Engineering Commons^™

Developing A Flexible System For A Friendly Robot To Ease Dementia (Fred) Using Cloud Technologies And Software Design Patterns, Robert James Bray

Masters Theses

In this work, we designed two prototypes for a friendly robot to ease dementia (FRED). This affordable social robot is designed to provide company to older adults with cognitive decline, create reminders for important events and tasks, like taking medication, and providing cognitive stimulus through games. This project combines several cloud technologies including speech-to-text, cloud data storage, and chat generation in order to provide high level interactions with a social robot. Software design patterns were employed in the creation of the software to produce flexible code base that can sustain platform changes easily, including the framework used for the graphical …

Development Of A Soft Robotic Approach For An Intra-Abdominal Wireless Laparoscopic Camera, Hui Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

In Single-Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS), the Magnetic Anchoring and Guidance System (MAGS) arises as a promising technique to provide larger workspaces and field of vision for the laparoscopes, relief space for other instruments, and require fewer incisions. Inspired by MAGS, many concept designs related to fully insertable magnetically driven laparoscopes are developed and tested on the transabdominal operation. However, ignoring the tissue interaction and insertion procedure, most of the designs adopt rigid structures, which not only damage the patients' tissue with excess stress concentration and sliding motion but also require complicated operation for the insertion. Meanwhile, lacking state tracking of …

Task-Oriented Manipulation Planning: Teaching Robot Manipulators To Learn Trajectory Tasks, Yan Li

Doctoral Dissertations

As robot manipulator applications are conducted in more complex tasks and unstructured environments, traditional manual programming cannot match the growing requirements. However, human experts usually know how to operate robot manipulators to complete tasks, but they do not know how to manually program the robot for automatically executing tasks. From a general point of view, a robot manipulation task is composed of a series of consecutive robot actions and environment states which we call it trajectory task. Imitation learning, an emerging and popular technique of robot behavior programming, is a good way to tackle this line of work but still …

Model Based Force Estimation And Stiffness Control For Continuum Robots, Vincent A. Aloi

Doctoral Dissertations

Continuum Robots are bio-inspired structures that mimic the motion of snakes, elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, etc. With good design, these robots can be naturally compliant and miniaturizable, which makes Continuum Robots ideal for traversing narrow complex environments. Their flexible design, however, prevents us from using traditional methods for controlling and estimating loading on rigid link robots.

In the first thrust of this research, we provided a novel stiffness control law that alters the behavior of an end effector during contact. This controller is applicable to any continuum robot where a method for sensing or estimating tip forces and pose exists. …

Sabr: Development Of A Neuromorphic Balancing Robot, Alec Yen, Yaw Mensah, Mark Dean

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

We discuss the development of a self-adjusted balancing robot (SABR) using a neuromorphic computing framework for control. Implementations of two-wheeled balancing robots have been achieved using traditional algorithms, often in the form of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control. We aim to achieve the same task using a neuromorphic architecture, which offers potential for higher power efficiency than conventional processing techniques. We utilize evolutionary optimization (EO) and the second iteration of Dynamic Adaptive Neural Network Arrays (DANNA2) developed by the Laboratory of Tennesseans Exploring Neural Networks (TENNLab). For the purpose of comparison, a traditional balancing robot was first designed using PID control; the …

Sensor Fusion For Object Detection And Tracking In Autonomous Vehicles, Mohamad Ramin Nabati

Doctoral Dissertations

Autonomous driving vehicles depend on their perception system to understand the environment and identify all static and dynamic obstacles surrounding the vehicle. The perception system in an autonomous vehicle uses the sensory data obtained from different sensor modalities to understand the environment and perform a variety of tasks such as object detection and object tracking. Combining the outputs of different sensors to obtain a more reliable and robust outcome is called sensor fusion. This dissertation studies the problem of sensor fusion for object detection and object tracking in autonomous driving vehicles and explores different approaches for utilizing deep neural networks …

Design And Simulation Of A Supervisory Control System For Hybrid Manufacturing, Michael Buckley

Masters Theses

The research teams of Dr. Bill Hamel, Dr. Bradley Jared and Dr. Tony Schmitz were tasked by the Office of Naval Research to create a hybrid manufacturing process for a reduced scale model of a naval ship propeller. The base structure of the propeller is created using Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM), which is then scanned to compare created geometry to desired geometry. The propeller is then machined down to match the desired geometry. This process is iterated upon until the final product meets design tolerances. Due to the complex nature and numerous industrial machines used in the process, it …

Connecting Islamic Technology And The History Of Robotics In Wikidata Via Wikidatabot, Anchalee Panigabutra-Roberts

UT Libraries Faculty: Other Publications and Presentations

My current study is on the connection between the history of robotics and Islamic technology. I focused on early Muslim inventors, such as al-Jazari, from Artuqid Dynasty of Jazira in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq, Syria and Turkey) who is considered to be the father of robotics. He wrote the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, the manuscript treaty published after his passing in 1206, translated by Donald R. Hill, a British engineer and scholar on Islamic technology, in 1974. The manuscript in Arabic (MS. Greaves 27) is archived at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. In …

Identification Of Emergent Collaborative Behaviors In Multi-Agent Systems, Bryson Howell

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Identification of Emergent Collaborative Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems

Bryson Howell

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has been used to allow groups of autonomous agents to perform complex cooperative tasks. When MARL methods such as the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) algorithm [1] are used to train teams of agents in cooperative tasks, it has been observed that the actions of individual agents are significantly influenced by the actions of their teammates [2]. Additionally, prior work has shown that teams of agents trained independently of one another under identical conditions display a variety of behaviors [3]. Since these teams have been …

Robot Object Detection And Locomotion Demonstration For Eecs Department Tours, Bryson Howell, Ethan Haworth, Chris Mobley, Ian Mulet

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Comparison Of Verbalized Feedback In Human To Computer Interfacing Versus Human To Human Interaction, Kea Francis

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

The project evaluates response to social robots for purposeful tasks. The study uses a social robot, Rapiro, along with a smartphone that serves as a visual interface for the robot system. My role was to design a program on a Raspberry Pi that allows simultaneous control of Rapiro’s actions and a response from a phone application. The phone app is downloaded to an Android phone and designed using MIT App Inventor software. This allows pre-programmed and real-time control of the robot. The user inputs what they want the robot to say through the terminal of the Raspberry Pi. Through serial …

Dynamic In Vivo Skeletal Feature Tracking Via Fluoroscopy Using A Human Gait Model, William Patrick Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

The Tracking Fluoroscope System II, a mobile robotic fluoroscopy platform, developed and built at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, presently employs a pattern matching algorithm in order to identify and track a marker placed upon a subject’s knee joint of interest. The purpose of this research is to generate a new tracking algorithm based around the human gait cycle for prediction and improving the overall accuracy of joint tracking.

This research centers around processing the acquired x-ray images of the desired knee joint obtained during standard clinical operation in order to identify and track directly through the acquired image. Due …

Learning Multimodal Structures In Computer Vision, Ali Taalimi

Doctoral Dissertations

A phenomenon or event can be received from various kinds of detectors or under different conditions. Each such acquisition framework is a modality of the phenomenon. Due to the relation between the modalities of multimodal phenomena, a single modality cannot fully describe the event of interest. Since several modalities report on the same event introduces new challenges comparing to the case of exploiting each modality separately.

We are interested in designing new algorithmic tools to apply sensor fusion techniques in the particular signal representation of sparse coding which is a favorite methodology in signal processing, machine learning and statistics to …

Modeling The Consumer Acceptance Of Retail Service Robots, So Young Song

Doctoral Dissertations

This study uses the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) and domestication theories as the underlying framework of an acceptance model of retail service robots (RSRs). The model illustrates the relationships among facilitators, attitudes toward Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), anxiety toward robots, anticipated service quality, and the acceptance of RSRs. Specifically, the researcher investigates the extent to which the facilitators of usefulness, social capability, the appearance of RSRs, and the attitudes toward HRI affect acceptance and increase the anticipation of service quality. The researcher also tests the inhibiting role of pre-existing anxiety toward robots on the relationship between these facilitators and attitudes …

Computational Imaging Approach To Recovery Of Target Coordinates Using Orbital Sensor Data, Michael D. Vaughan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the components necessary for simulation of an image-based recovery of the position of a target using orbital image sensors. Each component is considered in detail, focusing on the effect that design choices and system parameters have on the accuracy of the position estimate. Changes in sensor resolution, varying amounts of blur, differences in image noise level, selection of algorithms used for each component, and lag introduced by excessive processing time all contribute to the accuracy of the result regarding recovery of target coordinates using orbital sensor data.

Using physical targets and sensors in this scenario would be …

Target Detection With Neural Network Hardware, Hollis Bui, Garrett Massman, Nikolas Spangler, Jalen Tarvin, Luke Bechtel, Kevin Dunn, Shawn Bradford

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

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 autonomous …

Neuron Clustering For Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting In Supervised And Reinforcement Learning, Benjamin Frederick Goodrich

Doctoral Dissertations

Neural networks have had many great successes in recent years, particularly with the advent of deep learning and many novel training techniques. One issue that has affected neural networks and prevented them from performing well in more realistic online environments is that of catastrophic forgetting. Catastrophic forgetting affects supervised learning systems when input samples are temporally correlated or are non-stationary. However, most real-world problems are non-stationary in nature, resulting in prolonged periods of time separating inputs drawn from different regions of the input space.

Reinforcement learning represents a worst-case scenario when it comes to precipitating catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. …

A Magnetic Actuated Fully Insertable Robotic Camera System For Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery, Xiaolong Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a common surgical procedure which makes tiny incisions in the patients anatomy, inserting surgical instruments and using laparoscopic cameras to guide the procedure. Compared with traditional open surgery, MIS allows surgeons to perform complex surgeries with reduced trauma to the muscles and soft tissues, less intraoperative hemorrhaging and postoperative pain, and faster recovery time. Surgeons rely heavily on laparoscopic cameras for hand-eye coordination and control during a procedure. However, the use of a standard laparoscopic camera, achieved by pushing long sticks into a dedicated small opening, involves multiple incisions for the surgical instruments. Recently, single …

Dynamic Simulation And Neuromuscular Control Of Movement: Applications For Predictive Simulations Of Balance Recovery, Misagh Mansouri Boroujeni

Doctoral Dissertations

Balance is among the most challenging tasks for patients with movement disorders. Study and treatment of these disorders could greatly benefit from combined software tools that offer better insights into neuromuscular biomechanics, and predictive capabilities for optimal surgical and rehabilitation treatment planning. A platform was created to combine musculoskeletal modeling, closed-loop forward dynamic simulation, optimization techniques, and neuromuscular control system design. Spinal (stretch-reflex) and supraspinal (operational space task-based) controllers were developed to test simulation-based hypotheses related to balance recovery and movement control. A corrective procedure (rectus femoris transfer surgery) was targeted for children experiencing stiff-knee gait and how this procedure …

3d Robotic Sensing Of People: Human Perception, Representation And Activity Recognition, Hao Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

The robots are coming. Their presence will eventually bridge the digital-physical divide and dramatically impact human life by taking over tasks where our current society has shortcomings (e.g., search and rescue, elderly care, and child education). Human-centered robotics (HCR) is a vision to address how robots can coexist with humans and help people live safer, simpler and more independent lives.

As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us, perceive people, and interpret their behaviors. Endowing robots with these critical capabilities in highly dynamic human social environments is a significant but very challenging problem in practical …

Modeling, Analysis, And Control Of A Mobile Robot For In Vivo Fluoroscopy Of Human Joints During Natural Movements, Matthew A. Young

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, the modeling, analysis and control of a multi-degree of freedom (mdof) robotic fluoroscope was investigated. A prototype robotic fluoroscope exists, and consists of a 3 dof mobile platform with two 2 dof Cartesian manipulators mounted symmetrically on opposite sides of the platform. One Cartesian manipulator positions the x-ray generator and the other Cartesian manipulator positions the x-ray imaging device. The robotic fluoroscope is used to x-ray skeletal joints of interest of human subjects performing natural movement activities. In order to collect the data, the Cartesian manipulators must keep the x-ray generation and imaging devices accurately aligned while …

Vision-Based Robot Control In The Context Of Human-Machine Interactions, Andrzej Nycz

Doctoral Dissertations

This research has explored motion control based on visual servoing – in the context of complex human-machine interactions and operations in realistic environments. Two classes of intelligent robotic systems were studied in this context: operator assistance with a high dexterity telerobotic manipulator performing remote tooling-centric tasks, and a bio-robot for X-ray imaging of lower extremity human skeletal joints during natural walking. The combination of human-machine interactions and practical application scenarios has led to the following fundamental contributions: 1) exploration and evaluation of a new concept of acquiring fluoroscope images of musculoskeletal features of interest during natural human motion, 2) creation …

Coalition Formation And Execution In Multi-Robot Tasks, Yu Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

In this research, I explore several related problems in distributed robot systems that must be addressed in order to achieve multi-robot tasks, in which individual robots may not possess all the required capabilities. While most previous research work on multi-robot cooperation mainly concentrates on loosely-coupled multi-robot tasks, a more challenging problem is to also address tightly-coupled multi- robot tasks involving close robot interactions, which often require capability sharing. Three related topics towards addressing these tasks are discussed, as follows:

Forming coalitions, which determines how robots should form into subgroups (i.e., coalitions) to address individual tasks. To achieve system autonomy, the …

Real-Time Mobile Stereo Vision, Bryan Hale Bodkin

Masters Theses

Computer stereo vision is used extract depth information from two aligned cameras and there are a number of hardware and software solutions to solve the stereo correspondence problem. However few solutions are available for inexpensive mobile platforms where power and hardware are major limitations. This Thesis will proposes a method that competes with an existing OpenCV stereo correspondence method in speed and quality, and is able to run on generic multi core CPU’s.

Line Following Navigation, Nicole Marie Pennington

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Feature-Based Image Comparison And Its Application In Wireless Visual Sensor Networks, Yang Bai

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the feature-based image comparison method and its application in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks.

Wireless Visual Sensor Networks (WVSNs), formed by a large number of low-cost, small-size visual sensor nodes, represent a new trend in surveillance and monitoring practices. Although each single sensor has very limited capability in sensing, processing and transmission, by working together they can achieve various high level tasks. Sensor collaboration is essential to WVSNs and normally performed among sensors having similar measurements, which are called neighbor sensors. The directional sensing characteristics of imagers and the presence of visual occlusion present unique challenges to neighborhood …

Anomaly Detection In Unknown Environments Using Wireless Sensor Networks, Yuanyuan Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the problem of distributed anomaly detection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A challenge of designing such systems is that the sensor nodes are battery powered, often have different capabilities and generally operate in dynamic environments. Programming such sensor nodes at a large scale can be a tedious job if the system is not carefully designed. Data modeling in distributed systems is important for determining the normal operation mode of the system. Being able to model the expected sensor signatures for typical operations greatly simplifies the human designer’s job by enabling the system to autonomously characterize the expected …