The useful environmental interaction of a mobile robot is completely dependent on the reliable extraction of information from its immediate surroundings A review of some of the most commonly used coaxial active sensing methods in robotics is presented A coaxial sensor results if the transmitter and receiver are geometri cally arranged in a coaxial manner Certain advantages of such con gurations...

It has been shown previously that the Histogram Probabilistic Multi-Hypothesis Tracking (HPMHT) algorithm enables tracking of targets distributed across several sensor cells. Two related aspects of the H-PMHT algorithm are discussed in this paper, namely the estimation of target spread, and the use of the negative multinomial distribution to compensate for unobserved sensor cells. The examples ...

In this work we propose an enhanced model for mapping from sonar sensors and odometry that allows a robot to represent an environment map in a more suitable way to both the sonar sensory data and odometry system of the robot. We use a stochastic modelling of the errors that brings up reliable information. As a contribution, we obtain a final map that is more coherent with the reality of the ori...

Two key objectives of robot vision are autonomous navigation and mapping. Digital cameras have become relatively cheap in recent years and have appeared in a variety of consumer devices, such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). It therefore makes sense to try to build systems that use vision as their primary input instead of the more traditional sonar and infrared sensors that have been used...

Time delay estimation has been a research topic of significant practical importance in many fields (radar, sonar, seismology, geophysics, ultrasonics, hands-free communications, etc.). It is a first stage that feeds into subsequent processing blocks for identifying, localizing, and tracking radiating sources. This area has made remarkable advances in the past few decades, and is continuing to p...

In this article, we present the design of a team of heterogeneous, centimeter-scale robots that collaborate to map and explore unknown environments. The robots, called Millibots, are configured from modular components that include sonar and IR sensors, camera, communication, computation, and mobility modules. Robots with different configurations use their special capabilities collaboratively to...

We present a seabed profile estimation and following method for close proximity inspection of 3D underwater structures using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The presented method is used to determine a path allowing the AUV to pass its sensors over all points of the target structure, which is known as coverage path planning. Our profile following method goes beyond traditional seabed foll...

The information available to robots in real tasks is widely distributed both in time and space, requiring the agent to search for relevant data. In humans, that face the same problem when sounds, images and smells are presented to their sensors in a daily scene, a natural system is applied: Attention. As vision plays an important role in our routine, most research regarding attention has involv...

The emphasis of the MIT SWAMSI effort has focused on utilizing high fidelity acoustic modeling of both scatterers and shallow-water environments to better understand and bound the limits of detectability for mine-like objects via autonomous networks of sensors, and the assess the performance of time-reversal processing for concurrent detection, classification, localization and Tracking (DCLT) o...

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) has been an important field of research in the robotics community in recent years. A successful class of SLAM algorithms are Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters (RBPF), where the particles approximate the pose belief distribution, while each particle contains a separate map. So far, RBPF with landmark based environment representations as well as gridm...