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Articles
Stable visual navigation
Sabine Hauert
20 Apr 2011
If you’re trying to get from the couch to the fridge, you’ll probably be using vision to navigate and home-in on your fresh drink.
To make your camera-equipped robot do something similar, ...
Finding outdoor odor sources using particle filters
Sabine Hauert
05 Apr 2011
Robots with smell could be used to find sources of toxic gas, search for drugs, locate survivors under rubble or hidden mines. Robots have an advantage over sniffer dogs since they can enter dangerous...
Robots get students motivated to pursue STEM careers
Sabine Hauert
17 Mar 2011
Robotics is a great way to engage young students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. With this in mind, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML)...
Integrating path planning and robot control
Sabine Hauert
07 Mar 2011
There is often a conflict between planning the path a robot should take to achieve a desired task (high-level control) and the motion control needed for the robot to follow this path (low-level contro...
Real-time behavior-based control
Sabine Hauert
22 Feb 2011
Using behavior-based controllers, robots are theoretically able to rapidly react to their environment. This is typically done by having several behaviors, that map sensory input to actuator commands, ...
Simulated pronking robots move like springboks
Sabine Hauert
14 Feb 2011
If you’ve never seen a video of springboks gracefully pronking, have a look below.
Pronking is a gait where all legs are used in synchrony, usually resulting in relatively slow speeds but lo...
High-speed walkers pretend to go downhill
Sabine Hauert
03 Feb 2011
The typical way to make a bipedal robot walk is to actuate its leg joints, strap a bunch of sensors to measure its state and add a tight control loop to make sure it is performing the desired steps.
I...
Learning Bayesian filters without precise ground truth
Sabine Hauert
21 Jan 2011
As seen in a previous post, Bayes filters such as Kalman filters can be used to estimate the state of a robot. Usually, this requires having a model of how the robot’s sensor measurements relate...
Shared control for wheelchairs
Sabine Hauert
08 Jan 2011
To help aging populations with mobility, researchers are developing robotic wheelchairs. Typically, control switches between the user of the wheelchair and the robot when tasks become difficult or dan...
Learning behavioral models
Sabine Hauert
21 Dec 2010
It is often difficult to predict the high-level behavior of a robot given low-level models about sensors, actuators and controllers. You might know your robot will turn in response to obstacles but n...
Flying robot actors
Sabine Hauert
08 Dec 2010
Around a year ago, theater-goers at Texas A&M discovered Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The plot unfolds in a magical forest inhabited by fairies. To add to th...
Cooperative localization using Kalman filtering
Sabine Hauert
26 Nov 2010
Kalman filters are used in robotics to correct measurement errors. Imagine trying to precisely predict the position of an outdoor robot. The robot is equipped with a GPS and is able to measure the spe...
Cooperative payload transport with quadrotors
Sabine Hauert
18 Nov 2010
Just the other day, a noisy helicopter was flying above campus, carrying large batches of solar panels to hard to reach rooftops. You might have also seen people dangling from helicopters in rescue mi...
Adaptive walking using oscillators
Sabine Hauert
10 Nov 2010
Animal walking is thought to be driven by rhythmic signals sent through the spinal cord. These signals are translated to motions of the limbs. For a bipedal walker, such patterns would force leg swing...
Human motion database
Sabine Hauert
30 Oct 2010
By creating a database of human motions, Yamane et al. hope to allow robots to recognize human behaviors or move like humans. To do this, they analyze motion clips of people performing all sorts of ac...
Robotic chemistry
Sabine Hauert
18 Oct 2010
Stochastic self-assembly is a hot topic in chemistry and biology. The general idea is that if you pour building blocks into a recipient and stir, your blocks will eventually react with one another to ...
Robot coordination for fire response
Sabine Hauert
12 Oct 2010
Robots can work together to cooperatively execute tasks much faster than a single robot. In the scenario proposed by Jones et al. fire trucks are sent out to extinguish fires caused by a large-scale d...
SLAM with aerial images
Sabine Hauert
02 Oct 2010
Imagine arriving in a new city without a map. Starting from the train station, you might take a walk around the block before returning to your starting point. As you go you’ll probably start bui...
Exploration using Voronoi diagrams
Sabine Hauert
21 Sep 2010
How can a robot explore and make maps of new environments while avoiding obstacles?
One way is to let the robot remain at equal distance from its two nearest obstacles, thereby navigating exactly in b...
Robot formations that avoid obstacles
Sabine Hauert
13 Sep 2010
In formations, robots are positioned at a precise distance and sometimes angle from one another to form shapes. Robots that advance in formations can share communication, computation and sensing resou...
Adaptive bipedal walking on slopes
Sabine Hauert
06 Sep 2010
Imagine walking on a flat surface with your eyes blinded. If the slope below your feet changes, you’ll most likely change your posture to keep moving. To explain this, an idea from the 1950s say...
Social learning
Sabine Hauert
29 Aug 2010
Robots are portrayed as tomorrows helpers, be it in schools, hospitals, workplaces or homes. Unfortunately, such robots won’t be truly useful out-of-the-box because of the complexity of real-wor...
Local visual homing
Sabine Hauert
24 Aug 2010
How can a robot, using vision, go back to a previously visited location?
Möller et al. look at this research question, tagged “Local Visual Homing” in an intuitive manner inspired from so...
RFID-based global positioning
Sabine Hauert
14 Aug 2010
Having a robot figure out its global position is required in many real world applications, it’s also one of the biggest challenges in robotics.
The easiest approach is to have a robot blindly ke...
Human-like arm movements
Sabine Hauert
06 Aug 2010
Many robots are required to move like humans. Human-like motion is useful to efficiently interact with humans and environments built for them, make realistic humanoids or replace actual limbs (prosthe...
Contour extraction for mapping
Sabine Hauert
29 Jul 2010
To map their environment, robots typically collect large amounts of range and bearing measurements to walls around them. However, when using noisy sensors, additional efforts need to be done to extrac...
Learning tasks across different environments
Sabine Hauert
27 Jul 2010
In the future, robots will be expected to learn a task and execute it in a variety of realistic situations. Reinforcement-learning and planning algorithms are exactly intended for that purpose. Howeve...
Classifying dynamic obstacles
Sabine Hauert
24 Jul 2010
Identifying dynamic objects in urban environments has become a major concern with the advent of autonomous cars in industry and competitions such as the Darpa Urban Challenge. However, detecting and c...
Vision, force and touch for manipulation
Sabine Hauert
22 Jul 2010
Manipulating objects is still a major challenge for robots in human-centered environments. To overcome this hurdle, Prats et al. propose to combine vision, force and tactile sensing to achieve robust ...
Vision-based navigation with motion blur
Sabine Hauert
20 Jul 2010
Robots often need to know where they are in the world to navigate efficiently. One of the cheapest ways to localize is to strap a camera on-board and extract visual features from the environment. Howe...
