Small Autonomous Robots Research Articles

Farm Workers of the Future: Vision-Based Robotics for Broad-Acre Agriculture

Farmers are under growing pressure to intensify production to feed a growing population while managing environmental impact. Robotics has the potential to address these challenges by replacing large complex farm machinery with fleets of small autonomous robots. This article presents our research toward the goal of developing teams of autonomous robots that perform typical farm coverage operations. Making a large fleet of autonomous robots economical requires the use of inexpensive sensors, such as cameras for localization and obstacle avoidance. To this end, we describe a vision-based obstacle detection system that continually adapts to environmental and illumination variations and a visionassisted localization system that can guide a robot along crop rows with a complex appearance. Large fleets of robots will become time-consuming to monitor, control, and resupply. To reduce this burden, we describe a vision-based docking system for autonomously refilling liquid supplies and an interface for controlling multiple robots.

小型自律移動ロボットの設計と実証評価

小型自律移動ロボットの設計と実証評価

学生教育のための小型自律型探査ロボットの構造設計手法

This pepper described about a method of structural design using a small autonomous robot for student engineering educations. Engineering education which has R&D on practical evaluation and functional design of small robot produced by education activities and extra-curricular activities in University. We introduced some examples of effective method for engineering education using both the mechanical design and the electrical design. Our Robot had new architecture with many sensors including GPS electrical compass. Student could achieve practical engineering knowledge and technology effectively.

Software Design of Micromouse Motion Control

Micromouse is a small autonomous robot, which must navigate itself through an unknown maze from the start to the destination.One of the main challenges for micromouse is to control its two motors, which are used to control micromouse’s motion in solving the maze. Detailed design of an improved PD controller is given,which has to update the velocity and acceleration values of the motors when it wants to control the robot. Motion profile generator and motion command execution routine is designed to output a smooth motion for the robots.

Micromouse Digital Circuits Design with FPGA

Micromouse is a small autonomous robot, which must navigate itself through an unknown maze and solve the maze information.One of the main challenges for micromouse is to solve the maze after searching and find the optimum path, then the mouse must dash from the start to desitnation in the shortest time possible using its own artificial intelligence without any external source of help. In order to increase its dash speed and stability,detailed design of digital cirucits based on FPGA were given, also with their simulaiton. Results show that digital circuits can check and ensure the reading of encoder, and can change the duty cycle of PWM output.

Software Design for Micromouse Special Navigation

Micromouse is a small autonomous robot, which must navigate itself through an unknown maze from the start to the destination. The main challenge for micromouse is to solve the maze information after searching and find the optimum path. In order to ensure the correctness of maze information, software for micromouse navigation in some special position was designed.

Software Design for Micromouse Straight Path Navigation

Micromouse is a small autonomous robot, which must navigate itself through an unknown maze from the start to the destination. The main challenge for micromouse is to solve the maze information after searching to find the optimum path. Normally, the micromouse has to remain in the centre of the cells when traveling in the maze, In order to ensure the correctness of position, detailed design of software for micromouse navigation in straight path was designed.

Study on Flood-Fill Algorithm Used in Micromouse Solving Maze

Micromouse is a small autonomous electronic-mechanical robot, which is able to navigate through an unknown maze from the start to the destination. The main challenge for micromouse is to work out the maze after searching, find the optimum path for the shortest fast-run time and control the robot to win. Flood-fill algorithm is used in this project to develop a solver which is able to help the robot for finding the ‘best’ route from the starting position to the ‘goal’, maze solving result shows the correctness.

Software Design of Micromouse Dash Motion

Micromouse is a small autonomous robot, which must navigate itself through an unknown maze from the start to the destination, the main challenge for micromouse is to solve the maze and find the optimum path. Detailed design of best-path finder was given. According to the different dash mode combination, dash path of micromouse in complex maze was analyzed. Motion command generator is developed to generate list of the motion commands in order to guide the robot dash from the start to its destination.

A Curiosity Moment for Tropical Biology?

I was truly amazed by the remarkable feat that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pulled off in landing the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. But it leaves me wondering whether we have ever spent a billion dollars examining any part of Earth's tropical rainforest. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS We remain ignorant of even the most basic properties of Earth's equatorial forests, such as the number of large mammal species (or invertebrates, fungi, and microbes) in a forest, and their life cycles. The information that we do have is biased toward small intensively studied areas, whereas the vast intervening areas remain largely unexamined. The most extensive global network of observation plots, managed by the Center for Tropical Forest Science, encompasses a tiny fraction of total forest area. Acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of these forests seems impossible. Yet so did walking on the Moon 50 brief years ago. There are tremendous technical challenges in navigating the canopy of the tropical rainforests. We need to view the study of rainforests as an engineering problem and develop the same kind of amazing technologies used to study the surface of Mars. I want to be able to hover in a little car above the trees. I want to release a small cat-like autonomous robot into the canopy and retrieve it a month later two kilometers away, all the while tracking its movements as it gathers samples and observations, downloading gigabytes of data each day. There would be tremendous opportunities to translate those technologies into useful applications on Earth. I am confident that the trickle down would be much more substantial than that from the space program. Are we really going to have a colony on the Moon? Do we really plan on escaping to the stars? We have a few challenges here on Earth that we need to face before we can ever truly fulfill those dreams. [1]: pending:yes

Mathematical Aspects of the Implementation of Particle Filters on FPGA

AbstractParticle filters are a type of Bayesian filters commonly used for system state estimation such as tracking and localization applications. Tracking and localization are important tasks for autonomous robots, and particle filters are particularly well suited to deal with such tasks, as demonstrated by many RoboCup-Teams. However the computational complexity of particle filters lead to a high load of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) resulting in a high clock and a high energy usage. This limits the use of particle filters in small autonomous robots or intelligent embedded sensor for traffic surveillance. The algorithm is well suited for parallel execution, on customized hardware architectures. Such architectures can be realized using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The parallel execution leads to a significant reduction of clock and therefore of energy, making embedded high performance particle filters possible, relieving the CPU from a computational expensive task while providing high performance tracking capabilities. For reasons of logical cell usage the use of fixed point representations of the numbers involved in the computation of the algorithm is used. This poses a bigger problem than one might expect, as the original theory of the particle filter is based on continuous representations, and the algorithm won't work without modifications to counter the effects resulting from the limited precision of the fixed point number representation. A fixed point based particle filter for tracking of an object in six dimensions, 2D-translation, rotation, and translation and rotation speed has been implemented on a FPGA and the feasibility of some treatment approaches has been shown.

A Modular Real-Time Fieldbus Architecture for Mobile Robotic Platforms

The design and construction of complex and reconfigurable embedded systems such as small autonomous mobile robots is a challenging task that involves the selection, interfacing, and programming of a large number of sensors and actuators. Facilitating this tedious process requires modularity and extensibility both in hardware and software components. In this paper, we introduce the universal robot bus (URB), a real-time fieldbus architecture that facilitates rapid integration of heterogeneous sensor and actuator nodes to a central processing unit (CPU) while providing a software abstraction that eliminates complications arising from the lack of hardware homogeneity. Motivated by our primary application area of mobile robotics, URB is designed to be very lightweight and efficient, with real-time support for Recommended Standard (RS) 232 or universal serial bus connections to a central computer and inter-integrated circuit (I <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> C), controller area network, or RS485 bus connections to embedded nodes. It supports automatic synchronization of data acquisition across multiple nodes, provides high data bandwidth at low deterministic latencies, and includes flexible libraries for modular software development both for local nodes and the CPU. This paper describes the design of the URB architecture, provides a careful experimental characterization of its performance, and demonstrates its utility in the context of its deployment in a legged robot platform.

Development of a Low Cost High Speed Stereo Vision System for Embeded Use Using CMOS Imagers and DSP

We developped a low cost high speed stereo vision system for embeded use using CMOS imagers on the market and TI DSP(Digital Signal Processor) board that can capture subframe images in shorter period than video rate. Because the proposed system is small, low enegy consumption and low cost, it is suitable for embeded use or small autonomous mobile robot. Some experiments demonstrate that this vision system can capture 96[pixel]×96[pixel] image in 1[ms] period and detect the target position and track the target in 3[ms] period.

2A2-F14 群知能ロボットの研究 : マルチセンサ融合型群知能

Making a crowd an ant and the fish can make a procession and protect the body. The intelligence to occur by forming groups is called swarm intelligence. There are a lot of studies of the swarm intelligence, now most of study use simulation, there are few experiments using robot. I thought that reproduced swarm intelligence by the simple same algorithm and emerged swarm intelligence. The purposes of this research are emergence of swarm intelligence. In order to realize Multi-sensor fusion type swarm intelligence, 1 made the small autonomous robots, which is equipped with the ultrasonic sensors, geomagnetism sensors and global positioning system. In addition to it, I also added the atmospheric pressure altimeter and wireless communication. By these, the swarm intelligence was made into three dimensions from two dimensions.

Development of the research platform of small autonomous blimp robot

AbstractBlimp robots are an attractive form of small flight robot because they are maintained aloft by buoyancy, are safe, require little energy and have relatively long flight times. The development of a general‐purpose blimp robot research platform allowing modular installation of a variety of hardware and software components will lower the barrier to the creation of new research projects and increase project efficiency. This paper describes the development of such a general‐purpose platform and the testing of its suitability for research use. Experiments performed on the platform included: (1) testing of position maintenance capabilities, and changeover from a PID control software module to a learning control module; (2) testing of the ease and effectiveness of exchanging one hardware module (a microphone) for another (a camera); (3) installation of a new hardware module (a microphone) along with an existing module (a camera); (4) testing of addition of functions and performance of a topologic map generation experiment with addition of an ultrasonic sensor. The effectiveness of information fusion combined with a layered software structure was demonstrated in the experiments, indicating that the newly developed platform will be effective in promoting research on blimp robots. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 91(2): 1–13, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.10025

Preservation and Utilization of Reinforcement Learning Robot's Strategies Using Probablistic Networks

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been proven to be a promising approach to behavior acquisition of an autonomous robot. However, it holds the unwanted character of over-fitting such that a RL robot often loses its stable behavior to a change occurred in an environment after successful learning. To overcome this problem, we propose the mechanism for a robot that transforms an implicit knowledge collected as a result of RL into the form of a probabilistic network model as an explicit knowledge and preserves it for future use. We expects that a robot tends to show more robust behavior against various changes in an environment with the increase of the knowledges. The computer simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed knowledge collecting mechanism. The physical experiments with a small autonomous mobile robot called Khepera are also examined to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Goal!

In this paper, a new approach to the undergraduate capstone design experience that has been used successfully for the past five years in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at BYU. The project is built around a robot soccer competition in which students design small autonomous robots to play with two robots per team. Experience shows that robotic provides a set of engineering challenges that are ideal for senior-design projects because it is naturally multidisciplinary and requires the integration of knowledge from across the curriculum.

携帯小型カメラを用いる小型自律行動ロボットのための両眼視覚センサモジュールの開発(もの作りとメカトロニクス2)

携帯小型カメラを用いる小型自律行動ロボットのための両眼視覚センサモジュールの開発(もの作りとメカトロニクス2)

A sound localizer for reverberant environments

This paper proposes an intelligent acoustic sensor able to localize sound sources in acoustic environments with strong reverberation. The proposed system is inspired on the precedence effect used by the human auditory system and uses only two acoustic sensors. It implements a modified version of the algorithm proposed by (Huang etal. 1999a) that uses the precedence effect in order to achieve robust sound localization even in reverberant environments. The system was tested on a small autonomous mobile robot programmed to chase an arbitrary sound source. Several experiments were carried out to characterize its performance. Other possible applications of the system are, for example, the automatic orientation of a directional microphone or a video camera to a direction of interest, e.g. toward an interacting human, or an intruder in a protected area.

An introductory digital design course using a low-cost autonomous robot

This paper describes a new digital design laboratory developed for undergraduate students in this electrical and computer engineering curriculum. A top-down rapid prototyping approach with commercial computer-aided design tools and field-programmable logic devices (FPLDs) is used for laboratory projects. Students begin with traditional transistor-transistor logic-based projects containing a few gates and progress to designing a simple 16-bit computer, using very high-speed integrated circuits hardware description language (VHDL) synthesis tools and an FPLD. To help motivate students, the simple computer design is programmed to control a small autonomous robot with two servo drive motors and several sensors. The laboratory concludes with a team-based design project using the robot.