Closed-loop and activity-guided optogenetic control.

Review of Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) applications in the built environment: Towards automated building inspection procedures using drones

In this paper, we present a novel integrated vehicular system using collaborative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for autonomous exploration, mapping, and navigation in GPS-denied 3-dimensional (3-D) unknown environments. The system implements a novel two-layered exploration strategy to decompose the perception task into a coarse exploration layer and a fine mapping layer. The coarse exploration makes use of a UGV to carry out fast autonomous exploration and active 2.5D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to generate a coarse environment model, which serves as a navigation reference for subsequent complementary 3-D fine mapping conducted by a UAV. The two layers share a novel optimized exploration path planning and navigation framework, which provides optimal exploration paths and integrates the collaborative exploration and mapping efforts through an OctoMap-based volumetric motion planning interface. The proposed system provides an efficient pipeline of fast environment perception taking advantages of the agility of the UAVs as well as the powerful computation resource aboard UGVs, also allowing assistive local perception with augmented object information when necessary. The effectiveness of our system is verified by both simulations and experiments, which demonstrate its capability of implementing heterogeneous UAV and UGV collaborative exploration and structural reconstruction of the environments through active SLAM, providing optimized perception for navigation tasks.

Autonomous Exploration and Mapping System Using Heterogeneous UAVs and UGVs in GPS-Denied Environments

The building sector is the dominant consumer of energy and therefore a major contributor to anthropomorphic climate change. The rapid generation of photorealistic, 3D environment models with incorporated surface temperature data has the potential to improve thermographic monitoring of building energy efficiency. In pursuit of this goal, we propose a system which combines a range sensor with a thermal-infrared camera. Our proposed system can generate dense 3D models of environments with both appearance and temperature information, and is the first such system to be developed using a low-cost RGB-D camera. The proposed pipeline processes depth maps successively, forming an ongoing pose estimate of the depth camera and optimizing a voxel occupancy map. Voxels are assigned 4 channels representing estimates of their true RGB and thermal-infrared intensity values. Poses corresponding to each RGB and thermal-infrared image are estimated through a combination of timestamp-based interpolation and a predetermined knowledge of the extrinsic calibration of the system. Raycasting is then used to color the voxels to represent both visual appearance using RGB, and an estimate of the surface temperature. The output of the system is a dense 3D model which can simultaneously represent both RGB and thermal-infrared data using one of two alternative representation schemes. Experimental results demonstrate that the system is capable of accurately mapping difficult environments, even in complete darkness.

/pdf/3d-thermal-mapping-of-building-interiors-using-an-rgb-d-and-21t70s5t49.pdf

3D thermal mapping of building interiors using an RGB-D and thermal camera

In this paper, we have developed a novel visual servo-based model predictive control method to steer a wheeled mobile robot (WMR) moving in a polar coordinate toward a desired target. The proposed control scheme has been realized at both kinematics and dynamics levels. The kinematics predictive steering controller generates command of desired velocities that are achieved by employing a low-level motion controller, while the dynamics predictive controller directly generates torques used to steer the WMR to the target. In the presence of both kinematics and dynamics constraints, the control design is carried out using quadratic programming (QP) for optimal performance. The neurodynamic optimization technique, particularly the primal-dual neural network, is employed to solve the QP problems. Theoretical analysis has been first performed to show that the desired velocities can be achieved with the guaranteed stability, as well as with the global convergence to the optimal solutions of formulated convex programming problems. Experiments have then been carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme and illustrate its advantage over the conventional methods.

Vision-Based Model Predictive Control for Steering of a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot

A mobile robot based system for fully automated thermal 3D mapping

In this paper, the problem of path planning for active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is addressed. In order to improve its localization accuracy while autonomously exploring an unknown environment the robot needs to revisit positions seen before. To that end, we propose a path planning algorithm for active SLAM that continuously improves robot’s localization while moving smoothly, without stopping, toward a goal position. The algorithm is based on the D* shortest path graph search algorithm with negative edge weights for finding the shortest path taking into account localization uncertainty. The proposed path planning algorithm is suitable for exploration of highly dynamic environments with moving obstacles and dynamic changes in localization demands. While the algorithm operation is illustrated in simulation experiments, its effectiveness is verified experimentally in real-world scenarios.

Path Planning for Active SLAM Based on the D* Algorithm With Negative Edge Weights

https://robotik.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/telematics/download/syroco2012_1.pdf

The Project ThermalMapper – Thermal 3D Mapping of Indoor Environments for Saving Energy

In this paper the Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy is used to solve the mobile robot trajectory tracking problem, where controller must ensure that robot follows pre-calculated trajectory. The so-called explicit optimal controller design and implementation are described. The MPC solution is calculated off-line and expressed as a piecewise affine function of the current state of a mobile robot. A linearized kinematic model of a differential drive mobile robot is used for the controller design purpose. The optimal controller, which has a form of a look-up table, is tested in simulation and experimentally.

Explicit Model Predictive Control for trajectory tracking with mobile robots

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/ifac2014/media/files/1275.pdf

Ivan Maurović

Papers

A mobile robot based system for fully automated thermal 3D mapping

Path Planning for Active SLAM Based on the D* Algorithm With Negative Edge Weights

The Project ThermalMapper – Thermal 3D Mapping of Indoor Environments for Saving Energy

Explicit Model Predictive Control for trajectory tracking with mobile robots

Autonomous Exploration of Large Unknown Indoor Environments for Dense 3D Model Building