Refugee/asylee: A person who, because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is forced to flee the country of his or her nationality and is unwilling or unable to seek the protection of his or her government. Refugee status is determined by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before...

Teams of humans and robots working together can provide effective solutions to problems. In such applications, effective human-robot teaming relies on being able to communicate information about the current perception or understanding of the environment. In this paper, human-robot teaming on navigational tasks is discussed. The role of the human user will be to specify the goal point(s) for the...

In this paper a biologically inspired approach for compensating the limited angle of vision in obstacle detection systems of mobile robots is presented. Most of the time it is not feasible to exhaustively monitor the environment of a mobile robot. In order to nonetheless achieve safe navigation obstacle detection mechanisms need to keep in mind certain aspects of the environment. In mammals thi...

In some circumstances the erosive effects of inertial (transient) cavitation have been usefully employed in the acceleration of chemical processes that are dependent on surface reactions. However, in other situations the erosion of materials can be detrimental. For example erosion/corrosion phenomena have been well documented. It will be demonstrated here that the employment of inertial cavitat...

This paper proposes an approach to calibrate off-the-shelf cameras and inertial sensors to have a useful integrated system to be used in static and dynamic situations. The rotation between the camera and the inertial sensor can be estimated, when calibrating the camera, by having both sensors observe the vertical direction, using a vertical chessboard target and gravity. The translation between...

We present an underwater localization system for medium-sized Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that leverages a broadband wireless acoustic communication GPS-denied localization. Many current systems assume single line-of-sight path and use either narrow-band signals or short-duration pings the convenience of mitigating motion-induced Doppler at expense time-of-arrival (TOA) accuracy opera...

We propose a navigation system combining sensor-aided inertial and prior-map-based localization to improve the stability accuracy of robot in structure-rich environments. Specifically, we adopt point, line, plane features enhance feature richness low-texture environments reliability. additionally integrate structure prior information constrain drifts accuracy. The is called priors parameterized...