacy. Robots represent a promising educational tool with potentially large impact, due to their broad appeal and wide relevance; however, many existing educational robot platforms have cost as a barrier to widespread use. Here we present AERobot, a simple low-cost robot that can be easily used for introductory...
Dynamic changes can present significant challenges for visually impaired travelers to safely and independently navigate urban environments. To address these challenges, we are developing the NavPal suite of technology tools [1]. NavPal includes a dynamic guidance tool [2] in the form of a smartphone app that can provide real-time instructions based on available map information to guide navigation...
Millions of office workplaces are cleaned by a surprisingly small group of cleaning workers every day, however, cleaning companies struggle to recruit enough personnel these days. One solution to this challenge is to schedule available professionals for demanding tasks while relieving them from simpler activities which are transferred to a robotic cleaning assistant. Two of such tasks are floor cleaning...
A class of robotic systems that is attracting increased scientific attention is Large-Scale Actuator Networks (LSANs). A potential application of actuator networks is distributed manipulation, a technique that has significant utility within the field of industrial automation. A reactive elastic surface that autonomously morphs its shape to transport an arbitrary number of objects to a target location...
In this paper we propose to track online computed force trajectories to control the energy of various types of pendulum-like objects. The considered pendulum-like objects can be controlled by multiple agents and swing in different oscillation degrees of freedom. Our goal is to excite one specific oscillation, the intended oscillation, while damping all other disturbance oscillations. By approximating...
A humanoid robot can be viewed as a constrained dynamic system with constraints imposed by manipulation tasks, locomotion tasks, and the environment. This paper focuses on dealing with constraints in the upper-body of humanoid robots for manipulation tasks that involve coordinated motion of two arms. Inspired by research on human bimanual actions in the biomechanics area, we have developed the Extended-Cooperative-Task-Space...
One way to deal with occlusions or loss of tracking of the visual features used for visual servoing tasks is to predict the feature behavior in the image plane when the measurements are missing. Different prediction and correction methods have already been proposed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to compare and experimentally validate some of these methods for eye-in-hand and eye-to-hand...
In order for robots to be useful in real world learning scenarios, non-expert human teachers must be able to interact with and teach robots in an intuitive manner. One essential robot capability is wide-area (mobile or nonstationary) pick-and-place tasks. Even in its simplest form, pick-and-place is a hard problem due to uncertainty arising from noisy input demonstrations and non-deterministic real...
In this work, we deal with the problem of planning a manipulation task for a robotic system composed of at least one dexterous arm and a dexterous multi-fingered hand. The goal of the local planner is to include both, the arm and the hand, in the execution of the task in a coordinated way. This is achieved by using the workspace of the hand which is computed offline. During the online planning, the...
The inability of current robotic perception techniques to adequately detect non-geometric terrain hazards is a primary cause of failure for robots operating in natural terrain on Mars, the Moon, and Earth. Classical approaches detect surface appearance but do not measure the underlying mechanical properties that determine wheel-terrain interaction. Diurnal temperature variations of a granular material,...
Efficient estimation of obstacles is a crucial component in autonomous vehicle navigation. Fusing stereo vision and laser scan data is a widely used approach for obstacle detection and navigation. Stereo vision can detect obstacles and the ground. Planar laser range finders can detect obstacles, but false positives occur when the scans collide with the ground. This paper proposes an algorithm for...
Constrained Markov Decision Processes offer a principled way to tackle sequential decision problems with multiple objectives. Although they could be very valuable in numerous robotic applications, to date their use has been quite limited. One of the reasons is that their solution requires to solve constrained linear programs with a large number of variables and this is computationally demanding, especially...
This paper presents a novel online unsupervised vision system for obstacle detection in field environments which detects many obstacles pathological to appearance- or structure-only obstacle detection systems. Robust obstacle detection in field environments is challenging as it is infeasible to train on all possible obstacles in all conditions, and many obstacles are camouflaged in their appearance...
Autonomous manipulation of objects requires reliable information on robot-object contact state. Underwater environments can adversely affect sensing modalities such as vision, making them unreliable. In this paper we investigate underwater robot-object contact perception between an autonomous underwater vehicle and a T-bar valve using a force/torque sensor and the robot's proprioceptive information...
Controlling mobile robots with complex articulated parts and hence many degrees of freedom generates high cognitive load on the operator, especially under demanding conditions such as in Urban Search & Rescue missions. We propose a solution based on reinforcement learning in order to accommodate the robot morphology automatically to the terrain and the obstacles it traverses. In this paper, we...
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