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.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
Filtering by
- 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
Software has a great impact on the energy efficiency of any computing system--it can manage the components of a system efficiently or inefficiently. The impact of software is amplified in the context of a wearable computing system used for activity recognition. The design space this platform opens up is immense and encompasses sensors, feature calculations, activity classification algorithms, sleep schedules, and transmission protocols. Design choices in each of these areas impact energy use, overall accuracy, and usefulness of the system. This thesis explores methods software can influence the trade-off between energy consumption and system accuracy. In general the more energy a system consumes the more accurate will be. We explore how finding the transitions between human activities is able to reduce the energy consumption of such systems without reducing much accuracy. We introduce the Log-likelihood Ratio Test as a method to detect transitions, and explore how choices of sensor, feature calculations, and parameters concerning time segmentation affect the accuracy of this method. We discovered an approximate 5X increase in energy efficiency could be achieved with only a 5% decrease in accuracy. We also address how a system's sleep mode, in which the processor enters a low-power state and sensors are turned off, affects a wearable computing platform that does activity recognition. We discuss the energy trade-offs in each stage of the activity recognition process. We find that careful analysis of these parameters can result in great increases in energy efficiency if small compromises in overall accuracy can be tolerated. We call this the ``Great Compromise.'' We found a 6X increase in efficiency with a 7% decrease in accuracy. We then consider how wireless transmission of data affects the overall energy efficiency of a wearable computing platform. We find that design decisions such as feature calculations and grouping size have a great impact on the energy consumption of the system because of the amount of data that is stored and transmitted. For example, storing and transmitting vector-based features such as FFT or DCT do not compress the signal and would use more energy than storing and transmitting the raw signal. The effect of grouping size on energy consumption depends on the feature. For scalar features energy consumption is proportional in the inverse of grouping size, so it's reduced as grouping size goes up. For features that depend on the grouping size, such as FFT, energy increases with the logarithm of grouping size, so energy consumption increases slowly as grouping size increases. We find that compressing data through activity classification and transition detection significantly reduces energy consumption and that the energy consumed for the classification overhead is negligible compared to the energy savings from data compression. We provide mathematical models of energy usage and data generation, and test our ideas using a mobile computing platform, the Texas Instruments Chronos watch.
ContributorsBoyd, Jeffrey Michael (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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