2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

To enable robots to learn handover orientations from observing natural handovers, we conduct a user study to measure and compare natural handover orientations with giver-centered and receiver-centered handover orientations for twenty common objects. We use a distance minimization approach to compute mean handover orientations. We posit that, computed means of receiver-centered orientations could b... View full abstract»

In co-manipulation, humans and robots solve manipulation tasks together. Virtual guides are important tools for co-manipulation, as they constrain the movement of the robot to avoid undesirable effects, such as collisions with the environment. Defining virtual guides is often a laborious task requiring expert knowledge. This restricts the usefulness of virtual guides in environments where new task... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a finger-mounted walk controller for a complete paraplegic patient wearing a powered exoskeleton. The wearable controller mounted on both hands of the patient compensates impaired efferent and afferent nerves of the patient through healthy index fingers. The user controls his hip joint angle through force sensors of the controller as if he controls a position of his swing leg v... View full abstract»

In this paper, we propose an adaptive optimal control for a robot to collaborate with a human. Game theory and policy iteration are employed to analyze the interactive behaviors of the human and the robot in physical interactions. The human's control objective is estimated and it is used to adapt the robot's own objective, such that human-robot coordination can be achieved. An optimal control is d... View full abstract»

Enabling human-robot collaboration raises new challenges in safety-oriented robot design and control. Indices that quantitatively describe human injury due to a human-robot collision are needed to propose suitable pre-collision control strategies. This paper presents a novel model-based injury index built on the concept of dissipated kinetic energy in a potential inelastic impact. This quantity re... View full abstract»

In this work, we examine several wing designs for a motor-driven, flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. The full system consists of two wings independently driven by geared pager motors that include a spring in parallel with the output shaft. The linear transmission allows for resonant operation, while control is achieved by direct drive of the wing angle. Wings used in previous work... View full abstract»

This paper presents a fault tolerant control strategy based on an offline control mixing for an octorotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) regarding several rotor failures. This strategy consists of a set of explicit laws, computed offline, each one dedicated to a fault situation. The corresponding law is selected according to the output of a fault detection and isolation (FDI) module. This module is... View full abstract»

Seagoing vessels have to undergo regular visual inspections in order to detect the typical defective situations affecting metallic structures, such as cracks and corrosion. These inspections are currently performed by ship surveyors manually at a great cost. To make ship inspections safer and more cost-efficient, this paper presents a Micro-Aerial Vehicle (MAV) intended for visual inspection and b... View full abstract»

Autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) in a-priori unknown environments is one of the most challenging problems in robotics. First, a MAV has to incrementally build a 3D geometric map from raw sensor data. Then, based on the mapping information, the path planner has to search for a cost-optimal trajectory to the goal in real-time. It is common practice to discretize the search space... View full abstract»

Despite having achieved unconstrained stable flight, the insect-scale flapping-wing robot is still tethered for power and control. Towards the goal of operating a biologically-inspired robot autonomously outside of laboratory conditions. In this paper, we simulate outdoor disturbances in the laboratory setting and investigate the effects of wind gusts on the flight dynamics of a millimeter-scale f... View full abstract»

This paper presents a trajectory tracking control strategy based on the subspace stabilization approach to accurately manipulate an under-actuated flying robot from a known initial state to the desired terminal state. To facilitate the development of this tracking strategy, the dynamical model of the quadrotor is firstly proposed. Subsequently, an optimal trajectory generation algorithm is adopted... View full abstract»

Image feature descriptors composed of a series of binary intensity comparisons yield substantial memory and runtime improvements over conventional descriptors, but are sensitive to viewpoint changes in ways that vary per feature. We propose a method to improve the matching performance of such descriptors by specifically reasoning about the reliability of test results on a feature-by-feature basis.... View full abstract»

We propose a new method for obtaining object candidates in 3D space. Our method requires no learning, has no limitation of object properties such as compactness or symmetry, and therefore produces object candidates using a completely general approach. This method is a simple combination of Selective Search, which is a non-learning-based objectness detector working in 2D images, and a supervoxel se... View full abstract»

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate a temporal consistent semantic map for 3D indoor scenes. In contrast to previous techniques which generate the semantic map on the whole global scene immediately or smooth the semantic predictions by a graph model, we intend to discover temporal information over RGB-D images and leverage it to enforce the label consistency. Our method contains... View full abstract»

This work presents a flexible system to reconstruct 3D models of objects captured with an RGB-D sensor. A major advantage of the method is that unlike other modelling tools, our reconstruction pipeline allows the user to acquire a full 3D model of the object. This is achieved by acquiring several partial 3D models in different sessions-each individual session presenting the object of interest in d... View full abstract»

Vessel maintenance entails periodic visual inspections of internal and external parts of the hull in order to detect the typical defective situations affecting metallic structures. Nowadays, robots are becoming more and more important regarding these inspection tasks, since they can collect the requested information and, thus, prevent humans from performing tedious, and even dangerous tasks becaus... View full abstract»

Visual Odometry (VO) is a proven technology for planetary exploration rovers, facilitating their localization with a small error over medium-sized trajectories. However, due to VO's incremental mode of operation, its estimation error accumulates over time, resulting in considerable drift for long trajectories. This paper proposes a global localization method that counters VO drift by matching boul... View full abstract»

Incorrect landmark and loop closure measurements can cause standard SLAM algorithms to fail catastrophically. Recently, several SLAM algorithms have been proposed that are robust to loop closure errors, but it is shown in this paper that they cannot provide robust solutions when landmark measurement errors occur. The root cause of this problem is that the robust SLAM algorithms only focus on gener... View full abstract»

State-of-the-art techniques for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) employ iterative nonlinear optimization methods to compute an estimate for robot poses. While these techniques often work well in practice, they do not provide guarantees on the quality of the estimate. This paper shows that Lagrangian duality is a powerful tool to assess the quality of a given candidate solution. Our con... View full abstract»

We develop and evaluate methods based on a novel data compression strategy for visual SLAM that uses traveled trajectory analysis. Beyond compressing scene structure based purely on geometry, we aim at developing compact map representations that are useful for re-exploration while preserving scene structure. Our work is evaluated on data collected from a visual sensor and exploits the information ... View full abstract»

We propose a real-time, direct monocular SLAM method for omnidirectional or wide field-of-view fisheye cameras. Both tracking (direct image alignment) and mapping (pixel-wise distance filtering) are directly formulated for the unified omnidirectional model, which can model central imaging devices with a field of view above 180°. This is in contrast to existing direct mono-SLAM approaches li... View full abstract»

Nowadays real time visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms exist and rely on consistent measurements across multiple views. In indoor environments, where majority of robot's activity takes place, severe occlusions can occur, e.g., when turning around a corner or moving from one room to another. In these situations, SLAM algorithms can not establish correspondences across vie... View full abstract»

This paper shows how to carry out batch continuous-time trajectory estimation for bodies translating and rotating in three-dimensional (3D) space, using a very efficient form of Gaussian-process (GP) regression. The method is fast, singularity-free, uses a physically motivated prior (the mean is constant body-centric velocity), and permits trajectory queries at arbitrary times through GP interpola... View full abstract»

A novel method for sensing local pressure inside a microfluidic device is proposed and developed. The main advantage of the method is that the pressure can be visually seen without attaching any electrical wire or instrument. The method can also be easily integrated into applications, such as micro-robots, because of its single-layer design. The working principle is based on the deformation of Pol... View full abstract»