Abstract

Overall capacity of a structure depends on the strength and deformation capacities of the individual component of the structure. In order to determine capacities beyond the elastic limits some form of nonlinear analysis such as the pushover procedure is required. This procedure uses a series of sequential elastic analyses, superimposed to approximate a force-displacement capacity diagram of the overall structure. Usually this analysis is performed using FEM and that too with major assumption in defining hinge mechanisms and target displacement. In this paper, a new method for analysis nonlinear static large deformation analysis of bare frame subjected to lateral load is proposed. First we developed the method and later four frames were taken and they were pushed up to failure. Results clearly show the capability of the proposed method.

Abstract

Motion segmentation is an inevitable component for mobile robotic systems such as the case with robots performing SLAM and collision avoidance in dynamic worlds. This paper proposes an incremental motion segmentation system that efficiently segments multiple moving objects and simultaneously build the map of the environment using visual SLAM modules. Multiple cues based on optical flow and two view geometry are integrated to achieve this segmentation. A dense optical flow algorithm is used for dense tracking of features. Motion potentials based on geometry are computed for each of these dense tracks. These geometric potentials along with the optical flow potentials are used to form a graph like structure. A graph based segmentation algorithm then clusters together nodes of similar potentials to form the eventual motion segments. Experimental results of high quality segmentation on different publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a framework for optimum steering input determination of all-wheel steer vehicles (AWSV) on rough terrains. The framework computes the steering input which minimizes the tracking error for a given trajectory. Unlike previous methodologies of computing steering inputs of car-like vehicles, the proposed methodology depends explicitly on the vehicle dynamics and can be extended to vehicle having arbitrary number of steering inputs. A fully generic framework has been used to derive the vehicle dynamics and a non-linear programming based constrained optimization approach has been used to compute the steering input considering the instantaneous vehicle dynamics, no-slip and contact constraints of the vehicle. All Wheel steer Vehicles have a special parallel steering ability where the instantaneous centre of rotation (ICR) is at infinity. The proposed framework automatically enables the vehicle to choose between parallel steer and normal operation depending on the error with respect to the desired trajectory. The efficacy of the proposed framework is proved by extensive uneven terrain simulations, for trajectories with continuous or discontinuous velocity profile.

Abstract

In this paper, we automate the traditional problem of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) by interleaving planning for exploring unknown environments by a mobile robot. We denote such planned SLAM systems as SPLAM (Simultaneous Planning Localization and Mapping). The main aim of SPLAM is to plan paths for the SLAM process such that the robot and map uncertainty upon execution of the path remains minimum and tractable. The planning is interleaved with SLAM and hence the terminology SPLAM. While typical SPLAM routines find paths when the robot traverses amidst known regions of the constructed map, herein we use the SPLAM formulation for an exploration like situation. Exploration is carried out through a frontier based approach where we identify multiple frontiers in the known map. Using Randomized Planning techniques we calculate various possible trajectories to all the known frontiers. We introduce a novel strategy for selecting frontiers which mimics Fast SLAM, selects a trajectory for robot motion that will minimize the map and robot state covariance. By using a Fast SLAM like approach for selecting frontiers we are able to decouple the robot and landmark covariance resulting in a faster selection of next best location, while maintaining the same kind of robustness of an EKF based SPLAM framework. We then compare our results with Shortest Path Algorithm and EKF based Planning. We show significant reduction in covariance when compared with shortest frontier first approach, while the uncertainties are comparable to EKF-SPLAM albeit at much faster planning times.

Abstract

Exploration is a core and important robotics area, whose applications include search and rescue robotics, planetary exploration etc. We know that this exploration task is best performed when using a multi-robot system. In this paper, we present an algorithm for multi-robot exploration of an unknown environment, taking into account the communication constraints between the robots. The aim of the robots is to explore the whole map as a pack, without losing communication throughout. The key task for us here is to allocate the target points for multiple robots so as to maximize the area explored and minimize the time and plan paths for the robots in such a way so as to avoid obstacles. A multi-robot exploration methodology is introduced similar to depth first strategy, that samples frontier points based on a metric function. This function aims to maximize the visibility gain or information gain while minimizing the distance to be travelled to the frontier points, such that the robots are within the limited communication distance of each other. The algorithm has been tested through simulation runs of various maps and results and evaluations have been presented based on it. The results effectively demonstrate that our algorithm allows robot pack to quickly accomplish the task of exploration and without the constraint ever breaking down. Here, we also present a comparative analysis of our algorithm with another exploration approach, which finds new areas based on population generation and utility calculation over the population. The results show tangible performance gain of this method over previous methods reported on exploration with limited communication constraints.

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of detecting road intersections. We present two approaches to solve the problem of intersection detection in an unstructured outdoor setting. The first is a natural extension of the popular VFH* obstacle avoidance algorithm. It detects intersections and tracks, over a period of time, the angles at which gaps in the robot's certainty grid (CG) are first observed. The second approach uses techniques from image processing and computational geometry on the certainty grid image, to extract a skeleton of the navigable region, thus providing the intersections. We show experimental results portraying intersection detection due to both methods and show the results. On the whole, we found that the robot was able to detect all possible intersections.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a novel framework of generating trajectories which explicitly satisfies the stability constraints such as no-slip and permanent ground contact on uneven terrain. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) It derives analytical functions depicting the evolution of the vehicle on uneven terrain. These functional descriptions enable us to have a fast evaluation of possible vehicle stability along various directions on the terrain and this information is used to control the shape of the trajectory. (2) It introduces a novel paradigm wherein non-linear time scaling brought about by parametrized exponential functions are used to modify the velocity and acceleration profile of the vehicle so that these satisfy the no-slip and contact constraints. We show that nonlinear time scaling manipulates velocity and acceleration profile in a versatile manner and consequently has exceptional utility not only in uneven terrain navigation but also in general in any problem where it is required to change the velocity of the robot while keeping the path unchanged like collision avoidance.

Abstract

This paper presents a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based implementation of Acceleration Velocity Obstacle based Collision Avoidance for an omni-directional robot with acceleration constraint. Specifically a parallel architecture for collision avoidance is proposed that portrays the advantages of FPGA implementation over the sequential implementation for same processor or clock speed. FPGA based robotics is seen to gain popularity due to low cost, portability, seamless interface to hardware and most importantly due to inherent parallelism enshrined in various robotic algorithms. FPGA realization of the algorithm in a simulation test bed vindicates its efficacy and comparison with sequential implementation is also highlighted. The paper proposes three different architectures for the implementation of the proposed algorithm viz. sequential architecture; a resource constrained pipelined architecture and a hybrid pipeline parallel architecture. The performances of those three architectures have been evaluated.

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust approach for image based floor detection and segmentation from sequence of images or video. In contrast to many previous approaches, which uses a priori knowledge of the surroundings, our method uses combination of modified sparse optical flow and planar homography for ground plane detection which is then combined with graph based segmentation for extraction of floor from images. We also propose a probabilistic framework which makes our method adaptive to the changes in the surroundings. We tested our algorithm on several common indoor environment scenarios and were able to extract floor even under challenging circumstances. We obtained extremely satisfactory results in various practical scenarios such as where the floor and non floor areas are of same color, in presence of textured flooring, and where illumination changes are steep.

Abstract

We present a probabilistic method of finding the next best viewpoint that maximizes the chances of finding an object in a known environment for an indoor mobile robot. We make use of the information that is available to a robot in the form of potential locations to search for an object. Extraction of these potential locations and their representation for exploration is explained. This work primarily focuses on placing the robot at its best location in the environment to detect, recognize an object and hence do object search. With experiments done on the exploration, object recognition individually we show the robustness of this approach for object search task. We analyse and compare our method with two other strategies for localizing the object empirically and show unequivocally that the strategy based on the probabilistic formalism in general performs better than the other two.