One of the tasks specified for the vision group of the RIPR project is the implementation of a run time inspection cell which is able to identify a small object, and to subsequently inspect it using a single camera, referred to as the inspection camera, attached to a robot arm. As a definite example, we may want to determine whether a hole has been machined on a particular face of the object wi...

Active perception refers to a theoretical approach to the study of perception grounded on the idea that perceiving is a way of acting, rather than a process whereby the brain constructs an internal representation of the world. In this paper, we complement previous studies by illustrating the operational principles of an active categorisation process in which a neuro-controlled anthropomorphic r...

An efficient and systematic methodology for the topological synthesis of geared robot manipulators (GRMs) with a jointed unit is developed. The approach is based on the idea that the kinematic structure of a GRM with a jointed unit is composed of an equivalent open-loop chain (EOLC), disjointed mechanical transmission lines (MTLs), and jointed MTLs. It is shown that the jointed MTLs can be deco...

This paper describes the continuation of our work on extracting simple surfaces from a 3D line-segment representation of stereo image data. The surface parameters form a basis of a scene representation which is suitable for navigation by a mobile robot and also for recognition and manipulation of simple objects by a robot arm. Following our earlier work on planes we have now developed methods a...

Sony has provided a remarkable platform for re search and development in robotic agents namely fully autonomous legged robots In this paper we describe our work using Sony s legged robots to participate at the RoboCup legged robot demonstration and com petition Robotic soccer represents a very challenging environment for research into systems with multiple robots that need to achieve concrete o...

Robotic Surveillance and Deployment Strategies

We propose a skill learning and inference framework, which includes five processing modules as follows: 1) human demonstration process, 2) autonomous segmentation process, 3) process of learning dynamic movement primitives, 4) process of learning Bayesian networks, 5) process of constructing motivation graph and inferring skills. Based on the framework, the robot learns and infers situation-ade...

Neurology shows that human controls dozens of muscles for hand poses in a coordinated manner and such coordination is referred as to a postural synergy. The concept of postural synergies was recently adopted in the control of robotic hands. With the synergies implemented digitally in a controller, all the motors in an anthropomorphic robotic hand can be controlled via a few synergy inputs. Aimi...

A tracking control algorithm based on a disturbance estimation scheme is studied. The tracking control problem is formulated as a disturbance rejection problem, with all the system nonlinearities and uncertainties lumped into disturbance. A disturbance estimation scheme is proposed, which is based on a nominal linear plant dynamics plus proportional error feedback corrections. The tracking cont...