Robotics Commons^™

In-Situ Mechanical Tester, Andrrew Murach, Gustavo Marquez, Kosimo Tonn, Jake Vormbaum

Mechanical Engineering

Over the course of the 2022-23 Cal Poly SLO school year, a small tensile tester device was developed specifically for Dr. Long Wang to test thin film materials under a microscope and generate accurate force versus displacement graphs. A tensile tester was manufactured using purchased and machined components, electronics were consolidated in a separate box and connected, and a program and user interface were written to control the motion, provide custom inputs, and organize useful data for the researcher. Tests were conducted to compare the performance of the device to universal tensile testers available in the Composites lab. The device …

Using An Embedded System For A Quality Cup Of Coffee, Evan Powers, Joshua Stermer, Tsion Yohannes

2023 Symposium

Many coffee lovers spend up to $5 on a cup of coffee everyday. To save money one could make them at home, but a quality machine with PIDs start at $1000. Using an embedded system one could spend less than $50 and a few hours implement PIDs into an existing $400 machine that will last a lifetime. microcontroller. Learning C language combined with hardware implementation applied to cheap and simple everyday objects can improve everyday quality of life and save money.

This is challenging because we have to incorporate the additional circuitry into a pre established circuit with limited space, …

Targeted Adversarial Attacks Against Neural Network Trajectory Predictors, Kaiyuan Tan

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Trajectory prediction is an integral component of modern autonomous systems as it allows for envisioning future intentions of nearby moving agents. Due to the lack of other agents' dynamics and control policies, deep neural network (DNN) models are often employed for trajectory forecasting tasks. Although there exists an extensive literature on improving the accuracy of these models, there is a very limited number of works studying their robustness against adversarially crafted input trajectories. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a targeted adversarial attack against DNN models for trajectory forecasting tasks. We call the proposed attack TA4TP for …

Roboretrieve--In A Dual Role As A Hand-Held Surgical Robot And A Collaborative Robot End-Effector To Perform Spillage-Free Specimen Retrieval In Laparoscopy, Siqin Dong

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Recent advances in surgical robotics attempt to overcome limitations of manual surgery by augmenting the surgeon’s capabilities while performing suturing, incision, retraction, and retrieval tasks. This dissertation presents novel approaches for spillage-free specimen retrieval in confined spaces, targeted toward the surgical domain of minimally invasive robotic surgery. The retrieval task involves extraction of a resected specimen, residing in the abdominal cavity, completely outside of the patient’s body. A major challenge in this context is the spillage of content being retrieved, which may cause dissemination of malignancy. To address this challenge, this dissertation develops RoboRetrieve, a portable hand-held robot that …

Power Amplifier Based On Composite Injection-Voltaic Transistors, Nodira Batirdjanovna Alimova

Chemical Technology, Control and Management

The problem of high-current radio engineering devices is related to the fact that the use of high-power transistors and other semiconductor devices is limited by such a phenomenon as a secondary breakdown, in which there is a sharp decrease in the voltage on the device with simultaneous internal current lacing, and the device fails. To solve the problem of secondary breakdown, schemes have been proposed that operate stably at reverse voltage values 4-5 times higher than usual and at power dissipation 2-3 times higher than the maximum allowable power for an individual device. The problem is proposed to be solved …

Implementation Of Static Rfid Landmarks In Slam For Planogram Compliance, Brennan L. Drake

Honors College Theses

Autonomous robotic systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and exhibit robust solutions in a wide range of applications. They face many obstacles with the foremost of which being SLAM, or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, that encompasses both creation of the map of an unknown environment and localization of the robot in said environment. In this experiment, researchers propose the use of RFID tags in a semi-dynamic commercial environment to provide concrete landmarks for localization and mapping in pursuit of increased locational certainty. With this obtained, the ultimate goal of the research is to construct a robotics platform for …

Assessing High Dynamic Range Imagery Performance For Object Detection In Maritime Environments, Erasmo Landaeta

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The field of autonomous robotics has benefited from the implementation of convolutional neural networks in vision-based situational awareness. These strategies help identify surface obstacles and nearby vessels. This study proposes the introduction of high dynamic range cameras on autonomous surface vessels because these cameras capture images at different levels of exposure revealing more detail than fixed exposure cameras. To see if this introduction will be beneficial for autonomous vessels this research will create a dataset of labeled high dynamic range images and single exposure images, then train object detection networks with these datasets to compare the performance of these networks. …

Reactive Particle Swarm Control Architecture And Application For Scalar Field Adaptive Navigation, Shae Taylor Hart

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Adaptive navigation is a subcategory of navigation techniques that attempts to identify goal locations that satisfy specific criteria in an unknown area. In 2D scalar field adaptive navigation (SFAN), primitives navigate to or along features of interest in an unknown, possibly time-varying, planar scalar field. Features include extrema, contours, and fronts. This work solves the 2D SFAN problem using swarm robotic techniques. Robotic swarms are a subset of multi-robot systems that use decentralized control of simple interchangeable robots to perform collective actions. A subgroup of swarms is the Reactive Particle Swarm (RPS), characterized based on its simplicity, reactivity to its …

Neural Network Fusion Of Multi-Modal Sensor Data For Autonomous Surface Vessels, David J. Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Autonomous surface vessels (ASV) can potentially improve the safety of vessels traditionally operated by humans. Despite advancements in autonomous on-road vehicles, many of these advancements have yet to be realized for ASVs. This is primarily due to lacking ASV sensing platforms and public datasets for ASV-based perception research. To that end, this dissertation demonstrates the design of a synchronized multi-modal sensing platform for ASVs utilizing GPS/INS, LiDAR, LWIR cameras, HDR camera, and high-resolution cameras. The sensing platform is designed to maximize the overlap of sensors for multi-modal research and provides accurate intrinsic and extrinsic calibration between each sensor. Furthermore, the …

Accurate Indoor Navigation System Based On Imu/Lp-Mm Integrated Method Using Kalman Filter Algorithm, Abdullah Mohammed Bahasan

Hadhramout University Journal of Natural & Applied Sciences

Abstract

The demand for navigation systems is rapidly increasing, especially in indoor environments which the signal of GPS is not available. Therefore the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) system is a suitable navigation system in such indoor environments. It usually consists of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes to determine position, velocity and attitude information, respectively, without need of any external source. But this type of navigation systems has errors growth with time due to accelerometers and gyroscopes drifts. This paper introduces indoor navigation system based on integrated IMU navigation system with proposed system called Landmarks Points-Map Matching (LP-MM) system using Kalman …

Ai Applications On Planetary Rovers, Alexis David Pascual

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The rise in the number of robotic missions to space is paving the way for the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the autonomy and augmentation of rover operations. For one, more rovers mean more images, and more images mean more data bandwidth required for downlinking as well as more mental bandwidth for analyzing the images. On the other hand, light-weight, low-powered microrover platforms are being developed to accommodate the drive for planetary exploration. As a result of the mass and power constraints, these microrover platforms will not carry typical navigational instruments like a stereocamera or a laser …

Chatgpt As Metamorphosis Designer For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai): A Conceptual Investigation, Amarjit Kumar Singh (Library Assistant), Dr. Pankaj Mathur (Deputy Librarian)

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to explore ChatGPT’s potential as an innovative designer tool for the future development of artificial intelligence. Specifically, this conceptual investigation aims to analyze ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tool for designing and developing near about human intelligent systems for futuristic used and developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Also with the helps of this paper, researchers are analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT as a tool, and identify possible areas for improvement in its development and implementation. This investigation focused on the various features and functions of ChatGPT that …

Reference Frames In Human Sensory, Motor, And Cognitive Processing, Dongcheng He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reference-frames, or coordinate systems, are used to express properties and relationships of objects in the environment. While the use of reference-frames is well understood in physical sciences, how the brain uses reference-frames remains a fundamental question. The goal of this dissertation is to reach a better understanding of reference-frames in human perceptual, motor, and cognitive processing. In the first project, we study reference-frames in perception and develop a model to explain the transition from egocentric (based on the observer) to exocentric (based outside the observer) reference-frames to account for the perception of relative motion. In a second project, we focus …

Gesture-Based American Sign Language (Asl) Translation System, Kayleigh Moore, Stefano Pecile, Mahdi Yazdanpour

Posters-at-the-Capitol

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 5% of the world's population experiences severe hearing loss. Approximately 9 million people in the U.S. are either functionally deaf or have mild-to-severe hearing loss. In this research, we designed and implemented a translation interface which turns American Sign Language (ASL) gestures captured from a pair of soft robotic gloves into text and speech instantaneously.

We used a combination of flex sensors, tactile sensors, and accelerometers to recognize hand gestures and to record hand and fingers positions, movements, and orientations. The digitized captured gestures were then sent to our proposed translation interface …

A Camera-Only Based Approach To Traffic Parameter Estimation Using Mobile Observer Methods, Temitope D. Jegede

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As vehicles become more modern, a large majority of vehicles on the road will have the required sensors to smoothly interact with other vehicles and infrastructure on the road. There will be many benefits of this new connectivity between vehicles on the road but one of the most profound improvements will be in the area of road accident prevention. Vehicles will be able to share information vital to road safety to oncoming vehicles and vehicles that are occluded so they do not have a direct line of sight to see a pedestrian or another vehicle on the road.

Another advantage …

A Path Planning Framework For Multi-Agent Robotic Systems Based On Multivariate Skew-Normal Distributions, Peter Estephan

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis presents a path planning framework for a very-large-scale robotic (VLSR) system in an known obstacle environment, where the time-varying distributions of agents are applied to represent the multi-agent robotic system (MARS). A novel family of the multivariate skew-normal (MVSN) distributions is proposed based on the Bernoulli random field (BRF) referred to as the Bernoulli-random-field based skew-normal (BRF-SN) distribution. The proposed distributions are applied to model the agents’ distributions in an obstacle-deployed environment, where the obstacle effect is represented by a skew function and separated from the no-obstacle agents’ distributions. First, the obstacle layout is represented by a Hilbert …

Space Force Design Project, Emily Greene, Ashton Orosa, Julia Patek, Nathan Doty

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The objective of our research project is to develop a lab testbed composed of a curved surface to represent a spacecraft hull, a mobile robot equipped with repair tools, and a robotic arm equipped with a laser 3D scanner. This project is part of a larger grant to the University of Akron from Space Force and Air Research Labs. The lab testbed developed in this project will be used to assist in creating and testing a software and algorithm to inspect and repair spacecraft while in orbit. The project will involve researching spacecraft hulls to create an accurate simulation bed, …

Parallel Real Time Rrt*: An Rrt* Based Path Planning Process, David Yackzan

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

This thesis presents a new parallelized real-time path planning process. This process is an extension of the Real-Time Rapidly Exploring Random Trees* (RT-RRT*) algorithm developed by Naderi et al in 2015 [1]. The RT-RRT* algorithm was demonstrated on a simulated two-dimensional dynamic environment while finding paths to a varying target state. We demonstrate that the original algorithm is incapable of running at a sufficient rate for control of a 7-degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) robotic arm while maintaining a path planning tree in 7 dimensions. This limitation is due to the complexity of maintaining a tree in a high-dimensional space and the network …

Improving The Flexibility And Robustness Of Machine Tending Mobile Robots, Richard Ethan Hollingsworth

Theses and Dissertations

While traditional manufacturing production cells consist of a fixed base robot repetitively performing tasks, the Industry 5.0 flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) aims to bring Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulators (AIMMs) to the factory floor. Composed of a wheeled base and a robot arm, these collaborative robots (cobots) operate alongside people while autonomously performing tasks at different workstations. AIMMs have been tested in real production systems, but the development of the control algorithms necessary for automating a robot that is a combination of two cobots remains an open challenge before the large scale adoption of this technology occurs in industry. Currently popular …

Human Tracking Function For Robotic Dog, Andrew Sharkey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

With the increase the increase in automation and humans and robots working side by side, there is a need for a more organic way of controlling robots. The goal of this project is to create a control system for Boston dynamics robotic dog Spot that implements human tracking image software to follow humans using computer vision as well as using hand tracking image software to allow for control input through hand gestures.