Matching Items (8)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

155401-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
This work presents a communication paradigm, using a context-aware mixed reality approach, for instructing human workers when collaborating with robots. The main objective of this approach is to utilize the physical work environment as a canvas to communicate task-related instructions and robot intentions in the form of visual cues. A

This work presents a communication paradigm, using a context-aware mixed reality approach, for instructing human workers when collaborating with robots. The main objective of this approach is to utilize the physical work environment as a canvas to communicate task-related instructions and robot intentions in the form of visual cues. A vision-based object tracking algorithm is used to precisely determine the pose and state of physical objects in and around the workspace. A projection mapping technique is used to overlay visual cues on tracked objects and the workspace. Simultaneous tracking and projection onto objects enables the system to provide just-in-time instructions for carrying out a procedural task. Additionally, the system can also inform and warn humans about the intentions of the robot and safety of the workspace. It was hypothesized that using this system for executing a human-robot collaborative task will improve the overall performance of the team and provide a positive experience to the human partner. To test this hypothesis, an experiment involving human subjects was conducted and the performance (both objective and subjective) of the presented system was compared with a conventional method based on printed instructions. It was found that projecting visual cues enabled human subjects to collaborate more effectively with the robot and resulted in higher efficiency in completing the task.
ContributorsKalpagam Ganesan, Ramsundar (Author) / Ben Amor, Hani (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
155809-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Light field imaging is limited in its computational processing demands of high

sampling for both spatial and angular dimensions. Single-shot light field cameras

sacrifice spatial resolution to sample angular viewpoints, typically by multiplexing

incoming rays onto a 2D sensor array. While this resolution can be recovered using

compressive sensing, these iterative solutions are slow

Light field imaging is limited in its computational processing demands of high

sampling for both spatial and angular dimensions. Single-shot light field cameras

sacrifice spatial resolution to sample angular viewpoints, typically by multiplexing

incoming rays onto a 2D sensor array. While this resolution can be recovered using

compressive sensing, these iterative solutions are slow in processing a light field. We

present a deep learning approach using a new, two branch network architecture,

consisting jointly of an autoencoder and a 4D CNN, to recover a high resolution

4D light field from a single coded 2D image. This network decreases reconstruction

time significantly while achieving average PSNR values of 26-32 dB on a variety of

light fields. In particular, reconstruction time is decreased from 35 minutes to 6.7

minutes as compared to the dictionary method for equivalent visual quality. These

reconstructions are performed at small sampling/compression ratios as low as 8%,

allowing for cheaper coded light field cameras. We test our network reconstructions

on synthetic light fields, simulated coded measurements of real light fields captured

from a Lytro Illum camera, and real coded images from a custom CMOS diffractive

light field camera. The combination of compressive light field capture with deep

learning allows the potential for real-time light field video acquisition systems in the

future.
ContributorsGupta, Mayank (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
171818-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Recent advances in autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies have ensured that autonomous driving will soon be present in real-world traffic. Despite the potential of AVs, many studies have shown that traffic accidents in hybrid traffic environments (where both AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) are present) are inevitable because of the unpredictability

Recent advances in autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies have ensured that autonomous driving will soon be present in real-world traffic. Despite the potential of AVs, many studies have shown that traffic accidents in hybrid traffic environments (where both AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) are present) are inevitable because of the unpredictability of human-driven vehicles. Given that eliminating accidents is impossible, an achievable goal of designing AVs is to design them in a way so that they will not be blamed for any accident in which they are involved in. This work proposes BlaFT – a Blame-Free motion planning algorithm in hybrid Traffic. BlaFT is designed to be compatible with HVs and other AVs, and will not be blamed for accidents in a structured road environment. Also, it proves that no accidents will happen if all AVs are using the BlaFT motion planner and that when in hybrid traffic, the AV using BlaFT will be blame-free even if it is involved in a collision. The work instantiated scores of BlaFT and HV vehicles in an urban road scape loop in the 'Simulation of Urban MObility', ran the simulation for several hours, and observe that as the percentage of BlaFT vehicles increases, the traffic becomes safer. Adding BlaFT vehicles to HVs also increases the efficiency of traffic as a whole by up to 34%.
ContributorsPark, Sanggu (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Ruoyu (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
168821-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents

It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents a Commonsense knowledge Anchored Video cAptioNing (dubbed as CAVAN) approach. CAVAN exploits inferential commonsense knowledge to assist the training of video captioning model with a novel paradigm for sentence-level semantic alignment. Specifically, commonsense knowledge is queried to complement per training caption by querying a generic knowledge atlas ATOMIC, and form the commonsense- caption entailment corpus. A BERT based language entailment model trained from this corpus then serves as a commonsense discriminator for the training of video captioning model, and penalizes the model from generating semantically misaligned captions. With extensive empirical evaluations on MSR-VTT, V2C and VATEX datasets, CAVAN consistently improves the quality of generations and shows higher keyword hit rate. Experimental results with ablations validate the effectiveness of CAVAN and reveals that the use of commonsense knowledge contributes to the video caption generation.
ContributorsShao, Huiliang (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Xiao, Chaowei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
157886-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Visual navigation is a multi-disciplinary field across computer vision, machine learning and robotics. It is of great significance in both research and industrial applications. An intelligent agent with visual navigation ability will be capable of performing the following tasks: actively explore in environments, distinguish and localize a requested target and

Visual navigation is a multi-disciplinary field across computer vision, machine learning and robotics. It is of great significance in both research and industrial applications. An intelligent agent with visual navigation ability will be capable of performing the following tasks: actively explore in environments, distinguish and localize a requested target and approach the target following acquired strategies. Despite a variety of advances in mobile robotics, enabling an autonomous with above-mentioned abilities is still a challenging and complex task. However, the solution to the task is very likely to accelerate the landing of assistive robots.

Reinforcement learning is a method that trains autonomous robot based on rewarding desired behaviors to help it obtain an action policy that maximizes rewards while the robot interacting with the environment. Through trial and error, an agent learns sophisticated and skillful strategies to handle complex tasks in the environment. Inspired by navigation procedures of human beings that when navigating through environments, humans reason about accessible spaces and geometry of the environment a lot based on first-person view, figure out the destination and then ease over, this work develops a model that maps from pixels to actions and inherently estimate the target as well as the free-space map. The model has three major constituents: (i) a cognitive mapper that maps the topologic free-space map from first-person view images, (ii) a target recognition network that locates a desired object and (iii) an action policy deep reinforcement learning network. Further, a planner model with cascade architecture based on multi-scale semantic top-down occupancy map input is proposed.
ContributorsZheng, Shibin (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
158141-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
In a multi-robot system, locating a team robot is an important issue. If robots

can refer to the location of team robots based on information through passive action

recognition without explicit communication, various advantages (e.g. improving security

for military purposes) can be obtained. Specifically, when team robots follow

the same motion rule based on

In a multi-robot system, locating a team robot is an important issue. If robots

can refer to the location of team robots based on information through passive action

recognition without explicit communication, various advantages (e.g. improving security

for military purposes) can be obtained. Specifically, when team robots follow

the same motion rule based on information about adjacent robots, associations can

be found between robot actions. If the association can be analyzed, this can be a clue

to the remote robot. Using these clues, it is possible to infer remote robots which are

outside of the sensor range.

In this paper, a multi-robot system is constructed using a combination of Thymio

II robotic platforms and Raspberry pi controllers. Robots moving in chain-formation

take action using motion rules based on information obtained through passive action

recognition. To find associations between robots, a regression model is created using

Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), one of state-of-art technologies.

The input data of the regression model is divided into historical data, which

are consecutive positions of the robot, and observed data, which is information about the

observed robot. Historical data is sequence data that is analyzed through the LSTM

layer. The accuracy of the regression model designed using DNN can vary depending

on the quantity and quality of the input. In this thesis, three different input situations

are assumed for comparison. First, the amount of observed data is different, second, the

type of observed data is different, and third, the history length is different. Comparative

models are constructed for each case, and prediction accuracy is compared to analyze

the effect of input data on the regression model. This exploration validates that these

methods from deep learning can reduce the communication demands in coordinated

motion of multi-robot systems
ContributorsKang, Sehyeok (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore P (Thesis advisor) / Richa, Andréa W. (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
161732-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Computer vision and tracking has become an area of great interest for many reasons, including self-driving cars, identification of vehicles and drivers on roads, and security camera monitoring, all of which are expanding in the modern digital era. When working with practical systems that are constrained in multiple ways, such

Computer vision and tracking has become an area of great interest for many reasons, including self-driving cars, identification of vehicles and drivers on roads, and security camera monitoring, all of which are expanding in the modern digital era. When working with practical systems that are constrained in multiple ways, such as video quality or viewing angle, algorithms that work well theoretically can have a high error rate in practice. This thesis studies several ways in which that error can be minimized.This thesis describes an application in a practical system. This project is to detect, track and count people entering different lanes at an airport security checkpoint, using CCTV videos as a primary source. This thesis improves an existing algorithm that is not optimized for this particular problem and has a high error rate when comparing the algorithm counts with the true volume of users. The high error rate is caused by many people crowding into security lanes at the same time. The camera from which footage was captured is located at a poor angle, and thus many of the people occlude each other and cause the existing algorithm to miss people. One solution is to count only heads; since heads are smaller than a full body, they will occlude less, and in addition, since the camera is angled from above, the heads in back will appear higher and will not be occluded by people in front. One of the primary improvements to the algorithm is to combine both person detections and head detections to improve the accuracy. The proposed algorithm also improves the accuracy of detections. The existing algorithm used the COCO training dataset, which works well in scenarios where people are visible and not occluded. However, the available video quality in this project was not very good, with people often blocking each other from the camera’s view. Thus, a different training set was needed that could detect people even in poor-quality frames and with occlusion. The new training set is the first algorithmic improvement, and although occasionally performing worse, corrected the error by 7.25% on average.
ContributorsLarsen, Andrei (Author) / Askin, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Sefair, Jorge (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
156281-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Currently, one of the biggest limiting factors for long-term deployment of autonomous systems is the power constraints of a platform. In particular, for aerial robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the energy resource is the main driver of mission planning and operation definitions, as everything revolved around flight time.

Currently, one of the biggest limiting factors for long-term deployment of autonomous systems is the power constraints of a platform. In particular, for aerial robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the energy resource is the main driver of mission planning and operation definitions, as everything revolved around flight time. The focus of this work is to develop a new method of energy storage and charging for autonomous UAV systems, for use during long-term deployments in a constrained environment. We developed a charging solution that allows pre-equipped UAV system to land on top of designated charging pads and rapidly replenish their battery reserves, using a contact charging point. This system is designed to work with all types of rechargeable batteries, focusing on Lithium Polymer (LiPo) packs, that incorporate a battery management system for increased reliability. The project also explores optimization methods for fleets of UAV systems, to increase charging efficiency and extend battery lifespans. Each component of this project was first designed and tested in computer simulation. Following positive feedback and results, prototypes for each part of this system were developed and rigorously tested. Results show that the contact charging method is able to charge LiPo batteries at a 1-C rate, which is the industry standard rate, maintaining the same safety and efficiency standards as modern day direct connection chargers. Control software for these base stations was also created, to be integrated with a fleet management system, and optimizes UAV charge levels and distribution to extend LiPo battery lifetimes while still meeting expected mission demand. Each component of this project (hardware/software) was designed for manufacturing and implementation using industry standard tools, making it ideal for large-scale implementations. This system has been successfully tested with a fleet of UAV systems at Arizona State University, and is currently being integrated into an Arizona smart city environment for deployment.
ContributorsMian, Sami (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018