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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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Marta Diaz, Dennys Paillacho, & Cecilio Angulo. (2015). Evaluating Group-Robot Interaction in Crowded Public Spaces: A Week-Long Exploratory Study in the Wild with a Humanoid Robot Guiding Visitors Through a Science Museum. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, Vol. 12.
Abstract: This paper describes an exploratory study on group interaction with a robot-guide in an open large-scale busy environment. For an entire week a humanoid robot was deployed in the popular Cosmocaixa Science Museum in Barcelona and guided hundreds of people through the museum facilities. The main goal of this experience is to study in the wild the episodes of the robot guiding visitors to a requested destination focusing on the group behavior during displacement. The walking behavior follow-me and the face to face communication in a populated environment are analyzed in terms of guide- visitors interaction, grouping patterns and spatial formations. Results from observational data show that the space configurations spontaneously formed by the robot guide and visitors walking together did not always meet the robot communicative and navigational requirements for successful guidance. Therefore additional verbal and nonverbal prompts must be considered to regulate effectively the walking together and follow-me behaviors. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and recommendations for robot’s spatial behavior in dense crowded scenarios.
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Angel D. Sappa, Juan A. Carvajal, Cristhian A. Aguilera, Miguel Oliveira, Dennis G. Romero, & Boris X. Vintimilla. (2016). Wavelet-Based Visible and Infrared Image Fusion: A Comparative Study. Sensors Journal, Vol. 16, pp. 1–15.
Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and LongWave InfraRed (LWIR).
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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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