Pioneer P3-AT mobile robot (rightmost photos: config-1 at ISR/IST)
MSc dissertation proposal 2009/2010
Vision-based
Motion Control of a
Introduction:
"Although a few of the robots of tomorrow may resemble the
anthropomorphic devices seen in Star Wars, most will look nothing like the
humanoid C-3PO. In fact, as mobile peripheral devices become more and more
common, it may be increasingly difficult to say exactly what a robot is.
Because the new machines will be so specialized and ubiquitous--and look so
little like the two-legged automatons of science fiction--we probably will not
even call them robots. But as these devices become affordable to consumers,
they could have just as profound an impact on the way we work, communicate,
learn and entertain ourselves as the PC has had over the past 30 years."
Excerpt of A Robot in Every Home, Bill Gates, ScientificAmerican.com,
January 2007.
Future robots will be more than mere tools doing isolated tasks: they
will be quasi-team members whose tasks have to be integrated with those of
humans or other robots [HRI2007]. One of the key aspects of the integration is
collision free motion among the various robots and people working in the
environment. This work is therefore mainly concerned with designing motion
controllers capable of responding efficiently, while considering the own
dynamic limitations of the robots and the constraints to motion imposed by
other robots or people.
Objectives:
The objectives of this work are twofold: (i)
Visual tracking of patterns by their colours and/or shapes; (ii) Controlling a
unicycle-type robot in order to reach the visually tracked target-pattern. At
the end is expected to demonstrate a point to point navigation capability by a
mobile robot under the view of vision sensors.
Detailed description:
Controlling the motion of a mobile robot is still a very active
research-and-development topic mainly because the large variety of applications
and the available locomotion methods and sensors. In this work-proposal the
robots are of the very common unicycle-type, i.e. carts or cars moving in a
two-dimensional world having two parallel driven wheels, one mounted on each
side of their centre, and one or two offset castors to maintain balance. These
vehicles allow simultaneous arbitrary rotation and translation being only
constrained in the sideways motion (the sideways motion cannot be
instantaneous). The main sensors to use are computer vision and odometry.
More specifically, the work-proposal consists of controlling one
unicycle robot to navigate to a target location following a reference path [Carona08]. The target location is defined by an off-board
video camera. The path following, or
tracking, can be aided by both the off-board and on-board sensors. The
controller must consider the dynamic constraints of the mobile robot and re-adjust the motion according to unexpected obstacles (e.g. other robots or
people). In other words, the on-board sensors will be allowed to a certain
extent to redefine the path to follow, based on the characteristics of the
robot and the state of the environment. The control methodologies may involve
some visual path following [Gaspar00], visual
servoing [VISP], or
dynamic control [Aguiar04] as considered to be the most
adequate for the tasks at hand.
The work is therefore organized in the following main steps:
1) visual tracking of patterns marking the
robot and the target, based on colours and/or shapes
2) combining the sensors information in common
reference frames, using information fusion filters
3) controller design for the unicycle type
robot, in order to move it towards the target
References:
[Carona08] Control of Unicycle Type
Robots: Tracking, Path Following and Point Stabilization, Ricardo Carona, A. Pedro Aguiar, José
Gaspar, in Proc. of IV Jornadas de Engenharia Electrónica e Telecomunicações e de Computadores,
pp180-185, November 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.
[HRI2007] - 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot
Interaction, http://hri2007.org/
[Aguiar04] "Pose Estimation of Autonomous
Vehicles using Visual Information: A Minimum-Energy Estimator Approach", A. Pedro
Aguiar and João P. Hespanha,
in Proc. of IAV2004 - 5th IFAC/EURON Symposium on Intelligent
Autonomous Vehicles, Lisbon, Portugal, Jul. 2004.
[Gaspar00] Vision-based Navigation and Environmental Representations
with an Omnidirectional Camera, José Gaspar, Niall Winters, José Santos-Victor, IEEE Transaction on Robotics and Automation, Vol 16, number 6, December 2000
[ISR-galery] Some images of unicycle type
robots at ISR: see labmate, scouts, pioneers, ... in "Mini galeria
de fotografias de projectos
@ IST/ISR", http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag/infoforum/isr_galeria/
[OpenCV] Open Computer Vision Library, http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencv/
[VISP] Visual servoing videos, http://www.irisa.fr/lagadic/visp/video.html
Expected results:
At the end of the work the students will have enriched their knowledge
in:
* Computer vision
* Control of unicycle type vehicles
Examples of expected demonstrations in simulated and/or real
environments:
* remotely controlling the unicycle-type robot
by pointing to one reference target-object to be reached by the robot
* guiding the robot towards a target, while the robot negotiates its own
navigation in order to avoid collisions with other robots
Observations:
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More MSc dissertation
proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:
http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag