Recent advancements in mechatronics has led to tremendous development of application of robots for industrial applications involving high health hazards, rough working conditions and difficult to reach locations. Robot assisted welding is one such high risk operation for human being. The industrial arc welding robots are either mounted on the floor, table or on overhead rails. In this scenario,...

In this paper, our focus is on certain applications for mobile robotic networks, where reconfiguration is driven by factors intrinsic to the network rather than changes in the external environment. In particular, we study a version of the coverage problem useful for surveillance applications, where the objective is to position the robots in order to minimize the average distance from a random p...

Structure From Motion Using Omni-directional Vision and Certainty Grids. (August 2004) Steven Rey Ortiz, B.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna This thesis describes a method to create local maps from an omni-directional vision system (ODVS) mounted on a mobile robot. Range finding is performed by a structure-from-motion method, which recovers the th...

This paper considers the problem of vision-based control of a nonholonomic mobile robot. We describe the design and implementation of real-time estimation and control algorithms on a car-like robot platform using a single omni-directional camera as a sensor without explicit use of odometry. We provide experimental results for each of these vision-based control objects. The algorithms are packag...

This paper deals with dynamic analysis of mobile robot equipped with three omni-directional wheels. The mobile robots contain subsystems from different physical domains and in the paper bond graphs are chosen as an appropriate technique for modelling and simulation. Model of Robotino mobile robot is developed and simulation is performed using the program BondSim, developed by the first author o...

A lot of plumbings exist in factories and so on. Automated inspection of the plumbings by robots is desirable. Many of existing inspection robots have to rotate their cameras because conventional cameras can see only one direction while a plumbing has a cylindrical geometry. The use of an omnidirectional camera is effective for the solution of such problem. However, the shape measurement is dif...

Catadioptric Omni-Directional Stereo Vision (ODSV) technology is the combination of omni-directional imaging and stereo vision, which has wide application potentials on robot vision and large-scale video surveillance [1-4]. Fig.1 gives the framework of ODSV technology, which includes four major parts: the design of omni-directional stereo vision imaging system, unwarping of omni-directional ste...

In this paper OmniKity-III (OK-III), a novel wheeled omni-directional mobile robot is developed and its kinematic model and control laws are derived. A special gear train was developed to have omnidirectional mechanism using conventional tire wheels. Several control laws are provided by considering the robot as a redundantly actuated wheeled mobile robot (WMR) on the plane. Since the robot has ...