No legged walking robot yet approaches the high reliability and the low power usage of a walking person, even on flat ground. Here we describe a simple robot which makes a small progress towards that goal. Ranger is a knee-less 4-legged ‘bipedal’ robot which is energetically and computationally autonomous, except for radio controlled steering. Ranger walked 65.2 km in 186,076 steps in about 31 ...

In this paper, we study a cellular-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system consisting of one UAV and multiple ground base stations (GBSs). The UAV has a mission of flying from an initial location to a final location, during which it needs to maintain reliable wireless connection with the cellular network by associating with one of the GBSs at each time instant. We aim to mini...

Concepts of objects as enduring and complete across space and time have been documented in infants within several months after birth, but little is known about how such concepts arise during development. Current theories that stress innate knowledge may neglect the potential contributions of experience to guide acquisition of object concepts. To examine whether learning plays an important role ...

In this paper, a nonlinear controller design for an omni-directional mobile robot is presented. The robot controller consists of an outer-loop (kinematics) controller and an inner-loop (dynamics) controller, which are both designed using the Trajectory Linearization Control (TLC) method based on a nonlinear robot dynamic model. The TLC controller design combines a nonlinear dynamic inversion an...

This research addresses the path planning problem with a nonlinear optimization method running in real time. An optimization problem is continually solved to find a time-optimal, dynamically feasible trajectory from the vehicle’s position to some receding horizon ahead (20m-70m forward). The locally optimal numerical solver optimizes both the spatial and temporal components of the trajectory si...

Imitation learning has been studied widely as a convenient way to transfer human skills to robots. This learning approach is aimed at extracting relevant motion patterns from human demonstrations and subsequently applying these patterns to different situations. Despite many advancements have been achieved, the solutions for coping with unpredicted situations (e.g., obstacles and external pertur...

A method of motion parameter estimation for AGV's is developed based on a new trajectory constraint algorithm. It is assumed that the vehicle will follow a circular path over the vision sampling interval. The algorithm has been found to be more effective and consistent than least squares estimators when the motion obeys the trajectory constraint. Reliable estimates of the motion parameters can ...

Progressive apraxia of Speech (PAoS) is a progressive motor speech disorder associated with neurodegenerative disease causing impairment of phonetic encoding and motor speech planning. Clinical observation and acoustic studies show that duration analysis provides reliable cues for diagnosis of the disease progression and severity of articulatory disruption. The goal of this paper is to develop ...

Continuously moving objects are prevalent in many domains. Although there have been attempts to combine both spatial and temporal relationships from a reasoning, a database, as well as from a logical perspective, the question remains how to describe motion adequately within a qualitative calculus. In this paper, a Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC) for representing and reasoning about moving...