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Full-Text Articles in Robotics
Terrain And Adversary-Aware Autonomous Robot Navigation, Aniekan Ufot Inyang
Terrain And Adversary-Aware Autonomous Robot Navigation, Aniekan Ufot Inyang
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In autonomous robot navigation, the robot is able to understand the environment around it for intelligent navigation. From its world model of this environment, it generates a global plan for navigation from a position to a goal based on different factors. This research aims to implement autonomous robot navigation by learning terrain affordances: traversability (moving quickly) and concealment (staying hidden from an adversary) using the Preference-based Inverse Reward Learning (PbIRL) methodology. The PbIRL methodology reduces the barrier of generating initial demonstration data to learn the terrain affordances by using a human expert’s preferences to learn individual weights over the terrain …
Reference Frames In Human Sensory, Motor, And Cognitive Processing, Dongcheng He
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 …
Artificial Emotional Intelligence In Socially Assistive Robots, Hojjat Abdollahi
Artificial Emotional Intelligence In Socially Assistive Robots, Hojjat Abdollahi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) bridges the gap between humans and machines by demonstrating empathy and affection towards each other. This is achieved by evaluating the emotional state of human users, adapting the machine’s behavior to them, and hence giving an appropriate response to those emotions. AEI is part of a larger field of studies called Affective Computing. Affective computing is the integration of artificial intelligence, psychology, robotics, biometrics, and many more fields of study. The main component in AEI and affective computing is emotion, and how we can utilize emotion to create a more natural and productive relationship between humans …
Facial Action Unit Detection With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Siddhesh Padwal
Facial Action Unit Detection With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Siddhesh Padwal
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The facial features are the most important tool to understand an individual's state of mind. Automated recognition of facial expressions and particularly Facial Action Units defined by Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is challenging research problem in the field of computer vision and machine learning. Researchers are working on deep learning algorithms to improve state of the art in the area. Automated recognition of facial action units has man applications ranging from developmental psychology to human robot interface design where companies are using this technology to improve their consumer devices (like unlocking phone) and for entertainment like FaceApp. Recent studies …
Developing An Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent, Ali Mollahosseini
Developing An Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent, Ali Mollahosseini
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural and interpersonal manner. They are becoming an integrated part of our daily lives and have achieved positive outcomes in several applications such as education, health care, quality of life, entertainment, etc. Despite significant progress towards the development of realistic social robotic agents, a number of problems remain to be solved. First, current social robots either lack enough ability to have deep social interaction with human, or they are very expensive to build and maintain. Second, current social robots have yet to reach the full emotional and social …
Development Of A Locomotion And Balancing Strategy For Humanoid Robots, Emile Bahdi
Development Of A Locomotion And Balancing Strategy For Humanoid Robots, Emile Bahdi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The locomotion ability and high mobility are the most distinguished features of humanoid robots. Due to the non-linear dynamics of walking, developing and controlling the locomotion of humanoid robots is a challenging task. In this thesis, we study and develop a walking engine for the humanoid robot, NAO, which is the official robotic platform used in the RoboCup Spl. Aldebaran Robotics, the manufacturing company of NAO provides a walking module that has disadvantages, such as being a black box that does not provide control of the gait as well as the robot walk with a bent knee. The latter disadvantage, …
Reducing Communication Delay Variability For A Group Of Robots, Goncalo Martins
Reducing Communication Delay Variability For A Group Of Robots, Goncalo Martins
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A novel architecture is presented for reducing communication delay variability for a group of robots. This architecture relies on using three components: a microprocessor architecture that allows deterministic real-time tasks; an event-based communication protocol in which nodes transmit in a TDMA fashion, without the need of global clock synchronization techniques; and a novel communication scheme that enables deterministic communications by allowing senders to transmit without regard for the state of the medium or coordination with other senders, and receivers can tease apart messages sent simultaneously with a high probability of success. This approach compared to others, allows simultaneous communications without …