Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
Description
With robots being used extensively in various areas, a certain degree of robot autonomy has always been found desirable. In applications like planetary exploration, autonomous path planning and navigation are considered essential. But every now and then, a need to modify the robot's operation arises, a need for a human to provide it some supervisory parameters that modify the degree of autonomy or allocate extra tasks to the robot. In this regard, this thesis presents an approach to include a provision to accept and incorporate such human inputs and modify the navigation functions of the robot accordingly. Concepts such as applying kinematical constraints while planning paths, traversing of unknown areas with an intent of maximizing field of view, performing complex tasks on command etc. have been examined and implemented. The approaches have been tested in Robot Operating System (ROS), using robots such as the iRobot Create, Personal Robotics (PR2) etc. Simulations and experimental demonstrations have proved that this approach is feasible for solving some of the existing problems and that it certainly can pave way to further research for enhancing functionality.
ContributorsVemprala, Sai Hemachandra (Author) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Multi-sensor fusion is a fundamental problem in Robot Perception. For a robot to operate in a real world environment, multiple sensors are often needed. Thus, fusing data from various sensors accurately is vital for robot perception. In the first part of this thesis, the problem of fusing information from a LIDAR, a color camera and a thermal camera to build RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGBDT) maps is investigated. An algorithm that solves a non-linear optimization problem to compute the relative pose between the cameras and the LIDAR is presented. The relative pose estimate is then used to find the color and thermal texture of each LIDAR point. Next, the various sources of error that can cause the mis-coloring of a LIDAR point after the cross- calibration are identified. Theoretical analyses of these errors reveal that the coloring errors due to noisy LIDAR points, errors in the estimation of the camera matrix, and errors in the estimation of translation between the sensors disappear with distance. But errors in the estimation of the rotation between the sensors causes the coloring error to increase with distance.
On a robot (vehicle) with multiple sensors, sensor fusion algorithms allow us to represent the data in the vehicle frame. But data acquired temporally in the vehicle frame needs to be registered in a global frame to obtain a map of the environment. Mapping techniques involving the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and the Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) assume that a good initial estimate of the transformation between the 3D scans is available. This restricts the ability to stitch maps that were acquired at different times. Mapping can become flexible if maps that were acquired temporally can be merged later. To this end, the second part of this thesis focuses on developing an automated algorithm that fuses two maps by finding a congruent set of five points forming a pyramid.
Mapping has various application domains beyond Robot Navigation. The third part of this thesis considers a unique application domain where the surface displace- ments caused by an earthquake are to be recovered using pre- and post-earthquake LIDAR data. A technique to recover the 3D surface displacements is developed and the results are presented on real earthquake datasets: El Mayur Cucupa earthquake, Mexico, 2010 and Fukushima earthquake, Japan, 2011.
On a robot (vehicle) with multiple sensors, sensor fusion algorithms allow us to represent the data in the vehicle frame. But data acquired temporally in the vehicle frame needs to be registered in a global frame to obtain a map of the environment. Mapping techniques involving the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and the Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) assume that a good initial estimate of the transformation between the 3D scans is available. This restricts the ability to stitch maps that were acquired at different times. Mapping can become flexible if maps that were acquired temporally can be merged later. To this end, the second part of this thesis focuses on developing an automated algorithm that fuses two maps by finding a congruent set of five points forming a pyramid.
Mapping has various application domains beyond Robot Navigation. The third part of this thesis considers a unique application domain where the surface displace- ments caused by an earthquake are to be recovered using pre- and post-earthquake LIDAR data. A technique to recover the 3D surface displacements is developed and the results are presented on real earthquake datasets: El Mayur Cucupa earthquake, Mexico, 2010 and Fukushima earthquake, Japan, 2011.
ContributorsKrishnan, Aravindhan K (Author) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Thesis advisor) / Klesh, Andrew (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Thangavelautham, Jekan (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Statistical Shape Modeling is widely used to study the morphometrics of deformable objects in computer vision and biomedical studies. There are mainly two viewpoints to understand the shapes. On one hand, the outer surface of the shape can be taken as a two-dimensional embedding in space. On the other hand, the outer surface along with its enclosed internal volume can be taken as a three-dimensional embedding of interests. Most studies focus on the surface-based perspective by leveraging the intrinsic features on the tangent plane. But a two-dimensional model may fail to fully represent the realistic properties of shapes with both intrinsic and extrinsic properties. In this thesis, severalStochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDEs) are thoroughly investigated and several methods are originated from these SPDEs to try to solve the problem of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shape analyses. The unique physical meanings of these SPDEs inspired the findings of features, shape descriptors, metrics, and kernels in this series of works. Initially, the data generation of high-dimensional shapes, here, the tetrahedral meshes, is introduced. The cerebral cortex is taken as the study target and an automatic pipeline of generating the gray matter tetrahedral mesh is introduced. Then, a discretized Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) and a Hamiltonian operator (HO) in tetrahedral domain with Finite Element Method (FEM) are derived. Two high-dimensional shape descriptors are defined based on the solution of the heat equation and Schrödinger’s equation. Considering the fact that high-dimensional shape models usually contain massive redundancies, and the demands on effective landmarks in many applications, a Gaussian process landmarking on tetrahedral meshes is further studied. A SIWKS-based metric space is used to define a geometry-aware Gaussian process. The study of the periodic potential diffusion process further inspired the idea of a new kernel call the geometry-aware convolutional kernel. A series of Bayesian learning methods are then introduced to tackle the problem of shape retrieval and classification. Experiments of every single item are demonstrated. From the popular SPDE such as the heat equation and Schrödinger’s equation to the general potential diffusion equation and the specific periodic potential diffusion equation, it clearly shows that classical SPDEs play an important role in discovering new features, metrics, shape descriptors and kernels. I hope this thesis could be an example of using interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems.
ContributorsFan, Yonghui (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Lepore, Natasha (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021