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In many countries, robots and automation techniques are being introduced in agriculture farms to reduce the human labour and to improve the yield. However, such technological initiatives are still lacking in India, although it is the leading producer of many vegetables and fruits, for example, coconuts. Some of the activities carried out in a coconut farm that requires human labor are coconut dehusking,...
The authors are developing a talking robot which is a mechanical vocalization system modeling the human articulatory system. The talking robot is constructed with mechanical parts that are made by referring to human vocal organs biologically and functionally. In this study, a newly redesign artificial vocal cord is developed for the purpose of extending the speaking capability of the talking robot...
In this paper we provide an intelligent and convenient shopping cart, Intelligent Shopping Assistant System (ISAS). With ISAS, customers can concentrate on what he/she has to buy, and do not be bothered where he/she has to buy or it is want to buy. In contrast to conventional shopping cart, two modes of autonomous functions are added to ISAS in order to reduce the labor of customers for pushing goods...
Recent works of non-rigid registration have shown promising applications on tasks of deformable manipulation. Those approaches use thin plate spline-robust point matching (TPS-RPM) algorithm to regress a transformation function, which could generate a corresponding manipulation trajectory given a new pose/shape of the object. However, this method regards the object as a bunch of discrete and independent...
This work introduces a novel artificial intelligence approach to household object recognition. The approach used in this work is feature-based and it works toward recognition under a broad range of circumstances. The necessary image processing techniques are applied to recognize the objects. These techniques include removal of shadow that is segmenting the object from its shadow, extraction of shape...
In open-ended domains, autonomous robots must have the ability to continuously process visual information, and execute learning and recognition in a concurrent and interleaved fashion. Because the set of categories to be learned is not predefined, it is not feasible to assume that one can pre-program all object categories required by service robots. Topic modelling approaches usually construct the...
In this study, we propose a neural network based model for learning a robot's drawing sequences in an unsupervised manner. We focus on the ability to learn visual-motor relationships, which can work as a reusable memory in association of drawing motion from a picture image. Assuming that a humanoid robot can draw a shape on a pen tablet, the proposed model learns drawing sequences, which comprises...
Haptic force fields are widely used in studies on motor adaptation, motor retention, and motor recovery in both healthy and impaired subjects. In the main paradigm the hand is guided or perturbed along specific paths or channels in order to investigate different aspects underlying the human motor control. Programming such fields for complex haptic environments can be very challenging and is often...
This work investigates the geometric object-shape classification using the echoes generated by various kinds of obstacles in a cellular automata based virtual environment for ultra-sound propagation. The virtual environment is implemented as a JAVA platform [1] capable of emulate sound propagation in a controlled 2D environment. The echoes are preprocessed by a Feature Processor Vector Unit (FVPU)...
Most objects are composed of parts which have a semantic meaning. Ahandle can have many different shapes and can be present in quite different objects, but there is only one semantic meaning to a handle, which is "a part that is designed especially to be grasped by the hand". We introduce here a novel 3D algorithm named CPS for the decomposition of objects into their semantically meaningful...
In many real life scenarios, which span from domestic interactions to industrial manufacturing processes, the objects to be manipulated are non-rigid and deformable, hence, both the location of the object and its deformation have to be tracked. Different methodologies have been applied in literature, using different sensors and techniques for addressing this problem. The main contribution of this...
This paper presents the detection and localization methods of entrance and staircase markers for the team E-Mobile in TechX Challenge 2013. Autonomous vehicles are required to detect and locate traffic cones beside the indoor entrance and staircase. One big challenge is from the unpredictable lighting conditions and environment. Different practical techniques such as color space selection, segmentation,...
Existing exoskeletons for rehabilitation usually consist of a rigid kinematic chain of various forms. They are often bulky in size and need structural adjustments from time to time to fit to a specific patient. This paper presents a continuum exoskeleton design for bilateral rehabilitation. Its intrinsic flexibility adapts to different patient anatomies passively to provide AAA (Anatomy Adaptive Assistances)...
In this paper, we present a method to improve a robot's imitation performance in a drawing scenario by inserting pauses in motion. Human's drawing skills are said to develop through five stages: 1) Scribbling, 2) Fortuitous Realism, 3) Failed Realism, 4) Intellectual Realism, and 5) Visual Realism. We focus on stages 1) and 3) for creating our system, each corresponding to body babbling and imitation...
Generalising dexterous grasps to novel objects is an open problem. We show how to learn grasps for high DoF hands that generalise to novel objects, given as little as one demonstrated grasp. During grasp learning two types of probability density are learned that model the demonstrated grasp. The first density type (the contact model) models the relationship of an individual finger part to local surface...
One of the long-term challenges of programming by demonstration is achieving generality, i.e. automatically adapting the reproduced behavior to novel situations. A common approach for achieving generality is to learn parameterizable skills from multiple demonstrations for different situations. In this paper, we generalize recent approaches on learning parameterizable skills based on dynamical movement...
We present a method by which a robot learns to predict effective contact locations for pushing as a function of object shape. The robot performs push experiments at many contact locations on multiple objects and records local and global shape features at each point of contact. Each trial attempts to either push the object in a straight line or to rotate the object to a new orientation. The robot observes...
We present a real-world robotic agent that is capable of transferring grasping strategies across objects that share similar parts. The agent transfers grasps across objects by identifying, from examples provided by a teacher, parts by which objects are often grasped in a similar fashion. It then uses these parts to identify grasping points onto novel objects. We focus our report on the definition...
Over the last years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in detection and 3D pose estimation of known and unknown objects. However, the question of how to identify objects based on language descriptions has not been investigated in detail. While the computer vision community recently started to investigate the use of attributes for object recognition, these approaches do not consider...
This paper proposes a novel way of controllable pitch re-estimation that can produce better pitch contour or provide diverse speaking styles for text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The method is composed of a pitch re-estimation model and a set of control parameters. The pitch re-estimation model is employed to reduce over-smoothing effects which is usually introduced by TTS training. The control parameters...
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