A dual working mode mobile robot system based on visual guiding and visual servoing

A dual operational modes mobile robot system based on visual guiding and visual servo control is presented. This system consists of a mobile robot with a two-axis manipulator and a tele-operation station. In the visual guiding mode, for the robot works in an open loop visual servo control mode, the manipulating burden of the operator is reduced largely. In the visual servo mode the robot can locate the position of the target assigned by the operator and pick it up by its manipulator. With the help of the operator, the diffieuh problems of finding and handling a target in a complicated environment by the robot can be solved easily.

Robot visual guide with Fourier-Mellin based visual tracking

Robot vision guide is an important research area in industrial automation,and image-based target pose estimation is one of the most challenging problems.We focus on target pose estimation and present a solution based on the binocular stereo vision in this paper.To improve the robustness and speed of pose estimation,we propose a novel visual tracking algorithm based on Fourier-Mellin transform to extract the target region.We evaluate the proposed tracking algorithm on online tracking benchmark-50(OTB-50)and the results show that it outperforms other lightweight trackers,especially when the target is rotated or scaled.The final experiment proves that the improved pose estimation approach can achieve a position accuracy of 1.84 mm and a speed of 7 FPS(frames per second).Besides,this approach is robust to the variances of illumination and can work well in the range of 250-700 lux.

Design and Development of a Vision-based Hydraulic Operated Mending Machine for Repairing 3W Forks

Three wheelers(3 Ws)are widely used in low and middle-income countries,particularly in Asia Pacific region as a comparatively cheap method to passenger transportation and goods delivery.The frequent use of 3 Ws in day-to-day activities have caused a large number of accidents causing injuries to their passengers.Less research has been carried out to identify the reasons behind 3 W accidents.The survey carried out prior to this research has identified that the stability control and speed control are the two key factors which the 3 W accidents attributed to.3 W fork is the main mechanical element that controls the balance and the stability of the vehicle.A damaged 3 W fork(a physical damage or a slight deformation)unbalances the 3 W and had been identified as one of the reasons for large number of accidents.Therefore,correctly reforming the damaged fork is of paramount importance,when concerning the safety of the 3 Ws.Traditionally,both heat-treating and cold-working techniques are used in the mending processes.Not only this manual-labor repairing process weakens the strength of the fork,but also the profile produced is inaccurate.This paper discusses a hydraulic operated fork mending machine with an image processing technique to reform the damaged forks in 3 Ws.An image comparator-based imaging technique is used for this machine vision-based visually guided fork repairing process.Three cameras have been used to capture the images from three perpendicular directions.A contour sketch of the original fork(before the deformation occurs)has been compared against the faulty fork,to assist the worker to carry out the repairing process.The preliminary experimentations have shown that the proposed technique can improve the repositioning of the camber angle by repairing the damaged fork.

Robot Self-Location by Line Correspondences

This paper thoroughly investigates the problem of robot self-location by line correspondences. The original contributions are three-fold: (1) Obtain the necessary and sufficient condition to determine linearly the robot's pose by two line correspondences. (2) Show that if the space lines are vertical ones, it is impossible to determine linearly the robot's pose no matter how many line correspondences we have, and the minimum number of line correspondences is 3 to determine uniquely (but non-linearly) the robot's pose. (3) Show that if the space lines are horizontal ones, the minimum number of line correspondences is 3 for linear determination and 2 for non-linear determination of the robot's pose.