The conventional tracking paradigm is to sequentially apply a single frame detector to each sensor frame and then employ a tracking algorithm to determine which detector outputs originate from targets and which are false alarms. The tracker associates detections from a particular target and estimates parameters of interest for the target [3], [1]. The obvious shortcoming of this approach is tha...

We present a combined system that enables a humanoid robot to sense humans using different modalities. The user is localized by means of a joint audio-visual person tracker. His face is identified using a novel local-appearance based approach which is robust against partial occlusion. In order to determine the user’s focus and object of interest respectively, we estimate headpose using a neural...

The performance of traditional direction arrival (DOA) estimation methods always deteriorates at a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or without sufficient observations. This paper investigates the Bayesian DOA problem aided by prior knowledge from target tracker. Cramér–Rao lower bounds (CRLB) and expected CRLB are first derived to evaluate theoretical estimation. Based on maximum posterior (MAP)...

An autonomous control system designed for a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot that is programmed to emulate a fixed-wing unmanned air vehicle (UAV) flying at constant altitude is experimentally validated. The overall system is capable of waypoint navigation, threat avoidance, real-time trajectory generation and trajectory tracking. Both the wheeled mobile robot experimental platform and the hi...

Estimating the ego-motion of a mobile robot has been traditionally achieved by means of encoder-based odometry. However, this method presents several drawbacks, such as the existence of accumulative drifts, its sensibility to slippage, and its limitation to planar environments. In this work we present an alternative method for estimating the incremental change in the robot pose from images take...

We present a robotically assisted prostate brachytherapy system and test results in training phantoms. The system consists of a transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) and a spatially co-registered robot integrated with an FDA-approved commercial treatment planning system. The salient feature of the system is a small parallel robot affixed to the mounting posts of the template. The robot replaces the tem...

This article presents a semantic tracker which simultaneously tracks a single target and recognises its category. In general, it is hard to design a tracking model suitable for all object categories, e.g., a rigid tracker for a car is not suitable for a deformable gymnast. Category-based trackers usually achieve superior tracking performance for the objects of that specific category, but have d...

We have accelerated a robust model-based 3D tracking system by programmable graphics hardware to run online at frame-rate during operation of a humanoid robot and to efficiently auto-initialize. The tracker recovers the full 6 degree-of-freedom pose of viewable objects relative to the robot. Leveraging the computational resources of the GPU for perception has enabled us to increase our tracker’...