Robotics Commons^™

Multiple-Valued Quantum Automata For Robotics, Yuchen Huang

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation introduces a new type of quantum automata, their encoding and circuit realization. I concentrate on possible applications in robotics. Several methods and application of quantum automata and quantum circuit-based controllers for elementary robotic systems, with a focus on humanoid robot motion, emotion, and behavior generation are illustrated in detail. The research introduces several novel methodologies that bridge quantum computing principles with robotic control, aiming to overcome the limitations of classical deterministic and probabilistic approaches.

The dissertation first presents a quantum-circuit-based framework for generating non-repetitive and expressive (e)motions in a humanoid robot actor, using superposition and entanglement to produce …

Spike Timing Depended Plasticity Produces Unsupervised Learning Of Synergistic Muscle Feedback In A Synthetical Neural Network, Mark Allen Pupkiewicz

Dissertations and Theses

This study investigates how type Ia feedback from muscle spindles can be organized into groups representing agonistic muscle pairs through Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP). A single degree of freedom joint is actuated with four biologically modeled muscles forming two agonistic pairs. In order to emulate the sensory dynamics of biological muscle spindles, sensors in the model record the active length and velocity states of each muscle, the two primary factors eliciting type Ia afferent responses. In biological networks, synapses from Ia sensory neurons frequently activate interneurons representing agonistic muscle sources. This research investigates whether this organization can emerge in …

Virtual Environment Creation And Camera Calibration For Soft Target Identification And Assistance In Crowded Spaces With A Sensor Network And A Robotic Dog, Eltan Samoylov

Dissertations and Theses

Crowded places are increasingly targets of violence due to the increased accessibility and covertness of weapons, explosives, and other technology like drones. Addressing the challenges of protecting crowded places and assisting vulnerable individuals requires a multidisciplinary approach, taking inspiration from many different perspectives. Video surveillance of these crowded public facilities, such as train and bus stations, airports, shopping malls, and sports arenas, is very important to public safety, both for identifying threats/terrorist attacks and implementing evacuation plans.

The work of this thesis is part of a larger project aiming to explore the potential of using real-time computer vision and deep …

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning For Radiation Localization, Benjamin Scott Totten

Dissertations and Theses

For the safety of both equipment and human life, it is important to identify the location of orphaned radioactive material as quickly and accurately as possible. There are many factors that make radiation localization a challenging task, such as low gamma radiation signal strength and the need to search in unknown environments without prior information. The inverse-square relationship between the intensity of radiation and the source location, the probabilistic nature of nuclear decay and gamma ray detection, and the pervasive presence of naturally occurring environmental radiation complicates localization tasks. The presence of obstructions in complex environments can further attenuate the …

Robotic Inspection And Data Analytics To Localize And Visualize The Structural Defects Of Civil Infrastructure, Jinglun Feng

Dissertations and Theses

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) serves as a significant nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technique to inspect and survey underground objects (e.g., rebars, utility pipes) in complex urban environments. In addition to GPR, visual-based surface defect detection plays a crucial role in assessing and maintaining civil infrastructure. To facilitate deployment on a robotic platform and enhance inspection capabilities, the integration of GPR and visual-based sensors, such as RGB-D cameras, is crucial to obtain accurate subsurface and surface information. This thesis presents a novel robotic-based inspection system for the efficient collection of NDE data and accurate 3D reconstruction of both subsurface and surface infrastructure …

Design And Control Of Quasi-Direct Drive Actuation For Lightweight And Versatile Wearable Robots, Shuangyue Yu

Dissertations and Theses

Wearable robots have shown great potential for augmenting the physical capabilities of humans in lab settings. However, wearable robots for augmenting the physical capabilities of humans under community-based conditions are the new frontier of robotics. Furthermore, the design and control are still considered to be grand challenges for providing physical augmentation for humans. In terms of design, the state-of-the-art exoskeletons are typically rigid, bulky, and limited to lab settings. In terms of control, most of the rhythmic controllers are not versatile and are focused only on steady-state walking assistance.

The motivation behind my research is to improve both the design …

Synthesizing Expressive Behaviors For Humanoid Robots, Mathias Irwan Sunardi

Dissertations and Theses

Humanoid robots are expected to be able to communicate with expressive gestures at the same level of proficiency as humans. However, creating expressive gestures for humanoid robots is difficult and time consuming due to the high number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and the iterations needed to get the desired expressiveness.

Current robot motion editing software has varying levels of sophistication of motion editing tools ranging from basic ones that are text-only, to ones that provide graphical user interfaces (GUIs) which incorporate advanced features, such as curve editors and inverse kinematics. These tools enable users to create simple motions; but …

V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha

Dissertations and Theses

In underground, underwater and indoor environments, a robot has to rely solely on its on-board sensors to sense and understand its surroundings. This is the main reason why SLAM gained the popularity it has today. In recent years, we have seen excellent improvement on accuracy of localization using cameras and combinations of different sensors, especially camera-IMU (VIO) fusion. Incorporating more sensors leads to improvement of accuracy,but also robustness of SLAM. However, while testing SLAM in our ground robots, we have seen a decrease in performance quality when using the same algorithms on flying vehicles.We have an additional sensor for ground …

Audio Beat Detection With Application To Robot Drumming, Michael James Engstrom

Dissertations and Theses

This Drumming Robot thesis demonstrates the design of a robot which can play drums in rhythm to an external audio source. The audio source can be either a pre-recorded .wav file or a live sample .wav file from a microphone. The dominant beats-per-minute (BPM) of the audio would be extracted and the robot would drum in time to the BPM. A Fourier Analysis-based BPM detection algorithm, developed by Eric Scheirer (Tempo and beat analysis of acoustical musical signals)ⁱ was adopted and implemented. In contrast to other popular algorithms, the main advantage of Scheirer's algorithm is it has …

Design Of A Canine Inspired Quadruped Robot As A Platform For Synthetic Neural Network Control, Cody Warren Scharzenberger

Dissertations and Theses

Legged locomotion is a feat ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom, but modern robots still fall far short of similar achievements. This paper presents the design of a canine-inspired quadruped robot named DoggyDeux as a platform for synthetic neural network (SNN) research that may be one avenue for robots to attain animal-like agility and adaptability. DoggyDeux features a fully 3D printed frame, 24 braided pneumatic actuators (BPAs) that drive four 3-DOF limbs in antagonistic extensor-flexor pairs, and an electrical system that allows it to respond to commands from a SNN comprised of central pattern generators (CPGs). Compared to the previous version …

Unsupervised Feature Learning For Point Cloud By Contrasting And Clustering With Graph Convolutional Neural Network, Ling Zhang

Dissertations and Theses

Recently, deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted significant attention for point cloud understanding tasks, including classification, segmentation, and detection. However, the training of such deep networks still requires a large amount of annotated data, which is both expensive and time-consuming. To alleviate the cost of collecting and annotating large-scale point cloud datasets, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to learn features from unlabeled point cloud ”3D object” dataset by using part contrasting and object clustering with GNNs. In the contrast learning step, all the samples in the 3D object dataset are cut into two parts and put into a …

Biomimetic Design And Construction Of A Bipedal Walking Robot, Alexander Gabriel Steele

Dissertations and Theses

Human balance and locomotion control is highly complex and not well understood. To understand how the nervous system controls balance and locomotion works, we test how the body responds to controlled perturbations, the results are analyzed, and control models are developed. However, to recreate this system of control there is a need for a robot with human-like kinematics. Unfortunately, such a robotic testbed does not exist despite the numerous applications such a design would have in mobile robotics, healthcare, and prosthetics.

This thesis presents a robotic testbed model of human lower legs. By using MRI and CT scans, I designed …

2d Vector Map And Database Design For Indoor Assisted Navigation, Luciano Caraciolo Albuquerque

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper we implemented a 2D Vector Map, map editor and Database design intended to provide an efficient way to convert cad files from indoor environments to a set of vectors representing hallways, doors, exits, elevators, and other entities embedded in a floor plan, and save them in a database for use by other applications, such as assisted navigation for blind people.

A graphical application as developed in C++ to allow the user to input a CAD DXF file, process the file to automatically obtain nodes and edges, and save the nodes and edges to a database for posterior …

Vision-Based Motion For A Humanoid Robot, Khalid Abdullah Alkhulayfi

Dissertations and Theses

The overall objective of this thesis is to build an integrated, inexpensive, human-sized humanoid robot from scratch that looks and behaves like a human. More specifically, my goal is to build an android robot called Marie Curie robot that can act like a human actor in the Portland Cyber Theater in the play Quantum Debate with a known script of every robot behavior. In order to achieve this goal, the humanoid robot need to has degrees of freedom (DOF) similar to human DOFs. Each part of the Curie robot was built to achieve the goal of building a complete humanoid …

Mobile Robot Localization Based On Kalman Filter, Omar Q. Mohsin

Dissertations and Theses

Robot localization is one of the most important subjects in the Robotics science. It is an interesting and complicated topic. There are many algorithms to solve the problem of localization. Each localization system has its own set of features, and based on them, a solution will be chosen. In my thesis, I want to present a solution to find the best estimate for a robot position in certain space for which a map is available. The thesis started with an elementary introduction to the probability and the Gaussian theories. Simple and advanced practical examples are presented to illustrate each concept …

Matching Points To Lines: Sonar-Based Localization For The Psubot, Kevin Blythe Stanton

Dissertations and Theses

The PSUBOT (pronounced pea-es-you-bought) is an autonomous wheelchair robot for persons with certain disabilities. Its use of voice recognition and autonomous navigation enable it to carry out high level commands with little or no user assistance. We first describe the goals, constraints, and capabilities of the overall system including path planning and obstacle avoidance. We then focus on localization-the ability of the robot to locate itself in space. Odometry, a compass, and an algorithm which matches points to lines are each employed to accomplish this task. The matching algorithm (which matches "points" to "lines") is the main contribution to this …

An Intelligent Database For Psubot, An Autonomous Wheelchair, Dieudonne Mayi

Dissertations and Theses

In the design of autonomous mobile robots, databases have been used mainly to store information on the environment in which the device is to operate. For most of the models and ready systems, the database when used, is not a stand alone component in the system, rather it is only intended to keep static information on the disposition and properties of objects on the map.

In this thesis is implemented an intelligent database. It combines static facts to build more information. An intelligent database such as this one will be a plus for an intended autonomous machine such as the …

Low To Medium Level Image Processing For A Mobile Robot, Cecilia H. Espinosa

Dissertations and Theses

The use of visual perception in autonomous mobile systems was approached with caution by mobile robot developers because of the high computational cost and huge memory requirements of most image processing operations. When used, the image processing is implemented on multiprocessors or complex and expensive systems, thereby requiring the robot to be wired or radio controlled from the computer system base.

Hereby developed is a simple, inexpensive and automatic image processing subsystem that is completely implementable on a PC-386SX with 640K base memory. The subsystem will serve as the front end of the vision system for the PSUBOT, an autonomous …

Two Dimensional And Three Dimensional Path Planning In Robotics, Hyun Suk Kim

Dissertations and Theses

A methodology for 2D and 3D collision free path planning algorithm in a structured environment is presented. The isolated free convex areas are represented as a nodes in a graph, and a graph traversal strategy that dynamically allocates costs to graph path is used. Modification of the algorithm for small computational time and optimality is discussed. The 3D path planning is done in the three orthogonal two-dimensional projections of a 3D environment. Collision checking to increase the optimality for 3D paths is done in each of the three orthogonal two-dimensional subspaces.