A 3-level autonomous mobile robot navigation system designed by using reasoning/search approaches

This paper describes how soft computing methodologies such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence can be applied in a mobile robot navigation system. The navigation system that is considered has three navigation subsystems. The lower-level subsystem deals with the control of linear and angular volocities using a multivariable PI controller described with a full matrix. The position control of the mobile robot is at a medium level and is nonlinear. The nonlinear control design is implemented by a backstepping algorithm whose parameters are adjusted by a genetic algorithm. We propose a new extension of the controller mentioned, in order to rapidly decrease the control torques needed to achieve the desired position and orientation of the mobile robot. The high-level subsystem uses fuzzy logic and the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory to design a fusion of sensor data, map building, and path planning tasks. The fuzzy/evidence navigation based on the building of a local map, represented as an occupancy grid, with the time update is proven to be suitable for real-time applications. The path planning algorithm is based on a modified potential field method. In this algorithm, the fuzzy rules for selecting the relevant obstacles for robot motion are introduced. Also, suitable steps are taken to pull the robot out of the local minima. Particular attention is paid to detection of the robot’s trapped state and its avoidance. One of the main issues in this paper is to reduce the complexity of planning algorithms and minimize the cost of the search. The performance of the proposed system is investigated using a dynamic model of a mobile robot. Simulation results show a good quality of position tracking capabilities and obstacle avoidance behavior of the mobile robot.     

Vision Based Intelligent Wheel Chair Control: The Role of Vision and Inertial Sensing in Topological Navigation

This paper describes ongoing research on vision based mobile robot navigation for wheel chairs. After a guided tour through a natural environment while taking images at regular time intervals, natural landmarks are extracted to automatically build a topological map. Later on this map can be used for place recognition and navigation. We use visual servoing on the landmarks to steer the robot. In this paper, we investigate ways to improve the performance by incorporating inertial sensors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Symbolic Place Recognition in Voronoi-Based Maps by Using Hidden Markov Models

This article presents a new algorithm to recognize natural distinctive places such as corridors, halls, narrowings, corridors with doors opening on the left side, etc., from indoor environments using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). HMM give a stochastic solution which can be used to make decisions on localization, navigation and path-planning. The environment is modeled as a topo-geometric map which combines topological and geometric information. This map is obtained from a Voronoi diagram using measurements of a laser telemeter. The characteristics of topo-geometric map (nodes, number of edges adjacent to nodes, slope of edges, etc.) are used to learn and to recognize the different places typical of indoor environments. This map can be used in order to resolve several problems in robotics such as localization, navigation and path-planning. Our method of place recognition is a fast and effective way for a robot to recognize typical places of indoor environments from a topo-geometric map.     

Spatial Modelling for Mobile Robot’s Vision-based Navigation

We present an algorithm to model 3D workspace and to understand test scene for mobile robot’s navigation or human computer interaction. This has done by line-based modeling and recognition algorithm. Line-based recognition using 3D lines has been tried by many researchers however its reliability still needs improvement due to ambiguity of 3D line feature information from original images. To improve the outcome, we approach firstly to find real planes using given 3D lines and then to implement recognition process. The methods we use are principle component analysis (PCA), plane sweep, occlusion query, and iterative closest point (ICP). During the implementation, we also use 3D map information for localization. We apply this algorithm to real test scene images and find out our result can be useful to identify doors or walls in indoor environment with better efficiency.     

Household robots look and learn: environment modeling and localization from an omnidirectional vision system

The work illustrates that a catadioptric omnidirectional vision system can be successfully applied for basic mobile robot navigation tasks, such as localization and environment learning. In combination with other capabilities of such a sensor, such as the recognition and tracking of humans, and because the price of such systems can be made low, this system is particularly suited for systems that are expected to operate in offices and homes in the near future, such as robotic servant systems, entertainment robots, and help for the elderly and disabled.     

Landmark recognition with compact BoW histogram and ensemble ELM

Along with the rapid development of mobile terminal devices, landmark recognition applications based on mobile devices have been widely researched in recent years. Due to the fast response time requirement of mobile users, an accurate and efficient landmark recognition system is thus urgent for mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a landmark recognition framework by employing a novel discriminative feature selection method and the improved extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. The scalable vocabulary tree (SVT) is first used to generate a set of preliminary codewords for landmark images. An efficient codebook learning algorithm derived from the word mutual information and Visual Rank technique is proposed to filter out those unimportant codewords. Then, the selected visual words, as the codebook for image encoding, are used to produce a compact Bag-of-Words (BoW) histogram. The fast ELM algorithm and the ensemble approach using the ELM classifier are utilized for landmark recognition. Experiments on the Nanyang Technological University campus’s landmark database and the Fifteen Scene database are conducted to illustrate the advantages of the proposed framework.     

High‐precision control of tracked field robots in the presence of unknown traction coefficients

Accurate steering through crop rows that avoids crop damage is one of the most important tasks for agricultural robots utilized in various field operations, such as monitoring, mechanical weeding, or spraying. In practice, varying soil conditions can result in off‐track navigation due to unknown traction coefficients so that it can cause crop damage. To address this problem, this paper presents the development, application, and experimental results of a real‐time receding horizon estimation and control (RHEC) framework applied to a fully autonomous mobile robotic platform to increase its steering accuracy. Recent advances in cheap and fast microprocessors, as well as advances in solution methods for nonlinear optimization problems, have made nonlinear receding horizon control (RHC) and receding horizon estimation (RHE) methods suitable for field robots that require high‐frequency (milliseconds) updates. A real‐time RHEC framework is developed and applied to a fully autonomous mobile robotic platform designed by the authors for in‐field phenotyping applications in sorghum fields. Nonlinear RHE is used to estimate constrained states and parameters, and nonlinear RHC is designed based on an adaptive system model that contains time‐varying parameters. The capabilities of the real‐time RHEC framework are verified experimentally, and the results show an accurate tracking performance on a bumpy and wet soil field. The mean values of the Euclidean error and required computation time of the RHEC framework are equal to 0.0423 m and 0.88 ms, respectively.     

一种基于多层次MRF的多源图象融合算法

图象融合技术的主要目的是将多种图象传感器数据中的互补信息组合起来 ,使形成的新图象更适合于计算机处理 (如分割、特征提取和目标识别 )等 .在多层次 MRF模型的基础上 ,提出了一种应用于多源图象分类的图象融合算法 .该融合算法将定义在多层次图结构上的非线性因果 Markov模型与贝叶斯 SMAP(sequential m axi-mum a posteriori)最优化准则结合起来 ,克服了 MAP(maximum a posteriori)准则在多层次图结构上计算不合理的缺陷 .该算法可应用于多源遥感图象中的信息融合 ,使像素分类更精确 ,并解决多源海量数据的富集表示 .另外还利用合成图象与自然图象分别针对多层次 MRF模型的改进及算法中可最优化准则的不同进行了对比实验 ,结果表明 ,该算法具有许多优越性     

基于单目视觉的移动机器人导航算法研究进展

基于单目视觉的移动机器人导航的研究,涵盖了机器视觉、模式识别和多目标跟踪多个领域．其算法框架不仅成功应用于移动机器人导航,还为目标检测、识别与跟踪领域的研究提供了可供参考的模型．该综述将以算法发展历史为脉络,结合一些典型系统,通过对关键技术和算法结构的分析比较,总结算法本身的发展前景和由此发展起来的可供相关研究参考的算法框架．     

Detection of doors using a genetic visual fuzzy system for mobile robots

Doors are common objects in indoor environments and their detection can be used in robotic tasks such as map-building, navigation and positioning. This work presents a new approach to door-detection in indoor environments using computer vision. Doors are found in gray-level images by detecting the borders of their architraves. A variation of the Hough Transform is used in order to extract the segments in the image after applying the Canny edge detector. Features like length, direction, or distance between segments are used by a fuzzy system to analyze whether the relationship between them reveals the existence of doors. The system has been designed to detect rectangular doors typical of many indoor environments by the use of expert knowledge. Besides, a tuning mechanism based on a genetic algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the system according to the particularities of the environment in which it is going to be employed. A large database of images containing doors of our building, seen from different angles and distances, has been created to test the performance of the system before and after the tuning process. The system has shown the ability to detect rectangular doors under heavy perspective deformations and it is fast enough to be used for real-time applications in a mobile robot.     

Development of an algorithm for fast corner points detection

A method for detecting corner points in digital images is presented. The method is distinguished by high stability and efficiency compared with many method for detecting corner points developed earlier. The stability of corner detection is especially important in computer vision tasks connected with matching images of the same object, recovering digital surface models based on a set of images, and tracking objects. The overwhelming majority of algorithms detect equally well both correct corners and excessive points not corresponding to real corners of objects. The presented algorithm does have this disadvantage, and it can be used in frame-to-frame processing video in real time, e.g. in navigation systems of mobile robots and unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition, the proposed algorithm may be adapted to any data set since it is based on the machine learning method. The advantages of the developed method are demonstrated by an example of detection of corners in images of a typical hangar and in images with the international space station.     

环境特征提取在移动机器人导航中的应用

针对移动机器人在未知结构化环境中导航的需要,采用2D激光雷达作为主要传感器,对诸如墙壁、拐角、出口等这些典型的环境特征分别设计了一套有效的特征提取算法,并在该算法的基础上提出了基于特征点的移动机器人导航策略.该策略不需要里程计等其他一些内部传感器的信息,并且也不依赖具体的环境表述模型,从激光雷达扫描一次所得的数据中即可提取出环境特征,从而来指引机器人导航,实现起来快速可靠.应用到移动机器人MORCS-1上进行实验,取得了满意的结果,算法的实时性与鲁棒性得到了验证.     

Feature scalability for a low complexity face recognition with unconstrained spatial resolution

Automatic face recognition (FR) based applications in low computing power constrained systems, such as mobile and smart camera, have become particularly interesting topic in recent years. In this context, we present computationally efficient FR framework underpinning the so-called feature scalability algorithm. The proposed framework aims at implementing robust FR systems under low-computing power restriction and varying face resolution. Key beneficial property of our proposed FR framework based on feature scalability is to require low computational complexity without sacrificing a level of FR performance. To do this, using feature scalability algorithm enables to directly estimate the features (from pre-enrolled gallery images) that are well matched with the feature of an input probe image with different resolution (generally lower resolution) without any complex process. In addition, our method is helpful for relieving storage shortage problem as it does not require a large amount of training and gallery images with different face resolutions. Results show that our proposed feature scalability algorithm can be seamlessly embedded into state-of-the-art feature extraction methods extensively used for FR by achieving impressive recognition performance. Also, according to the results on computational complexity measurement, the proposed method is proven to be useful for substantially saving FR operation time.     

Automatic interpretation and coding of face images using flexiblemodels

Face images are difficult to interpret because they are highly variable. Sources of variability include individual appearance, 3D pose, facial expression, and lighting. We describe a compact parametrized model of facial appearance which takes into account all these sources of variability. The model represents both shape and gray-level appearance, and is created by performing a statistical analysis over a training set of face images. A robust multiresolution search algorithm is used to fit the model to faces in new images. This allows the main facial features to be located, and a set of shape, and gray-level appearance parameters to be recovered. A good approximation to a given face can be reconstructed using less than 100 of these parameters. This representation can be used for tasks such as image coding, person identification, 3D pose recovery, gender recognition, and expression recognition. Experimental results are presented for a database of 690 face images obtained under widely varying conditions of 3D pose, lighting, and facial expression. The system performs well on all the tasks listed above     

Generative Methods for Long-Term Place Recognition in Dynamic Scenes

This paper proposes a new framework for visual place recognition that incrementally learns models of each place and offers adaptability to dynamic elements in the scene. Traditional Bag-Of-Words (BOW) image-retrieval approaches to place recognition typically treat images in a holistic manner and are not capable of dealing with sub-scene dynamics, such as structural changes to a building façade or seasonal effects on foliage. However, by treating local features as observations of real-world landmarks in a scene that is observed repeatedly over a period of time, such dynamics can be modelled at a local level, and the spatio-temporal properties of each landmark can be independently updated incrementally. The method proposed models each place as a set of such landmarks and their geometric relationships. A new BOW filtering stage and geometric verification scheme are introduced to compute a similarity score between a query image and each scene model. As further training images are acquired for each place, the landmark properties are updated over time and in the long term, the model can adapt to dynamic behaviour in the scene. Results on an outdoor dataset of images captured along a 7 km path, over a period of 5 months, show an improvement in recognition performance when compared to state-of-the-art image retrieval approaches to place recognition.     

交通图像中机动车联合检测与识别

目的 机动车检测和属性识别是智能交通系统中的基本任务,现有的方法通常将检测和识别分开进行,导致以下两个问题：一是检测算法与识别任务在时序上存在耦合问题,增加了算法设计的复杂度;二是多个任务模块及其交互会增加计算负载,降低了智能交通系统的执行效率。为了解决以上问题,结合机动车辆视觉属性与检测之间的联系,提出机动车联合检测与识别方法,将检测和属性识别任务整合在一个算法框架中完成。方法 首先,将车辆颜色与类型融合到检测算法中,使用多任务学习框架对机动车的属性识别任务与定位任务建模,在检测的同时完成属性识别。进一步地,针对智能交通系统中数据分布不均匀、呈现长尾现象的问题,将多任务学习框架与在线难例挖掘算法相结合,降低该现象给模型优化带来的危害。结果 为了验证本文提出的方法,构建了拥有12 712幅图像,包含19 398辆机动车的道路车辆图像数据集。在该数据集上,使用机动车联合检测与识别算法取得了85.6%的检测精度,优于SSD （single shot detector）与Faster-RCNN检测方法。针对识别任务,本文方法对于颜色与类型属性的识别准确率分别达到了91.3%和91.8%。结论 车辆颜色和类型作为机动车的重要视觉特征,综合利用以上线索有助于提高机动车检测的效果,同时能够得到良好的属性识别性能。除此之外,使用一个高度集成的框架完成多个任务,可以提升智能交通系统的运行效率。     

Real-time operation of mobile robots using linear image arrays

A vision system using a pair of Linear Image Arrays is proposed for use with mobile robots for factory environments. This vision system was developed to perform the function of guidance, navigation, and obstacle detection. Using a standard 16-bit microprocessor for all of the computing tasks, low cost, small size, and low power consumption can be obtained. Real-time operation is achieved by using line images, which provide less data than two-dimensional images. However, this results in the need for special image processing techniques. Guidance and navigation are achieved using a new technique called the difference of medians, a robust method of detecting and locating known features in line images. Obstacle detection is performed by locating feature points in thresholded images and determining the distances to these feature points by template matching. A distance map is then generated, from which obstacles can be located. the algorithms used are chosen for their efficiency, with the result that a pair of images can be analyzed in less than 0.5 s.