Robotics Commons^™

A Ulysses Pact With Artificial Systems. How To Deliberately Change The Objective Spirit With Cultured Ai, Bruno Gransche

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

The article introduces a concept of cultured technology, i.e. intelligent systems capable of interacting with humans and showing (or simulating) manners, of following customs and of socio-sensitive considerations. Such technologies might, when deployed on a large scale, influence and change the realm of human customs, traditions, standards of acceptable behavior, etc. This realm is known as the "objective spirit" (Hegel), which usually is thought of as being historically changing but not subject to deliberate human design. The article investigates the question of whether the purposeful design of interactive technologies (as cultured technologies) could enable us to shape modes of …

Spring 2019

In The Loop

Lab Life: New and improved School of Computing labs inspire research in robotics and engineering; A Festival to Remember: Students thrive in film festival environments; Next Gen Data Scientists: Data Science Academy introduces high school students to the big world of data; A Well-Designed Design Colloquium; Game Face: "Sausage Sports Club: creator and CDM alumnus Chris Wade shares the story behind his playful Nintendo Switch game: Connected from Afar: Graduate student Sierra Sellman makes the most of her online degree program; Seen and Heard; Bravo! Bravo!

Quantified Measurement Of The Tilt Effect In A Family Of Café Wall Illusions, Nasim Nematzadeh Dr., David Martin Powers Prof.

MODVIS Workshop

This abstract explores the tilt effect in a family of Café Wall illusions using a Classical Gaussian Receptive Field model (CRF). Our model constructs an intermediate representation called edge map at multiple scales (Fig. 1) that reveals tilt cues and clues involved in the illusory perception of the Café Wall pattern. We investigate a wide range of parameters of the stimulus including mortar width, luminance, tiles contrast, and phase of the tile displacement (the stimuli in Fig. 2). We show that this simple bioplausible model, simulating the contrast sensitivity of the retinal ganglion cells, can not only detect the tilts …

The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The accelerated digitalisation of both people and business around the world today is having a huge impact on the investment management and advisory space. The addition of new and vastly larger data sets, as well as exponentially more sophisticated analytical tools to turn that data into usable information is constantly changing the way investments are decided on, made and managed.

Towards A Prototype Platform For Ros Integrations On A Ground Robot, Taylor Joseph Linville Whitaker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this work was to develop, evaluate, and demonstrate a prototype robot platform on which ROS integrations could be explored. With observations of features and requirements of existing industrial and service mobile ground robots, a platform was designed and outfitted with appropriate components to enable the most common operational-critical functionalities and account for unforeseen components and features. The resulting Arlo Demonstration Robot accommodates basic mapping, localization, and navigation in both two and three-dimensional space as well as additional safety and teleoperation features. The control system is centered around the Zybo Z7 FPGA SoC hosting a custom hardware design. …

3d Printed Smart Mobile, Bingfang Chen

Publications and Research

The goal of this research project is to design and build a prototype of a smart mobile robot to participate and compete in IEEE Micro-mouse and similar competitions. The robot has to find its way out of a maze as quickly as possible, by exploring and learning the paths in the maze. 3D printing technology will be used to build a lightweight robot frame so that it can move at a fast speed.

Modeling Of Complex Parts For Industrial Waterjet Cleaning, Braden James

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Industrial high-pressure waterjet cleaning is common to many industries. The modeling in this paper functions inside a collaborative robotic framework for high mix, low volume processes where human robot collaboration is beneficial. Automation of pressure washing is desirable for economic and ergonomic reasons. An automated cleaning system needs path simulation and analysis to give the operator insight into the predicted cleaning performance of the system. In this paper, ablation, the removal of a substrate coating by waterjet, is modeled for robotic cleaning operations. The model is designed to work with complex parts often found in spray cleaning operations, namely parts …

Comparison Of Lqr And Lqr-Mrac For Linear Tractor-Trailer Model, Kevin Richard Gasik

Master's Theses

The United States trucking industry is immense. Employing over three million drivers and traveling to every city in the country. Semi-Trucks travel millions of miles each week and encompass roads that civilians travel on. These vehicles should be safe and allow efficient travel for all. Autonomous vehicles have been discussed in controls for many decades. Now fleets of autonomous vehicles are beginning their integration into society. The ability to create an autonomous system requires domain and system specific knowledge. Approaches to implement a fully autonomous vehicle have been developed using different techniques in control systems such as Kalman Filters, Neural …

Design And Creation Of A System Of Machines To Automate Quality Control Processes For Atms, Miguel D. Pedrozo

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

This project is based around the quality control processes used to test ATMs. Currently, a person will manually run through each function of the ATM in order to find modes of failure. As the case with all repetitive jobs, it is an unwanted task and is simple enough to be automated. The new solution I propose allows for a system of devices to operate the functions of the ATM autonomously with little to no human intervention. Additionally, this solution is more reliable when diagnosing a problem as it will eventually communicate with the ATM directly in a closed loop system …

A Generative Human-Robot Motion Retargeting Approach Using A Single Rgbd Sensor, Sen Wang, Xinxin Zuo, Runxiao Wang, Ruigang Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The goal of human-robot motion retargeting is to let a robot follow the movements performed by a human subject. Typically in previous approaches, the human poses are precomputed from a human pose tracking system, after which the explicit joint mapping strategies are specified to apply the estimated poses to a target robot. However, there is not any generic mapping strategy that we can use to map the human joint to robots with different kinds of configurations. In this paper, we present a novel motion retargeting approach that combines the human pose estimation and the motion retargeting procedure in a unified …

End-To-End Learning: Using Neural Networks For Vehicle Control And Obstacle Avoidance, Keith Russell

Honors College Theses

End to End learning is a method of deep learning which has been used to great effect to solve complex problems which would normally be performed by humans. Within this thesis, a neural network was created to mimic the steering patterns of humans in highway driving situations. A Turtlebot was used in place of a car and was tested within a laboratory on a closed loop track to drive within the lanes created for it. The network architecture was based on that of Nvidia’s model which was used for predicting steering angles of a vehicle. The network was successfully trained …

Autonomous Watercraft Simulation And Programming, Nicholas J. Savino

Student Scholar Showcase

Automation of various modes of transportation is thought to make travel more safe and efficient. Over the past several decades, advances to semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles have led to advanced autopilot systems on planes and boats, and an increasing popularity of self-driving cars. We predicted the motion of an autonomous vehicle using simulations in Python. The simulation models the motion of a small scale watercraft, which can then be built and programmed using an Arduino Microcontroller. We examined different control methods for a simulated rescue craft to reach a target. We also examined the effects of different factors, such as …

Consensus-Based Robotic Formation Control, Satish Reddy Modugu

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

Exoskeleton, Vinu Casper, Liliana Fitzpatrick

Engineering and Technology Management Student Projects

This is a research about the marketing plan for exoskeleton wearable devices. The objective is to provide a meaningful Customer Value Proposition to the prospective customers.The Samsung company SWOT analysis is the basis for a marketing strategy. The exoskeleton features and market definition is included in the analysis. A competitor analysis of homogeneus exoskeletons providers is included to review the current market. An exhaustive customer analysis was performed to identify the customer needs as the input for the marketing plan development. The potential market was identified to learn about the exoskeleton market share opportunity. The exoskeleton global market is analyzed …

A Framework For Test & Evaluation Of Autonomous Systems Along The Virtuality-Reality Spectrum, Nathan D. Gonda

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Test & Evaluation of autonomous vehicles presents a challenge as the vehicles may have emergent behavior and it is frequently difficult to ascertain the reason for software decisions. Current Test & Evaluation approaches for autonomous systems place the vehicles in various operating scenarios to observe their behavior. However, this introduces dependencies between design and development lifecycle of the autonomous software and physical vehicle hardware. Simulation-based testing can alleviate the necessity to have physical hardware; however, it can be costly when transitioning the autonomous software to and from a simulation testing environment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a …

Integrating Mathematics And Educational Robotics: Simple Motion Planning, Ronald I. Greenberg, George K. Thiruvathukal, Sara T. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper shows how students can be guided to integrate elementary mathematical analyses with motion planning for typical educational robots. Rather than using calculus as in comprehensive works on motion planning, we show students can achieve interesting results using just simple linear regression tools and trigonometric analyses. Experiments with one robotics platform show that use of these tools can lead to passable navigation through dead reckoning even if students have limited experience with use of sensors, programming, and mathematics.

Effects Of Control Device And Task Complexity On Performance And Task Shedding During A Robotic Arm Task, Shelby K. Long

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The use of robotic arms across domains is increasing, but the relationship between control features and performance is not fully understood. The goal of this research was to investigate the difference in task performance when using two different control devices at high and low task complexities when participants can shed tasks to automation. In this experiment, 40 undergraduates (24 females) used two control devices, a Leap Motion controller and an Xbox controller, to teleoperate a robotic arm in a high or low complexity peg placement task. Simultaneously, participants were tasked with scanning images for tanks. During the experiment, participants had …

Robotic Motion Generation By Using Spatial-Temporal Patterns From Human Demonstrations, Yongqiang Huang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Robots excel in manufacturing facilities because the tasks are repetitive and do not change. However, when the tasks change, which happens in almost all tasks that humans perform daily, such as cutting, pouring, and grasping, etc., robots perform much worse. We aim at teaching robots to perform tasks that are subject to change using demonstrations collected from humans, a problem referred to as learning from demonstration (LfD).

LfD consists of two parts: the data of human demonstrations, and the algorithm that extracts knowledge from the data to perform the same motions. Similarly, this thesis is divided into two parts. The …

Force Feedback And Intelligent Workspace Selection For Legged Locomotion Over Uneven Terrain, John Rippetoe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Legged robots present an incredible opportunity for humanity to conduct dangerous operations such as search and rescue, disaster recovery, and planetary exploration without ever placing themselves in harms way. The ability of a leg to more freely dictate its shape, orientation, and length gives it tremendous mobility and adaptability demanded of a system intended for operation outside of a controlled environment. However, one only need look at the average cat, dog, or friendly neighborhood squirrel to understand the immense gap that exists between what is possible of legged systems and their current set of capabilities.

Areas of study relevant to …

End To End Satellite Servicing And Space Debris Management, Aman Chandra, Himangshu Kalita, Roberto Furfaro, Jekan Thanga

Space Traffic Management Conference

There is growing demand for satellite swarms and constellations for global positioning, remote sensing and relay communication in higher LEO orbits. This will result in many obsolete, damaged and abandoned satellites that will remain on-orbit beyond 25 years. These abandoned satellites and space debris maybe economically valuable orbital real-estate and resources that can be reused, repaired or upgraded for future use. Space traffic management is critical to repair damaged satellites, divert satellites into warehouse orbits and effectively deorbit satellites and space debris that are beyond repair and salvage. Current methods for on-orbit capture, servicing and repair require a large service …