Robotics Commons^™

Mechanical Design And Optimization Of An Interactive Animatronic Bald Eagle, Eric Burns

Phi Kappa Phi Research Symposium

Animatronics is a specialized sub-category of mechatronics, a fusion of mechanical and electrical engineering. The field has grown from small, individual projects into a major industry. As animatronics progress, mechanical engineers are pushed to design internal structures which occupy ever-decreasing spaces and to ensure designs can undergo maintenance and modifications smoothly. This research investigates methods of reducing space required for mechanisms and several other beneficial methods of development as well as varying satisfactions for audiences when exposed to actor-controlled systems rather than pre-scripted functions. The mechanical systems are designed using CAD software available at Georgia Southern. On-campus, resources are used ...

Computational Interpersonal Communication: Communication Studies And Spoken Dialogue Systems, David J. Gunkel Dr.

communication +1

With the advent of spoken dialogue systems (SDS), communication can no longer be considered a human-to-human transaction. It now involves machines. These mechanisms are not just a medium through which human messages pass, but now occupy the position of the other in social interactions. But the development of robust and efficient conversational agents is not just an engineering challenge. It also depends on research in human conversational behavior. It is the thesis of this paper that communication studies is best situated to respond to this need. The paper argues: 1) that research in communication can supply the information necessary to ...

Autonomous Android: Autonomous 3d Environment Mapping With Android Controlled Multicopters, Tate Glick Hawkersmith

Masters Theses

Autonomous robots are robotic platforms with a high degree of autonomy, programmed to perform various behaviors or tasks. They can either be semi-autonomous, only operable within the strict confines of their direct environment, or fully autonomous, capable of sensing and navigating their environments without any human interaction.

In this thesis, I focus on fully autonomous robotic platforms, specifically multicopters, controlled by an onboard Android-driven device, a widely available operating system for smartphones and tablets with over 1.4 billion active monthly users worldwide [Callaham 2015]. The main objective of this research is to create a plug and play solution for ...

Roborodentia Robot: Tektronix, Sean Yap

Computer Engineering

Tektronix is a robot created to compete in the 2016 Roborodentia Competition. This report details the full function and implementation of the robot.

Senior Project: Control System For An Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle, Tyler Mau, Joseph Mahoney

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

The Story Of Beyoncé: The Roborodentia 2016 Contestant, Brandon Arnold, Mana Kulkarni, Aaron Newberg, Jon Sleep

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Roborodentia 2016: Scorpion, Tyler Whalen

Computer Engineering

This report showcases my entry into the Roborodentia 2016 competition, and my senior project. I chose this project because robotics has always interested me, and this was a great opportunity to jump in headfirst.

I will step through my design decisions and detail all information necessary for replicating this build.

Roborodentia Xxi Robot, Jose A. Villa

Computer Engineering

This report covers the design and implementation of a robot built to compete in Roborodentia 2016.

Roborodentia Robot (Amazon Prime), Alec Cheung

Computer Science

Roborodentia is an annual autonomous robotics competition sponsored and hosted by Cal Poly. In the 2016 competition, participants are to design a robot that scores the most points by gathering rings from marked supply pegs and placing them onto marked scoring pegs. For Roborodentia I designed, constructed, and programmed a robot, named Amazon Prime, to compete.

Red Piston (Roborodentia), Gabriel Lee Hernandez, Davie Sy

Computer Science

Roborodentia is an annual robotics competition held during Cal Poly’s Open House showcase. Teams of one to three people come together to build an autonomous robot to typically collect rings for points. The specifications of the competition will be detailed in the problem statement. For Roborodentia 2016, we built a machine dubbed Red Piston to tackle on this year’s competition. The following report will detail the design process and implementation of our robot.

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely ...

3-D Shape Recovery From A Single Camera Image, Vijai Jayadevan, Aaron Michaux, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

3-D shape recovery is an ill-posed inverse problem which must be solved by using a priori constraints. We use symmetry and planarity constraints to recover 3-D shapes from a single image. Once we assume that the object to be reconstructed is symmetric, all that is left to do is to estimate the plane of symmetry and establish the symmetry correspondence between the various parts of the object. The edge map of the image of an object serves as a good representation of its 2-D shape and establishing symmetry correspondence means identifying pairs of symmetric curves in the edge map. The ...

A Cyber-Physical System, Andrew Davis, Dustin Bowe, Josiah Nagel

Montview Liberty University Journal of Undergraduate Research

The team was tasked with the creation of an autonomous cyber-physical system that could be continually developed as a post-capstone class by future STEM students and as a means to teach future engineering students. The strict definition of a cyber-physical system is a computation machine that networks with an embedded computer that performs a physical function. The autonomous aspect was achieved through two sonic sensors to monitor object distances in order to avoid walls and obstacles. The integrated system was based on the Intel Edison computation module. A primary goal for future addition is automation capabilities and machine learning applications.

Adaptive Kalman Filtering Methods For Low-Cost Gps/Ins Localization For Autonomous Vehicles, Adam Werries, John M. Dolan

Robotics Institute

For autonomous vehicles, navigation systems must be accurate enough to provide lane-level localization. Highaccuracy sensors are available but not cost-effective for production use. Although prone to significant error in poor circumstances, even low-cost GPS systems are able to correct Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) to limit the effects of dead reckoning error over short periods between sufficiently accurate GPS updates. Kalman filters (KF) are a standard approach for GPS/INS integration, but require careful tuning in order to achieve quality results. This creates a motivation for a KF which is able to adapt to different sensors and circumstances on its own ...

Robot Detection Using Gradient And Color Signatures, Megan Marie Maher

Honors Projects

Tasks which are simple for a human can be some of the most challenging for a robot. Finding and classifying objects in an image is a complex computer vision problem that computer scientists are constantly working to solve. In the context of the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL) Competition, in which humanoid robots are programmed to autonomously play soccer, identifying other robots on the field is an example of this difficult computer vision problem. Without obstacle detection in RoboCup, the robotic soccer players are unable to smoothly move around the field and can be penalized for walking into another robot ...

Inferring Intrinsic Beliefs Of Digital Images Using A Deep Autoencoder, Seok H. Lee

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Training a system of artificial neural networks on digital images is a big challenge. Often times digital images contain a large amount of information and values for artificial neural networks to understand. In this work, the inference model is proposed in order to absolve this problem. The inference model is composed of a parameterized autoencoder that endures the loss of information caused by the rescaling of images and transition model that predicts the effect of an action on the observation. To test the inference model, the images of a moving robotic arm were given as the data set. The inference ...

Efficient Algorithms For Clustering Polygonal Obstacles, Sabbir Kumar Manandhar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Clustering a set of points in Euclidean space is a well-known problem having applications in pattern recognition, document image analysis, big-data analytics, and robotics. While there are a lot of research publications for clustering point objects, only a few articles have been reported for clustering a given distribution of obstacles. In this thesis we examine the development of efficient algorithms for clustering a given set of convex obstacles in the 2D plane. One of the methods presented in this work uses a Voronoi diagram to extract obstacle clusters. We also consider the implementation issues of point/obstacle clustering algorithms.

Robust Monocular Flight In Cluttered Outdoor Environments, Shreyansh Daftry, Sam Zeng, Arbaaz Khan, Debadeepta Dey, Narek Melik-Barkhudarov, J. Andrew Bagnell, Martial Hebert

Robotics Institute

Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straightforward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring devices can be employed, robust methods for obstacle avoidance remains a challenging task for MAVs which operate at low altitude in cluttered unstructured environments. Due to payload and power constraints, it is necessary for such systems to have autonomous navigation and flight capabilities using mostly passive sensors such as cameras. In this paper, we describe a robust system that enables autonomous navigation of small agile quad-rotors at low altitude ...

Inference Machines For Nonparametric Filter Learning, Arun Venkatraman, Wen Sun, Martial Hebert, Byron Boots, J. Andrew Bagnell

Robotics Institute

Data-driven approaches for learning dynamic models for Bayesian filtering often try to maximize the data likelihood given parametric forms for the transition and observation models. However, this objective is usually nonconvex in the parametrization and can only be locally optimized. Furthermore, learning algorithms typically do not provide performance guarantees on the desired Bayesian filtering task. In this work, we propose using inference machines to directly optimize the filtering performance. Our procedure is capable of learning partially-observable systems when the state space is either unknown or known in advance. To accomplish this, we adapt PREDICTIVE STATE INFERENCE MACHINES (PSIMS) by introducing ...

Online Bellman Residual And Temporal Difference Algorithms With Predictive Error Guarantees, Wen Sun, J. Andrew Bagnell

Robotics Institute

We establish connections from optimizing Bellman Residual and Temporal Difference Loss to worstcase long-term predictive error. In the online learning framework, learning takes place over a sequence of trials with the goal of predicting a future discounted sum of rewards. Our first analysis shows that, together with a stability assumption, any no-regret online learning algorithm that minimizes Bellman error ensures small prediction error. Our second analysis shows that applying the family of online mirror descent algorithms on temporal difference loss also ensures small prediction error. No statistical assumptions are made on the sequence of observations, which could be nonMarkovian or ...