Domestic service robots are becoming increasingly available and affordable. However, interaction with the real world is still a challenge. Fast and reliable visual perception is one of these challenges. Systems that track the target over time are fast and can yield good results because they exploit temporal coherence, but they often need manual initialization. In this study, such a tracking sys...

In this paper a sensor fusion scheme, called triangulation-based fusion (TBF) of sonar data, is presented. This algorithm delivers stable natural point landmarks, which appear in practically all indoor environments, i.e., vertical edges like door posts, table legs, and so forth. The landmark precision is in most cases within centimeters. The TBF algorithm is implemented as a voting scheme, whic...

Most early research in robotic visual tracking, especially prior to 1990, separated the vision processing and robot control aspects of the system. Recent attempts to solve the problem close the control loop by incorporating the output of the vision processing as an input to the control subsystem. The Controlled Active Vision framework describes one such approach wherein dynamic target, camera, ...

In the growing field of service robotics the interaction between humans and robots is an important topic. In this paper the interactive features of the kinematically redundant DLR lightweight robot are presented. At the example of an inverted pendulum the “interactive nullspace motion” is introduced, where the user is able to modify the configuration as a subtask while balancing the pendulum as...

The aim is to improve the operability of an advanced demonstration platform incorporating reflexive teleoperated control concepts developed on a mobile robot system. The robot is capable of autonomously navigating in semi-structured environments. Reflexive tele-operation mode employs the robot extensive onboard sensor suite to prevent collisions with obstacles when the human operator assumes co...

In this paper, we describe a new real-time visual system that enables a humanoid robot to learn from and interact with humans. The core of the visual system is a probabilistic tracker that uses shape and color information to find relevant objects in the scene. Multiscale representations, windowing and masking are employed to accelerate the data processing. The perception system is directly coup...

We address the task of monocular visual head tracking in the context of applications that involve human-robot interactions, where both near field and far field tracking settings could occur and real-time constraints are imposed. The original contribution of this paper is a real-time multiperson tracking model that combines a priori texture and colour models for different head poses with face de...

Tracking multiple moving targets from a video plays an important role in many vision-based robotic applications. In this paper, we propose an improved Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GM-PHD) tracker with weight penalization to effectively and accurately track multiple moving targets from a video. First, an entropy-based birth intensity estimation method is incorporated to elimi...

Visual tracking is required by many vision applications such as human-computer interfaces and human-robot interactions. However, in daily living spaces where such applications are assumed to be used, stable tracking is often difficult because there are many objects which can cause the visual occlusion. While conventional tracking techniques can handle, to some extent, partial and short-term occ...