Search results for "robotics"
showing 10 items of 484 documents
Distributed and proximity-constrained C-means for discrete coverage control
2018
In this paper we present a novel distributed coverage control framework for a network of mobile agents, in charge of covering a finite set of points of interest (PoI), such as people in danger, geographically dispersed equipment or environmental landmarks. The proposed algorithm is inspired by C-Means, an unsupervised learning algorithm originally proposed for non-exclusive clustering and for identification of cluster centroids from a set of observations. To cope with the agents' limited sensing range and avoid infeasible coverage solutions, traditional C-Means needs to be enhanced with proximity constraints, ensuring that each agent takes into account only neighboring PoIs. The proposed co…
Compliance error compensation technique for parallel robots composed of non-perfect serial chains
2012
The paper presents the compliance errors compensation technique for over-constrained parallel manipulators under external and internal loadings. This technique is based on the non-linear stiffness modeling which is able to take into account the influence of non-perfect geometry of serial chains caused by manufacturing errors. Within the developed technique, the deviation compensation reduces to an adjustment of a target trajectory that is modified in the off-line mode. The advantages and practical significance of the proposed technique are illustrated by an example that deals with groove milling by the Orthoglide manipulator that considers different locations of the workpiece. It is also de…
Using Hankel matrices for dynamics-based facial emotion recognition and pain detection
2015
This paper proposes a new approach to model the temporal dynamics of a sequence of facial expressions. To this purpose, a sequence of Face Image Descriptors (FID) is regarded as the output of a Linear Time Invariant (LTI) system. The temporal dynamics of such sequence of descriptors are represented by means of a Hankel matrix. The paper presents different strategies to compute dynamics-based representation of a sequence of FID, and reports classification accuracy values of the proposed representations within different standard classification frameworks. The representations have been validated in two very challenging application domains: emotion recognition and pain detection. Experiments on…
Ensemble of Hankel Matrices for Face Emotion Recognition
2015
In this paper, a face emotion is considered as the result of the composition of multiple concurrent signals, each corresponding to the movements of a specific facial muscle. These concurrent signals are represented by means of a set of multi-scale appearance features that might be correlated with one or more concurrent signals. The extraction of these appearance features from a sequence of face images yields to a set of time series. This paper proposes to use the dynamics regulating each appearance feature time series to recognize among different face emotions. To this purpose, an ensemble of Hankel matrices corresponding to the extracted time series is used for emotion classification withi…
Modality-Guided Subnetwork for Salient Object Detection
2021
Recent RGBD-based models for saliency detection have attracted research attention. The depth clues such as boundary clues, surface normal, shape attribute, etc., contribute to the identification of salient objects with complicated scenarios. However, most RGBD networks require multi-modalities from the input side and feed them separately through a two-stream design, which inevitably results in extra costs on depth sensors and computation. To tackle these inconveniences, we present in this paper a novel fusion design named modality-guided subnetwork (MGSnet). It has the following superior designs: 1) Our model works for both RGB and RGBD data, and dynamically estimating depth if not availabl…
Expanding the Active Inference Landscape: More Intrinsic Motivations in the Perception-Action Loop
2018
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena, including consciousness. In active inference, action selection is driven by an objective function that evaluates possible future actions with respect to current, inferred beliefs about the world. Active inference at its core is independent from extrinsic rewards, resulting in a high level of robustness across e.g.\ different environments or agent morphologies. In the literature, paradigms that share this independence have been summarised under the notion of in…
Safety assurance of an industrial robotic control system using hardware/software co-verification
2022
As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend reinforces the importance of supplementing traditional, input-based testing and quality procedures which are widely used in industry today, with formal verification and model-checking methods. To this end, this paper focuses on a representative safety-critical system in an ABB industrial paint robot, namely the High-Voltage electrostatic Control system (HVC). The practical convergence of the high-voltage produced by the HVC, essential for safe operation, is f…
Depth-Adapted CNN for RGB-D cameras
2020
Conventional 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) extract features from an input image by applying linear filters. These filters compute the spatial coherence by weighting the photometric information on a fixed neighborhood without taking into account the geometric information. We tackle the problem of improving the classical RGB CNN methods by using the depth information provided by the RGB-D cameras. State-of-the-art approaches use depth as an additional channel or image (HHA) or pass from 2D CNN to 3D CNN. This paper proposes a novel and generic procedure to articulate both photometric and geometric information in CNN architecture. The depth data is represented as a 2D offset to adapt …
Random Walk in a N-cube Without Hamiltonian Cycle to Chaotic Pseudorandom Number Generation: Theoretical and Practical Considerations
2017
Designing a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) is a difficult and complex task. Many recent works have considered chaotic functions as the basis of built PRNGs: the quality of the output would indeed be an obvious consequence of some chaos properties. However, there is no direct reasoning that goes from chaotic functions to uniform distribution of the output. Moreover, embedding such kind of functions into a PRNG does not necessarily allow to get a chaotic output, which could be required for simulating some chaotic behaviors. In a previous work, some of the authors have proposed the idea of walking into a $\mathsf{N}$-cube where a balanced Hamiltonian cycle has been removed as the basis o…
RGB-Event Fusion for Moving Object Detection in Autonomous Driving
2022
Moving Object Detection (MOD) is a critical vision task for successfully achieving safe autonomous driving. Despite plausible results of deep learning methods, most existing approaches are only frame-based and may fail to reach reasonable performance when dealing with dynamic traffic participants. Recent advances in sensor technologies, especially the Event camera, can naturally complement the conventional camera approach to better model moving objects. However, event-based works often adopt a pre-defined time window for event representation, and simply integrate it to estimate image intensities from events, neglecting much of the rich temporal information from the available asynchronous ev…