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Institute
MOBSY is a fully integrated autonomous mobile service robot system.
It acts as an automatic dialogue based receptionist for visitors of our institute. MOBSY incorporates many techniques from different research areas into one working stand-alone system. Especially the computer vision and dialogue aspects are of main interest from the pattern recognition’s point of view.
To summarize shortly, the involved techniques range from object classification over visual self-localization and recalibration to object tracking with multiple cameras. A dialogue component has to deal with speech recognition, understanding and answer generation. Further techniques needed are navigation, obstacle avoidance, and mechanisms to provide fault tolerant behavior.
This contribution introduces our mobile system MOBSY. Among the main aspects vision and speech, we focus also on the integration aspect, both on the methodological and on the technical level. We describe the task and the involved techniques.
Finally, we discuss the experiences that we gained with MOBSY during a live performance at the 25th anniversary of our institute
Wepresentaniterativeregistrationalgorithmfor aligning two differently scaled 3-D point sets. It extends the popular Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm by estimating a scale factor between the two point sets in every iteration.
The presented algorithm is especially useful for the registration of point sets generated by structure-frommotion algorithms, which only reconstruct the 3-D structure of a scene upto scale. LiketheoriginalICPalgorithm,thepresentedalgorithm requires a rough pre-alignment of the point sets.
In order to determine the necessary accuracy of the pre-alignment, wehaveexperimentallyevaluatedthebasinofconvergence of the algorithm with respect to the initial rotation, translation, andscale factor between the two point sets.
There are many nearest neighbor algorithms tailor made for ICP,but most of them require Special input data like range Images or triangle meshes.
We focus on efficient nearest neighbor algorithms that do not impose this limitation, and thus can also be used with 3-D point sets generated by structure-frommotion techniques. We shortly present the evaluated algorithms and introduce the modifications we made to improve their efficiency.
In particular, several enhancements to the well-known k-D tree algorithm are described. The first part of our Performance Analysis consists of Experiments on synthetic point sets, whereas the second part features experiments with the ICP algorithm on real point sets. Both parts are completed by a thorough evaluation of the obtained results.
Robust registration of two 3-D point sets is a common problem in computer vision.
The iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is undoubtedly the most popular algorithm for solving this kind of problem. In this paper, we present the Picky ICP algorithm, which has been created by merging several extensions of the standard ICP algorithm, thus improving its robustness and computation time.
Using pure 3-D point sets as input data, we do not consider additional information like point color or neighborhood relations. In addition to the standard ICP algorithm and the Picky ICP algorithm proposed in this paper, a robust algorithm due to Masuda and Yokoya and the RICP algorithm by Trucco et al. are evaluated.
We have experimentally determined the basin of convergence, robustness to noise and outliers, and computation time of these four ICP based algorithms
We propose a reinforcement learning approach to heating control in home automation, that can acquire a set of rules enabling an agent to heat a room to the desired temperature at a defined time while conserving as much energy as possible. Experimental results are presented that show the feasibility of our method.
This paper shows how a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors and an odometer is used to test ideas about cognitive mapping. The robot first explores an office environment and computes a "cognitive map" which is a network of ASRs [1]. The robot generates two networks, one for the outward journey and the other for the journey home.
It is shown that both networks are different. The two networks, however, are not merged to form a single network. Instead, the robot attempts to use distance information implicit in the shape of each ASR to find its way home. At random positions in the homeward journey, the robot calculates its orientation towards home. The robot's performances for both problems are evaluated and found to be surprisingly accurate.
In this paper, we present our experience in designing and teaching of our first robotics course for students at primary school level.
The course was carried out over a comparatively short period of time, namely 6 weeks, 2 hours per week. In contrast to many other projects, we use robots that researchers used to conduct their research and discuss problems faced by these researchers. Thus, this is not a behavioural study but a hands-on learning experience for the students.
The aim is to highlight the development of autonomous robots and artificial intelligence as well as to promote science and robotics in schools.
When animals (including humans) first explore a new environment, what they remember is fragmentary knowledge about the places visited. Yet, they have to use such fragmentary knowledge to find their way home. Humans naturally use more powerful heuristics while lower animals have shown to developa varietyof methodsthat tend to utilize two key pieces of information,namely distance and orientation information.
Their methods differ depending on how they sense their environment.
Could a mobile robot be used to investigate the nature of such a process, commonly referred to in the psychological literature as cognitive mapping? What might be computed in the initial explorations and how is the resulting “cognitive map” be used to return home?
In this paper, we presented a novel approach using a mobile robot to do cognitive mapping. Our robot computes a “cognitive map” and uses distance and orientation information to find its way home.
The process developed provides interesting insights into the nature of cognitive mapping and encourages us to use a mobile robot to do cognitive mapping in the future, as opposed to its popular use in robot mapping.
This paper presents a novel algorithm for computing absolute space representations (ASRs) in Yeap, W.K. and Jefferies, M. (1988) for mobile robots equipped with sonar sensors and an odometer. The robot is allowed to wander freely (i.e. without following any fixed path) along the corridors in an office environment from a given start point to an end point. It then wanders from the end point back to the start point. The resulting ASRs computed in both directions are shown
Shifting energy peak load is a subject that plays a huge role in the currently changing energy market, where renewable energy sources no longer produce the exact amount of energy demanded.
Matching demand to supply requires behavior Changes on the customerside, which can be achieved by incentives suchas Real-Time-Pricing (RTP).
Various studies show that such incentives cannot be utilized without a complexity reduction, e.g., by smart home automation systems that inform the customer about possible savings or automatically schedule appliances to off-peak load phases.
We propose a probabilistic appliance usage prediction based on historical energy data that can be used to identify the times of day where an appliance will be used and therefore make load shift recommendations that suite the customer’s usage profile. A huge issue is how to provide a valid performance evaluation for this particular problem.
We will argue why the commonly used accuracy metric is not suitable, and suggest to use other metrics like the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) or F1-Score instead.