This paper describes a phased earthquake data collection system using the cooperation between mobile robots and a spatial temporal GIS (Geographic Information System). This proposed method features three-phased data update and models a “change region” as KIWI+ building object data. The 1st update sends the robot position and the omnidirectional images as soon as possible. At the 2nd stage, 3D (...

The typical omnidirectional vision sensor predicts the location of mobile robots based on the information of the wall. With this method, following the location of landmarks is available and it is possible to predict where the target is in broad areas, but the location error increases according to the increasing distance from the feature point. In this paper, we suggest the new omnidirectional v...

Dynamic modelling of mobile robots is very important to design of controllers, mainly when the robots need to travel at higher velocity and perform heavy works. For example, in (Liu et al., 2003) and (Watanabe, 1998), control strategies for omnidirectional robots using the dynamic model are discussed. However, non-linearities, like motor dynamic constraints can greatly affect the robot behaviou...

This paper focuses on motion control problems of an omnidirectional robot based on the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method. Although NMPC has been studied in many mobile robots applications due to the advantages of taking the robot constraints into account and increasing the robot performance with future information, the high computational requirement makes NMPC difficult to be uti...

In Robotics, many path-planning algorithms have been proposed but almost all are evaluated only in 2-D computer simulations and a few experiments without any human being. Recently, a human lives with many mobile and/or pet robots. Therefore, such a path-planning algorithm, especially, many interactions between a human and robots should be evaluated in our living space. However, a practical test...

Omnidirectional cameras are often used with robots to provide an immersive view of the surroundings. However, robots often have unstable motion and undergo rotation. In this work, we formulate a method to stabilize the viewpoint of Omnidirectional videos by removing the rotation using dense optical flow fields. The method works by first projecting each Omnidirectional video frame on a unit sphe...

The recognition of colored objects is very important for robot vision in RoboCup Middle Size League competition. This paper describes an efficient hybrid vision system developed for the robotic soccer team of the University of Aveiro, CAMBADA (Cooperative Autonomous Mobile roBots with Advanced Distributed Architecture). The hybrid vision system integrates an omnidirectional and a perspective ca...

While navigating, most autonomous mobile robots view things only in front of them and, as a result, they may collide with objects moving from the side or behind. To overcome this problem, an Active Omni-directional Range Sensor System has been presented, that is capable of obtaining the omni-directional range data on navigation environment through the use of a laser conic plane and a conic mirr...

A lot of plumbings such as gas pipes and water pipes exist in factories and so on. However, it is difficult for humans to inspect them directly because they are laid underground. Therefore, automated inspection by robots is desirable, and many efforts have been done to solve this problem. However, many of existing inspection robots have to rotate the camera to record images in piping because a ...