This paper studies the problem of having mobile robots in a multi-robot system maintain an estimate of the relative position and relative orientation of near-by robots in the environment. This problem is studied in the context of large swarms of simple robots which are capable of measuring only the distance to near-by robots. We present two distributed localization algorithms with different tra...

A growing number of wireless devices and increasing traffic in the radio spectrum has pushed for alternatives to radio based communication. Among these, communication using visible light (VLC) has gained considerable momentum. The imminent adoption of energy efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and the high data transmission rates offered by VLC has greatly contributed to the spread of visibl...

In this paper we present a method for fovea localization which does not use organization information of other retinal structures like optic disk and arcades. The main advantage of this method is that it does not require segmentation/localization of other retinal structures which are required as prior knowledge in existing fovea localization methods. The key idea is to enhance the relative contr...

There are many methods to localize its position based on visual sensing schemes in indoor environment. This paper presents the problem of finding the correspondences of images feature’s descriptors when the images have large rotation. SIFT and SURF have always been considered as very effective algorithms to extract interest points and their orientation and descriptors. For descriptors, one of b...

Two different groups of subjects had to adjust two-dimensional stimuli, differing in size, shape and type (dot patterns or irregular contour figures), within a reference circle. The two groups performed under two different instructions. The first instruction stressed matching the centres of the stimulus and the circle, while the second required simply positioning the test stimulus in the middle...

Relative location information helps build vehicle topology maps. Such maps provide location information of nearby vehicles to drivers. In building a vehicle topology, one must consider various attacks on vehicular networks. Also the localization system should protect the drivers’ identity and make it difficult for the adversary to track vehicles. Many techniques have been proposed for relative ...

This paper studies the problem of having mobile robots in a multi-robot system maintain an estimate of the relative position and relative orientation of near-by robots in the environment. This problem is studied in the context of large swarms of simple robots which are capable of measuring only the distance to near-by robots. We compare two distributed localization algorithms with different tra...

In this paper, we propose a relative self-localization estimation algorithm based on relative locations and orientation changes of some image features. We show that the proposed algorithm is valuable through some simulation examples.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work in this dissertation could never have been made possible without the financial support of Vanderbilt University, a Google Research Award, and the National Science Foundation, and I am extremely grateful to NSF Project Manager Thyagarajan Nandagopal for taking a personal interest in this research. First and foremost, however, I would like to express my deepest and mos...

Intelligent autonomous navigation in a large-scale and unknown indoor environment is an important problem in mobile robotics. For a car-like mobile robot with a racing car platform, the movement control concept is similar to that of a car. The autonomous features enable robots to control own motion without human interference. Three autonomous features are addressed in this thesis; obstacle avoi...