Robotics Commons^™

Sensor-Based Legged Robot Homing Using Range-Only Target Localization, Vasileios Vasilopoulos, Omur Arslan, Avik De, Daniel E. Koditschek

Departmental Papers (ESE)

This paper demonstrates a fully sensor-based reactive homing behavior on a physical quadrupedal robot, using onboard sensors, in simple (convex obstacle-cluttered) unknown, GPS-denied environments. Its implementation is enabled by our empirical success in controlling the legged machine to approximate the (abstract) unicycle mechanics assumed by the navigation algorithm, and our proposed method of range-only target localization using particle filters.

For more information: Kod*lab

Answering Food Insecurity: Serving The Community With Food And Knowledge Using Technology, Courtney Simpson

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

The courses of Tech120, CGT110, and ENGT 180/181 and Red Gold at Purdue collaborated to design a robot that would plant and water a garden for a local community charter school. The students centered the project on the users’ needs for fresh food, nutrition education, and early exposure to STEM for children. The school, Anderson Preparatory Academy (APA), is comprised of many children who come from low-income families and are in the free or reduced lunch program. Inspired from “Farm Bot,” a similar system that allows for almost hands-free gardening, the “Boiler Bot” is designed to be scalable so ...

Implementation Of The Tickbot: Results And Implications For Modeling, Alexis White, Armin Bahrani, Amanda Devleeschower, Holly Gaff

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology: Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Developing Grounded Goals Through Instant Replay Learning, Lisa Meeden, Douglas S. Blank

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

This paper describes and tests a developmental architecture that enables a robot to explore its world, to find and remember interesting states, to associate these states with grounded goal representations, and to generate action sequences so that it can re-visit these states of interest. The model is composed of feed-forward neural networks that learn to make predictions at two levels through a dual mechanism of motor babbling for discovering the interesting goal states and instant replay learning for developing the grounded goal representations. We compare the performance of the model with grounded goal representations versus random goal representations, and find ...

Regulating Robo Advice Across The Financial Services Industry, Tom Baker, Benedict G. C. Dellaert

Faculty Scholarship

Automated financial product advisors – “robo advisors” – are emerging across the financial services industry, helping consumers choose investments, banking products, and insurance policies. Robo advisors have the potential to lower the cost and increase the quality and transparency of financial advice for consumers. But they also pose significant new challenges for regulators who are accustomed to assessing human intermediaries. A well-designed robo advisor will be honest and competent, and it will recommend only suitable products. Because humans design and implement robo advisors, however, honesty, competence, and suitability cannot simply be assumed. Moreover, robo advisors pose new scale risks that are different ...

Effects Of Anthropomorphism On Trust In Human-Robot Interaction, Keith R. Macarthur, William T. Shugars, Tracy L. Sanders, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Ani-Bot: A Mixed-Reality Ready Modular Robotics System, Zhuangying Xu, Yuanzhi Cao

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

DIY modular robotics has always had a strong appeal to makers and designers; being able to quickly design, build, and animate their own robots opens the possibility of bringing imaginations to life. However, current interfaces to control and program the DIY robot either lacks connection and consistency between the users and target (Graphical User Interface) or suffers from limited control capabilities due to the lack of versatility and functionality (Tangible User interface). We present Ani-Bot, a modular robotics system that allows users to construct Do-It-Yourself (DIY) robots and use mixed-reality approach to interact with them instantly. Ani-Bot enables novel user ...

Cyber-Physical System Characterization And Co-Regulation Of A Quadrotor Uas, Seth E. Doebbeling

Mechanical (and Materials) Engineering -- Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in which a host of real-time computational tasks contending for shared resources must be cooperatively managed to obtain mission objectives. Traditionally, control of the UAS is designed assuming a fixed, high sampling rate in order to maintain reliable performance and margins of stability. But emerging methods challenge this design by dynamically allocating resources to computational tasks, thereby affecting control and mission performance. To apply these emerging strategies, a characterization and understanding of the effects of timing on control and trajectory following performance is required. Going beyond traditional control evaluation techniques ...

Motion Planning For Simple Two-Wheeled Robots, Ronald I. Greenberg, Jeffery M. Karp

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper considers various simple ways of navigating in a 2-dimensianal territory with a two-wheeled robot of a type typical in educational robotics. We determine shortest paths under various modes of operation and compare.

Regulating By Robot: Administrative Decision Making In The Machine-Learning Era, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr

Faculty Scholarship

Machine-learning algorithms are transforming large segments of the economy, underlying everything from product marketing by online retailers to personalized search engines, and from advanced medical imaging to the software in self-driving cars. As machine learning’s use has expanded across all facets of society, anxiety has emerged about the intrusion of algorithmic machines into facets of life previously dependent on human judgment. Alarm bells sounding over the diffusion of artificial intelligence throughout the private sector only portend greater anxiety about digital robots replacing humans in the governmental sphere. A few administrative agencies have already begun to adopt this technology, while ...

The Following Robot, Juan D. Cerda, Matthew S. Kwan, Vi M. Le

Computer Engineering

The objective of this project is to design, build, and test an autonomous robot with an associated Android application. The robot uses on board inertial measurement sensors (magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope) and coordinates itself through Bluetooth communication with the similar built­in measurement sensors on the Android phone to mimic and follow movement. The Following Robot incorporates the same basic movement functionality as a typical RC car. The robot follows the user’s phone through an application on one’s phone. This application accesses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data and translates into appropriate conversions. Methods of tracking and calculating ...

Blend It Wine Blending Distribution System, Connor Clarry, Russell Temple, Matt Moren

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Farmbot Rfid Integration, Laura R. Swart

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project is to assist the company FarmBot improve their product by adding RFID tracking to the FarmBot robot. RFID tracking will allow the robot to select and pick up tool heads without any user interference.

Light Sensing Automated Blinds, Andrew B. Hodges, Ryan C. Flick

Electrical Engineering

This project is solving the problem of wasted energy within buildings and homes, because currently the lights turned on inside building do not utilize natural, ambient light from the sun. Rather than having unnecessary light from a light source, the automated light sensing smart blinds can sense the amount of light outside the window and in the room, and then adjust the angle of the blinds to save energy by utilizing the available outdoor light. This way, the light source will not be running at maximum power output while there is excess light coming through the window. This project aims ...

Remote Cable Gantry, Allen L. Bailey

Electrical Engineering

The Remote Cable Gantry is a robotic system that was initially intended to aid in the art of aerial videography. It was designed to enable novice and expert users alike to capture both video footage and audio from perspectives unachievable by current methods. This system uses a series of cables to control the position of a camera gimbal in a defined 3D space and, as a self-contained unit, is portable and easy to use. The Remote Cable Gantry offers a quiet, intuitive, and safe alternative to existing technology, which has been limiting the market and potential of aerial photography and ...

Empirical Validation Of A Spined Sagittal-Plane Quadrupedal Model, Jeff Duperret, Daniel Koditschek

Departmental Papers (ESE)

We document empirically stable bounding using an actively powered spine on the Inu quadrupedal robot, and propose a reduced-order model to capture the dynamics associated with this additional, actuated spine degree of freedom. This model is sufficiently accurate as to roughly describe the robots mass center trajectory during a bounding limit cycle, thus making it a potential option for low dimensional representations of spine actuation in steady-state legged locomotion.

An Internetworked Self-Driving Car System Of Systems, Jeremy Straub, Wafaa Amer, Christian Ames, Karanam R. Dayananda, Andrew Jones, Goutham Miryala, Nathan Olson, Noah Rockenback, Franklin Slaby, Santipab Tipparach, Samuel Fehringer, David Jedynak, Haiming Lou, Dakota Martin, Marc Olberding, Austin Oltmans, Alec Witte, Brady Goenner, Jessie Lee, Dylan Shipman

Jeremy Straub

Cybersecurity Considerations For An Interconnected Self Driving Car System Of Systems, Jeremy Straub, John Mcmillan, Brett Yaniero, Mitchell Schumacher, Abdullah Almosalami, Kelvin Boatey, Jordan Hartman

Jeremy Straub

Smooth Extensions Of Feedback Motion Planners Via Reference Governors, Omur Arslan, Daniel E. Koditschek

Departmental Papers (ESE)

In robotics, it is often practically and theoretically convenient to design motion planners for approximate low-order (e.g., position- or velocity-controlled) robot models first, and then adapt such reference planners to more accurate high-order (e.g., force/torque-controlled) robot models. In this paper, we introduce a novel provably correct approach to extend the applicability of low-order feedback motion planners to high-order robot models, while retaining stability and collision avoidance properties, as well as enforcing additional constraints that are specific to the high-order models. Our smooth extension framework leverages the idea of reference governors to separate the issues of stability and ...

Perception Of 3d Symmetrical And Near-Symmetrical Shapes, Vijai Jayadevan, Aaron Michaux, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.