2016 |
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Miguel Oliveira, Vítor Santos, Angel D. Sappa, Paulo Dias, & A. Paulo Moreira. (2016). Incremental Scenario Representations for Autonomous Driving using Geometric Polygonal Primitives. Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, Vol. 83, pp. 312–325.
Abstract: When an autonomous vehicle is traveling through some scenario it receives a continuous stream of sensor data. This sensor data arrives in an asynchronous fashion and often contains overlapping or redundant information. Thus, it is not trivial how a representation of the environment observed by the vehicle can be created and updated over time. This paper presents a novel methodology to compute an incremental 3D representation of a scenario from 3D range measurements. We propose to use macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scenario. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms designed to update the geometric polygonal primitives over time whenever fresh sensor data is collected. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene, and that it is computationally very efficient when compared to other reconstruction techniques.
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Miguel Oliveira, Vítor Santos, Angel D. Sappa, Paulo Dias, & A. Paulo Moreira. (2016). Incremental Texture Mapping for Autonomous Driving. Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, Vol. 84, pp. 113–128.
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles have a large number of on-board sensors, not only for providing coverage all around the vehicle, but also to ensure multi-modality in the observation of the scene. Because of this, it is not trivial to come up with a single, unique representation that feeds from the data given by all these sensors. We propose an algorithm which is capable of mapping texture collected from vision based sensors onto a geometric description of the scenario constructed from data provided by 3D sensors. The algorithm uses a constrained Delaunay triangulation to produce a mesh which is updated using a specially devised sequence of operations. These enforce a partial configuration of the mesh that avoids bad quality textures and ensures that there are no gaps in the texture. Results show that this algorithm is capable of producing fine quality textures.
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Miguel Realpe, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Ljubo Vlacic. (2016). A Fault Tolerant Perception system for autonomous vehicles. In 35th Chinese Control Conference (CCC2016), International Conference on, Chengdu (pp. 1–6).
Abstract: Driverless vehicles are currently being tested on public roads in order to examine their ability to perform in a safe and reliable way in real world situations. However, the long-term reliable operation of a vehicle’s diverse sensors and the effects of potential sensor faults in the vehicle system have not been tested yet. This paper is proposing a sensor fusion architecture that minimizes the influence of a sensor fault. Experimental results are presented simulating faults by introducing displacements in the sensor information from the KITTI dataset.
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Miguel Realpe, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Ljubo Vlacic. (2016). Multi-sensor Fusion Module in a Fault Tolerant Perception System for Autonomous Vehicles. Journal of Automation and Control Engineering (JOACE), Vol. 4, pp. 430–436.
Abstract: Driverless vehicles are currently being tested on public roads in order to examine their ability to perform in a safe and reliable way in real world situations. However, the long-term reliable operation of a vehicle’s diverse sensors and the effects of potential sensor faults in the vehicle system have not been tested yet. This paper is proposing a sensor fusion architecture that minimizes the influence of a sensor fault. Experimental results are presented simulating faults by introducing displacements in the sensor information from the KITTI dataset.
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2015 |
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Cristhian A. Aguilera, Angel D. Sappa, & R. Toledo. (2015). LGHD: A feature descriptor for matching across non-linear intensity variations. In IEEE International Conference on, Quebec City, QC, 2015 (pp. 178–181). Quebec City, QC, Canada: IEEE.
Abstract: This paper presents a new feature descriptor suitable to the task of matching features points between images with nonlinear intensity variations. This includes image pairs with significant illuminations changes, multi-modal image pairs and multi-spectral image pairs. The proposed method describes the neighbourhood of feature points combining frequency and spatial information using multi-scale and multi-oriented Log- Gabor filters. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed approach and also the improvements with respect to the state of the art.
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Dennis G. Romero, A. Frizera, Angel D. Sappa, Boris X. Vintimilla, & T.F. Bastos. (2015). A predictive model for human activity recognition by observing actions and context. In ACIVS 2015 (Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems), International Conference on, Catania, Italy, 2015 (pp. 323–333).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel model to estimate human activities – a human activity is defined by a set of human actions. The proposed approach is based on the usage of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Bayesian inference through the continuous monitoring of human actions and its surrounding environment. In the current work human activities are inferred considering not only visual analysis but also additional resources; external sources of information, such as context information, are incorporated to contribute to the activity estimation. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the way the information is encoded, so that it can be later associated according to a predefined semantic structure. Hence, a pattern representing a given activity can be defined by a set of actions, plus contextual information or other kind of information that could be relevant to describe the activity. Experimental results with real data are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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Dennys Paillacho, Cecilio Angulo, & Marta Díaz. (2015). An Exploratory Study of Group-Robot Social Interactions in a Cultural Center. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2015, International Conference on, Hamburg, Germany, 2015.
Abstract: This article describes an exploratory study of social human-robot interaction with the experimental robotic platform MASHI. The experiences were carried out in La B`obila Cultural Center in Barcelona, Spain to study the visitor preferences, characterize the groups and their spatial relationships in this open and unstructured environment. Results showed that visitors prefers to play and dialogue with the robot. Children have the highest interest in interacting with the robot, more than young and adult visitors. Most of the groups consisted of more than 3 visitors, however the size of the groups during interactions was continuously changed. In static situations, the observed spatial relationships denotes a social cohesion in the human-robot interactions.
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Dennys Paillacho, F. Novillo, W. Agila., & V. Huilcapi. (2015). Impacto de las redes de comunicaciones en los Sistemas Robóticos de Control. Revista Politécnica, Vol. 35, pp. 97–102.
Abstract: El análisis de incidencia que tienen las redes de comunicaciones sobre el comportamiento de los sistemas robóticos de control en red muestra grandes dificultades cuando se quieren hacer evaluaciones de tipo analítico. Por tal razón, en este trabajo un análisis que utiliza una aproximación basada en simulación es propuesto, de manera que el comportamiento temporal y espacial de un sistema robótico de control en red pueda ser evaluado. Para tal efecto, se propone un entorno de validación mediante el cual una red de comunicaciones permita distribuir mensajes de control entre el controlador principal y los controladores remotos ubicados en cada articulación angular del robot manipulador planar. Las interacciones entre los componentes del sistema han sido modeladas mediante un sistema de capas. Dicho modelo es llevado a un entorno de simulación con la finalidad de analizar el impacto de distintos parámetros de comunicaciones (i.e. tipo de red, tasa de datos y tamaño de datos) sobre el ciclo de comunicación y el error de seguimiento de trayectoria en un sistema robótico.
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Julien Poujol, Cristhian A. Aguilera, Etienne Danos, Boris X. Vintimilla, Ricardo Toledo, & Angel D. Sappa. (2015). A visible-Thermal Fusion based Monocular Visual Odometry. In Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2015), International Conference on, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015 (Vol. 417, pp. 517–528).
Abstract: The manuscript evaluates the performance of a monocular visual odometry approach when images from different spectra are considered, both independently and fused. The objective behind this evaluation is to analyze if classical approaches can be improved when the given images, which are from different spectra, are fused and represented in new domains. The images in these new domains should have some of the following properties: i) more robust to noisy data; ii) less sensitive to changes (e.g., lighting); iii) more rich in descriptive information, among other. In particular in the current work two different image fusion strategies are considered. Firstly, images from the visible and thermal spectrum are fused using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Secondly, a monochrome threshold strategy is considered. The obtained representations are evaluated under a visual odometry framework, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, using different urban and semi-urban scenarios. Comparisons with both monocular-visible spectrum and monocular-infrared spectrum, are also provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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M. Oliveira, L. Seabra Lopes, G. Hyun Lim, S. Hamidreza Kasaei, Angel D. Sappa, & A. Tomé. (2015). Concurrent Learning of Visual Codebooks and Object Categories in Open- ended Domains. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, Hamburg, Germany, 2015 (pp. 2488–2495). Hamburg, Germany: IEEE.
Abstract: In open-ended domains, robots must continuously learn new object categories. When the training sets are created offline, it is not possible to ensure their representativeness with respect to the object categories and features the system will find when operating online. In the Bag of Words model, visual codebooks are usually constructed from training sets created offline. This might lead to non-discriminative visual words and, as a consequence, to poor recognition performance. This paper proposes a visual object recognition system which concurrently learns in an incremental and online fashion both the visual object category representations as well as the codebook words used to encode them. The codebook is defined using Gaussian Mixture Models which are updated using new object views. The approach contains similarities with the human visual object recognition system: evidence suggests that the development of recognition capabilities occurs on multiple levels and is sustained over large periods of time. Results show that the proposed system with concurrent learning of object categories and codebooks is capable of learning more categories, requiring less examples, and with similar accuracies, when compared to the classical Bag of Words approach using codebooks constructed offline.
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