Robotics Commons^™

A Neuromorphic Quadratic, Integrate, And Fire Silicon Neuron With Adaptive Gain, David Parent, Eric Basham

Faculty Publications

An integrated circuit implementation of a silicon neuron was designed, manufactured, and tested. The circuit was designed using the Quadratic, Integrate, and Fire (QIF) neuron model in 0.5 µm silicon technology. The neuron implementation was optimized for low current consumption, drawing only 1.56 mA per QIF circuit and utilized hysteretic reset, non-inverting integrator, and voltage-squarer circuits. The final area of each circuit in silicon was 268 µm height × 400 µm width. This design is the first IC of its kind for this neuron model and is successfully able to output true spiking that follows the behaviors of bistability, monotonic, …

Surgical And Medical Applications Of Drones: A Comprehensive Review, Brent Terwilliger, James C. Rosser Jr., Vudatha Vignesh, Brett C. Parker

Publications

Drones have the ability to gather real time data cost effectively, to deliver payloads and have initiated the rapid evolution of many industrial, commercial, and recreational applications. Unfortunately, there has been a slower expansion in the field of medicine. This article provides a comprehensive review of current and future drone applications in medicine, in hopes of empowering and inspiring more aggressive investigation.

Identification And Optimal Linear Tracking Control Of Odu Autonomous Surface Vehicle, Nadeem Khan

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are being used for diverse applications of civilian and military importance such as: military reconnaissance, sea patrol, bathymetry, environmental monitoring, and oceanographic research. Currently, these unmanned tasks can accurately be accomplished by ASVs due to recent advancements in computing, sensing, and actuating systems. For this reason, researchers around the world have been taking interest in ASVs for the last decade. Due to the ever-changing surface of water and stochastic disturbances such as wind and tidal currents that greatly affect the path-following ability of ASVs, identification of an accurate model of inherently nonlinear and stochastic ASV system …

Search Methods For Mobile Manipulator Performance Measurement, Samuel Nana Yaw Amoako-Frimpong

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Mobile manipulators are a potential solution to the increasing need for additional flexibility and mobility in industrial robotics applications. However, they tend to lack the accuracy and precision achieved by fixed manipulators, especially in scenarios where both the manipulator and the autonomous vehicle move simultaneously. This thesis analyzes the problem of dynamically evaluating the positioning error of mobile manipulators. In particular, it investigates the use of Bayesian methods to predict the position of the end-effector in the presence of uncertainty propagated from the mobile platform. Simulations and real-world experiments are carried out to test the proposed method against a deterministic …

Smart Vertical Farm System (Svfs), Sarasit Sirawattanakul

The International Student Science Fair 2018

The unremitting trends of increasing population, urbanization, diminishing water supply, and continuing climate change have contributed to declining stocks of arable land per person. Land available for farming is shrinking, and the demand for food is growing. All of these lead to food insecurity. For the first version of Smart Vertical Farm System is designed to increase food productions by an automatic system. It built with shelves which support soil and hydroponic system, stacked vertically. The system first shovels the soil in the tray and sews the seeds. There is also additional watering system. The hydroponic parts are on the …

Smart Vertical Farm System (Svfs), Sarasit Sirawattanakul

The International Student Science Fair 2018

The unremitting trends of increasing population, urbanization, diminishing water supply, and continuing climate change have contributed to declining stocks of arable land per person. Land available for farming is shrinking, and the demand for food is growing. All of these lead to food insecurity. For the first version of Smart Vertical Farm System is designed to increase food productions by an automatic system. It built with shelves which support soil and hydroponic system, stacked vertically. The system first shovels the soil in the tray and sews the seeds. There is also additional watering system. The hydroponic parts are on the …

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 …

Robust Pose Estimation Of A Robotic Navigation Aid For The Visually Impaired By Multimodal Data Fusion, He Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

For a visually impaired individual, it is a challenging task for him/her to plan and follow a path towards the destination. This task is referred to as wayfinding. In this paper, the functions of wayfinding are defined as localization (aka pose estimation) in an indoor environment and finding a way to get to the destination by using the location information. To address this issue, vision-based navigation systems that use a camera for pose estimation have been intensively studied. Several vision-based robotic navigation aids (RNAs) for the visually impaired have been developed. However, these RNAs are not reliable enough to assist …

Baseball Shagger, Anthony Velasquez, Nick Walker, Nathaniel Kai Paresa

Computer Engineering

The purpose of our project is to allow players to hit baseballs on a baseball field and not have to worry about picking them up. By combining our knowledge of software and hardware, we developed the first design of a robot that “shags” baseballs. Our endeavor was only partially successful. The device was tested on grass, turf, and concrete. The motors did not have enough torque to get moving on grass. The device faired better on turf where it could move, but was quite jerky as the motor drive needed to be high to start moving, but once it was …

Towards Autonomous Localization Of An Underwater Drone, Nathan Sfard

Master's Theses

Autonomous vehicle navigation is a complex and challenging task. Land and aerial vehicles often use highly accurate GPS sensors to localize themselves in their environments. These sensors are ineffective in underwater environments due to signal attenuation. Autonomous underwater vehicles utilize one or more of the following approaches for successful localization and navigation: inertial/dead-reckoning, acoustic signals, and geophysical data. This thesis examines autonomous localization in a simulated environment for an OpenROV Underwater Drone using a Kalman Filter. This filter performs state estimation for a dead reckoning system exhibiting an additive error in location measurements. We evaluate the accuracy of this Kalman …

Senior Project - Roborodentia Robot, Nicholas Alexander Ilog

Computer Engineering

This project includes an autonomous robot capable of dispensing balls from a dispenser mounted on a wall and shooting the balls through targets five to eight feet away. The robot can hold up to five balls at a time and shoots balls one by one at targets.

Roborodentia Robot: Treadbot, Stephen C. Schmidt

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This document is a summary of my contest entry to the 2018 Cal Poly Roborodentia competition. It is meant to be a process overview and design outline of the mechanical, electrical, and software components of my robot.

Dynamic Model For Simulating Motion Of The Right Ventricle, Brian Michael Larsen, Sam Koopman Porter, John Francis D'Ambrosio

Mechanical Engineering

This report documents all the research, ideation, and mockups used to determine right ventricle motion and develop a system capable of reproducing that motion on a tissue sample. The model is intended for evaluating anchoring systems being developed by Edwards Lifesciences for use with tricuspid valve therapies. Several design solutions were considered for the primary functions of recreating motion of the right ventricle and attaching tissue to the device. From these ideas a primary means of producing motion and attaching tissue was selected. These ideas were then developed over the course of a school year to become the final system …

Autonomous Navigation And Mapping Using Lidar, Steven E. Alsalamy, Ben C. Foo, Garrett C. Frels

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project was to make a fully autonomous robot, capable of mapping its surroundings and navigating through obstacles. This was done through the use of a chassis fitted with tracks and two motors, a lidar, a compass, and a Raspberry Pi. The robot also contains two batteries and is self powered. Encoders are used on the motors in order to track the distance traveled for more precise mapping and movements.

Darling, Robot For Roborodentia 2018, Michael Le, Steven Liu

Computer Engineering

For our senior project, our group decided to build a robot to participate in Roborodentia 2018, an annual robotics competition overlooked by Professor Seng that takes place during open house. When taking into consideration the classes that Computer Engineering students had to have taken and the skills that we have developed throughout our time here on campus, a robotics project seemed to be an appropriate culmination of both the technical and non-technical skills that we have acquired.

Roborodentia, Bryan D. Hendricks

Computer Engineering

This project is an autonomous robot, designed to perform a series of basic tasks without any human input. It’s based on the 2018 Roborodentia competition, in which teams of students design and build a small (roughly 1 square foot) robot that collects small foam spheres from vertical tubes on the edges of a table-sized arena, and shoot them into goals across the field. The more foam spheres the robot makes into the goals after a 3 minute time period, the more points they get. The challenge is doing so autonomously, without any human input after the initial timer for the …

Roborodentia Final Report, Trevor James Gesell, Zeph Colby Nord, Mitchell Tyler Myjak

Computer Engineering

The Senior Project consisted of competing in Roborodentia, a competition in which groups build robots to complete a particular task. This event took place at the Cal Poly Open House on Saturday, April 12th, 2018. For the competition, the robot was to collect Nerf balls from supply tubes raised approximately 7” from the board and shoot them into nets placed along the opposite side of the course. The design, manufacture, and testing of the robot began the first week of Cal Poly winter quarter and lasted until the day of the competition.

A Comparative Study Of Feature Detection Methods For Auv Localization, Andrew Y. Kim

Master's Theses

Underwater localization is a difficult task when it comes to making the system autonomous due to the unpredictable environment. The fact that radio signals such as GPS cannot be transmitted through water makes autonomous movement and localization underwater even more challenging. One specific method that is widely used for autonomous underwater navigation applications is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a technique in which a map is created and updated while localizing the vehicle within the map. In SLAM, feature detection is used in landmark extraction and data association by examining each pixel and differentiating landmarks pixels from those of the …

Artificial Neural Network-Based Robotic Control, Justin Ng

Master's Theses

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are highly-capable alternatives to traditional problem solving schemes due to their ability to solve non-linear systems with a nonalgorithmic approach. The applications of ANNs range from process control to pattern recognition and, with increasing importance, robotics. This paper demonstrates continuous control of a robot using the deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG) algorithm, an actor-critic reinforcement learning strategy, originally conceived by Google DeepMind. After training, the robot performs controlled locomotion within an enclosed area. The paper also details the robot design process and explores the challenges of implementation in a real-time system.

Corridor Navigation For Monocular Vision Mobile Robots, Matthew James Ng

Master's Theses

Monocular vision robots use a single camera to process information about its environment. By analyzing this scene, the robot can determine the best navigation direction. Many modern approaches to robot hallway navigation involve using a plethora of sensors to detect certain features in the environment. This can be laser range finders, inertial measurement units, motor encoders, and cameras.

By combining all these sensors, there is unused data which could be useful for navigation. To draw back and develop a baseline approach, this thesis explores the reliability and capability of solely using a camera for navigation. The basic navigation structure begins …

Automated Pruning Of Greenhouse Indeterminate Tomato Plants, Joey M. Angeja

Master's Theses

Pruning of indeterminate tomato plants is vital for a profitable yield and it still remains a manual process. There has been research in automated pruning of grapevines, trees, and other plants, but tomato plants have yet to be explored. Wage increases are contributing to the depleting profits of greenhouse tomato farmers. Rises in population are the driving force behind the need for efficient growing techniques. The major contribution of this thesis is a computer vision algorithm for detecting greenhouse tomato pruning points without the use of depth sensors. Given an up-close 2-D image of a tomato stem with the background …

An Exploration Of Software Defined Radio And Gnu Radio Companion For Use In Drone-To-Drone Communication, Amanda K. H. Voegtlin

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

In a world that increasingly relies on automation and intelligent robotics, there is a need for drones to expand their independence and adaptability in navigating their environments. One approach to this problem is the use of wireless communication between units in order to coordinate their sensor data and build real-time maps of the environments they are navigating. However, especially indoors, relying on a fixed transmission tower to provide data to the units faces connectivity challenges.

The purpose of this research was to determine the fitness of an on-drone assembly that uses the the NI B200mini software-defined radio board and Gnu …

Robust Fuzzy Clustering For Multiple Instance Regression., Mohamed Trabelsi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Multiple instance regression (MIR) operates on a collection of bags, where each bag contains multiple instances sharing an identical real-valued label. Only few instances, called primary instances, contribute to the bag labels. The remaining instances are noise and outliers observations. The goal in MIR is to identify the primary instances within each bag and learn a regression model that can predict the label of a previously unseen bag. In this thesis, we introduce an algorithm that uses robust fuzzy clustering with an appropriate distance to learn multiple linear models from a noisy feature space simultaneously. We show that fuzzy memberships …

Handwritten Digit Recognition By Multi-Class Support Vector Machines, Yu Wang

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Support Vector Machine(SVM) is a widely-used tool for pattern classification problems. The main idea behind SVM is to separate two different groups with a hyperplane which makes the margin of these two groups maximized. It doesn't require any knowledge about the object we are focused on, since it can catch the features automatically. The idea of SVM can be easily generalized to nonlinear model by a mapping from the original space to a high-dimensional feature space, and they construct a max-margin linear classifier in the high dimensional feature space.

This thesis will investigate the basic idea of SVM and apply …

Real-Time Object Detection And Tracking On Drones, Tu Le

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have been more and more widely used in recent decades because of their mobility. They appear in many applications such as farming, search and rescue, entertainment, military, and so on. Such high demands for drones lead to the need of developments in drone technologies. Next generations of commercial and military drones are expected to be aware of surrounding objects while flying autonomously in different terrains and conditions. One of the biggest challenges to drone automation is the ability to detect and track objects of interest in real-time. While there are many robust machine …

A Qualitative Research On Marketing And Sales In The Artificial Intelligence Age, Yin Yang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The age of artificial intelligence is here! Artificial Intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and automation are impacting the field of marketing and sales in an unprecedented way. In this study, the qualitative research methodology will be used to better understand the revolution and evolution of marketing and sales field in the AI age. Multiple case studies will be performed in various marketing and sales units in different organizations. This research is of value to both academics and practitioners as it aims to provide a detailed analysis and documentation of the changes in marketing and sales functionalities and job markets as AI …

Optimizing The Use Of A Liquid Handling Robot To Conduct A High Throughput Forward Chemical Genetics Screen Of Arabidopsis Thaliana, B. Kirtley Amos, Victoria G. Pook, Seth Debolt

Horticulture Faculty Publications

Chemical genetics is increasingly being employed to decode traits in plants that may be recalcitrant to traditional genetics due to gene redundancy or lethality. However, the probability of a synthetic small molecule being bioactive is low; therefore, thousands of molecules must be tested in order to find those of interest. Liquid handling robotics systems are designed to handle large numbers of samples, increasing the speed with which a chemical library can be screened in addition to minimizing/standardizing error. To achieve a high-throughput forward chemical genetics screen of a library of 50,000 small molecules on Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), protocols using a …

Design And Implementation Of An Artificial Neural Network Controller For Quadrotor Flight In Confined Environment, Ahmed Mekky

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Quadrotors offer practical solutions for many applications, such as emergency rescue, surveillance, military operations, videography and many more. For this reason, they have recently attracted the attention of research and industry. Even though they have been intensively studied, quadrotors still suffer from some challenges that limit their use, such as trajectory measurement, attitude estimation, obstacle avoidance, safety precautions, and land cybersecurity. One major problem is flying in a confined environment, such as closed buildings and tunnels, where the aerodynamics around the quadrotor are affected by close proximity objects, which result in tracking performance deterioration, and sometimes instability. To address this …

Anthropomorphically Inspired Design Of A Tendon-Driven Robotic Prosthesis For Hand Impairments, Manali Bapurao Bhadugale

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This thesis presents the design of a robotic prosthesis, which mimics the morphology of a human hand. The primary goal of this work is to develop a systematic methodology that allows a custom-build of the prosthesis to match the specific requirements of a person with hand impairments. Two principal research questions are addressed toward this goal: 1) How do we cater to the large variation in the distribution of overall hand-sizes in the human population? 2) How closely do we mimic the complex morphological aspects of a biological hand in order to maximize the anthropomorphism (human-like appearance) of the robotic …

Collaborative Appearance-Based Place Recognition And Improving Place Recognition Using Detection Of Dynamic Objects, Juan Pablo Munoz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes contributions to the problem of Long-Term Appearance-Based Place Recognition. We present a framework for place recognition in a collaborative scheme and a method to reduce the impact of dynamic objects on place representations. We demonstrate our findings using a state-of-the-art place recognition approach.

We begin in Part I by describing the general problem of place recognition and its importance in applications where accurate localization is crucial. We discuss feature detection and description and also explain the functioning of several place recognition frameworks.

In Part II, we present a novel framework for collaboration between agents from a pure …