IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Early Access Articles

Early Access articles are made available in advance of the final electronic or print versions. Early Access articles are peer reviewed but may not be fully edited. They are fully citable from the moment they appear in IEEE Xplore.

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Displaying Results 1 - 25 of 39
• Control of Musculoskeletal Systems using Learned Dynamics Models

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1981 KB)

Controlling musculoskeletal systems, e.g. robots actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles, is a challenging task due to nonlinearities, hysteresis effects, massive actuator delay and unobservable dependencies such as temperature. Despite such difficulties, muscular systems offer many beneficial properties to achieve human-comparable performance in uncertain and fast-changing tasks. For example, mu... View full abstract»

• iBoW-LCD: An Appearance-based Loop Closure Detection Approach using Incremental Bags of Binary Words

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (366 KB)

In this paper, we introduce iBoW-LCD, a novel appearance-based loop closure detection method. The presented approach makes use of an incremental Bag-of-Words (BoW) scheme based on binary descriptors to retrieve previously seen similar images, avoiding any vocabulary training stage usually required by classic BoW models. In addition, to detect loop closures, iBoW-LCD builds on the concept of dynami... View full abstract»

• Automation of Train Cab Front Cleaning with a Robot Manipulator

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2388 KB)

In this work we present a control and trajectory tracking approach for wiping the train cab front panels, using a velocity controlled robotic manipulator and a force/torque sensor attached to its end-effector, without using any surface model or vision based surface detection. The control strategy consists in a simultaneous position and force controller, adapted from the Operational Space Formulati... View full abstract»

• Local Positioning System Using UWB Range Measurements for an Unmanned Blimp

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (6178 KB)

Unmanned blimps are a safe and reliable alternative to conventional drones when flying above people. On-board real time tracking of their pose and velocities is a necessary step towards autonomous navigation. There is a need for an easily deployable technology that is able to accurately and robustly estimate the pose and velocities of a blimp in 6 degrees of freedom, as well as unexpected applied ... View full abstract»

• Path planning and micromanipulation using a learned model

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (4369 KB)

This paper presents a system for manipulating micro-scale objects in an obstacle prone environment using push manipulations based on a learned model. The path planning is done using a RRT* search algorithm adapted for this setup and the manipulation is done using a regression model trained on manipulation data collected a priori. This model is used to capture the dynamics of the micro-part and it'... View full abstract»

• Efficient Object Search with Belief Road Map Using Mobile Robot

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1944 KB)

This paper describes a pipeline for autonomous object search using a mobile robot. The robot is required to efficiently find an object in an unknown environment. In this paper, we formulate the object search problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The semantic information of the room types and the object is utilized for training the belief distribution in the POMDP. We u... View full abstract»

• State Estimation Using the CoG Candidates for Sit-to-Stand Support System User

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2492 KB)

Various support systems have been developed to support elderly people, and the demand for indoor support system has increased. It is important to support not only walking but also to support sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit motions. We develop a support system for indoor use that depends on the user's state. Although it is useful for assistive devices to be able to select how to support users based o... View full abstract»

• Fruit Quantity and Ripeness Estimation using a Robotic Vision System

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2073 KB)

Accurate localisation of crop remains highly challenging in unstructured environments such as farms. Many developed systems still rely on the use of hand selected features for crop identification and often neglect the estimation of crop quantity and ripeness, which is key to assigning labor during farming processes. To alleviate these limitations we present a robotic vision system that can accurat... View full abstract»

• Integrating Rotations using Non-Unit Quaternions

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1433 KB)

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a method for integration of rotations using non-unit quaternions. Unit quaternions are commonly used to represent rotation, in which case the rotation operation involves the conjugate of the unit quaternion. However, based on the more general rotation operation involving the quaternion inverse, a redundant mapping can be defined from all nonzero quaternion... View full abstract»

• Super-High-Purity Seed Sorter using Low-latency Image-Recognition based on Deep Learning

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (4361 KB)

Most commercial optical sorting systems are designed to achieve high throughput, so they use a naive low-latency image processing for object identification. These naive low-latency algorithms have difficulty in accurately identifying objects with various shapes, textures, sizes, and colors, so the purity of sorted objects is degraded. Current deep learning technology enables robust image detection... View full abstract»

• Automatic Segmentation of Tree Structure from Point Cloud Data

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (3939 KB)

Methods for capturing and modeling vegetation such as trees or plants typically distinguish between two components -- branch skeleton and foliage. Current methods do not provide quantitatively accurate tree structure and foliage density needed for applications such as visualization, inspection, or to estimate vegetation parameters. This paper describes an automatic method for segmenting 3D point c... View full abstract»

• 3D Soil Compaction Mapping through Kriging-based Exploration with a Mobile Robot

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2607 KB)

This paper presents an automated method for creating spatial maps of soil condition with an outdoor mobile robot. Effective soil mapping on farms can enhance yields, reduce inputs and help protect the environment. Traditionally, data are collected manually at an arbitrary set of locations, then soil maps are constructed offline using Kriging, a form of Gaussian process regression. This process is ... View full abstract»

• SuMo-SS: Submodular Optimization Sensor Scattering for Deploying Sensor Networks by Drones

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1625 KB)

To meet the immediate needs of environmental monitoring or hazardous event detection, we consider the automatic deployment of a group of low-cost or disposable sensors by a drone. Introducing sensors by drones to an environment instead of humans has advantages in terms of worker safety and time requirements. In this study, we define "sensor scattering (SS)" as the problem of maximizing the informa... View full abstract»

• Robust Long-Term Registration of UAV Images of Crop Fields for Precision Agriculture

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (4982 KB)

Continuous crop monitoring is an important aspect of precision agriculture and requires the registration of sensor data over longer periods of time. Often, fields are monitored using cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) but strong changes in the visual appearance of the growing crops and the field itself poses serious challenges to conventional image registration methods. In this pap... View full abstract»

• Communication Model-Task Pairing in Artificial Swarm Design

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2740 KB)

Unraveling the nature of the communication model that governs which two individuals in a swarm interact with each other is an important line of inquiry in the collective behavior sciences. A number of models have been proposed in the biological swarm literature, with the leading models being the metric, topological, and visual models. The hypothesis evaluated in this manuscript is whether the choi... View full abstract»

• Probabilistic Terrain Mapping for Mobile Robots with Uncertain Localization

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (3161 KB)

Mobile robots build on accurate, real-time mapping with onboard range sensors to achieve autonomous navigation over rough terrain. Existing approaches often rely on absolute localization based on tracking of external geometric or visual features. To circumvent the reliability-issues of these approaches, we propose a novel terrain mapping method which bases on proprioceptive localization from kinem... View full abstract»

• Research on Scheduling of Iron and Steel Scrap Steelmaking and Continuous Casting Process Aiming at Power Saving and Carbon Emissions Reducing

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (694 KB)

Iron and steel scrap could substitute ironstone as the raw material for steelmaking and continuous casting production, and effectively reduce emissions of waste gas, water, and residue. The iron and steel scrap steelmaking and continuous casting (ISSSC) process is a compact production process involving scrap steel as raw material, electric arc furnace (AF), refining (RH/CAS/KIP/LF) and continuous ... View full abstract»

• Decentralized Ergodic Control: Distribution-Driven Sensing and Exploration for Multi-Agent Systems

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1564 KB)

We present a decentralized ergodic control for time-varying area coverage for multiple agents with nonlinear dynamics. Ergodic control allows us to specify distributions as objectives for area coverage problems for nonlinear robotic systems as a closed-form controller. We derive a variation to the ergodic control policy that can be used with consensus to enable a fully decentralized multi-agent co... View full abstract»

• A Multimodal Classifier Generative Adversarial Network for Carry and Place Tasks from Ambiguous Language Instructions

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2247 KB)

This paper focuses on a multimodal language understanding method for "Carry and Place" tasks with domestic service robots. We address the case of ambiguous instructions, that is when the target area is not specified. For instance "Put away the milk and cereal." is a natural instruction where there is ambiguity on the target area, considering daily life environments. Conventionally, this instructio... View full abstract»

• Computing The Forward Reachable Set for a Multirotor Under First-Order Aerodynamic Effects

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (2750 KB)

Collision avoidance plays a crucial role in safe multirotor flight in cluttered environments. Even though a given reference trajectory is designed to be collision free, it might lead to collision due to imperfect tracking caused by external disturbances. In this work, we tackle this problem by computing the Forward Reachable Set (FRS), which is the set of positions and velocities that a multirotor... View full abstract»

• Analysis of morphology-based features for classification of crop and weeds in precision agriculture

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (4210 KB)

Determining the types of vegetation present in an image is a core step in many precision agriculture tasks. Once the plant types are known, a system can reach further decisions on treatments needed. In this paper, we focus on grid- and pixel-based approaches for classification of crops versus weeds, especially for complex cases involving overlapping plants and partial occlusion. We examine the ben... View full abstract»

• Integrating Deep Semantic Segmentation into 3D Point Cloud Registration

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (806 KB)

Point cloud registration is the task of aligning 3D scans of the same environment captured from different poses. When semantic information is available for the points, it can be used as a prior in the search for correspondences to improve registration. Semantic-assisted Normal Distributions Transform (SE-NDT) is a new registration algorithm that reduces the complexity of the problem by using the s... View full abstract»

• Map-Reduce-style Job Offloading Using Historical Manufacturing Behavior for Edge Devices in Smart Factory

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1069 KB)

For smart factories in the Industry 4.0 era, edge devices can be used to run intelligent software packages (i.e., manufacturing services) to support manufacturing activities of production equipment. However, this kind of edge device may fail to provide designed functionalities in time when it encounters a sudden high-computation load (called a SHC job) that cannot be executed by the edge device it... View full abstract»

• DCOP: Dubins Correlated Orienteering Problem Optimising sensing missions of a non-holonomic vehicle under budget constraints

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1339 KB)

The increased deployment of mobile robotic platforms in the field has been facilitated by advances in robotic technology. The dynamic nature of the operating environment can constrain the robotic mission execution in terms of required time or energy. Current solutions for providing optimal and optimised plans for the resource constrained sensing mission planning only consider holonomic vehicles. T... View full abstract»

• Disturbance Observer Based Hovering Control of Quadrotor Tail-sitter VTOL UAVs Using H-infinity Synthesis

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s): 1
| | PDF (1873 KB)

Hybrid VTOL UAVs such as tail-sitters allow several key maneuvers such as vertical takeoff, landing, and hovering while at the same time maintaining superior aerodynamic efficiency at level flight. However, the large wing area of a tail-sitter at hovering makes it rather sensitive to the cross wind. In this paper, we present a disturbance observer (DOB) based control method to improve its hovering... View full abstract»

Aims & Scope

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) publishes peer-reviewed articles that provide a timely and concise account of innovative research ideas and application results, reporting significant theoretical findings and application case studies in areas of robotics and automation.

Full Aims & Scope

Meet Our Editors

Editor-in-Chief

Allison Okamura
Department: Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University
Stanford,  California  USA 94305-4021