Incremental Learning-Based Adaptive Object Recognition for Mobile Robots

3D visual understanding of the surrounding environment is vital for successful mobile robotic tasks such as autonomous navigation or general object interaction. However, current systems have limited perceptual capabilities in the sense that they are not very well adaptable to unknown environments. Human operators, on the other hand, are experts...

A virtual structure approach to formation control of unicycle mobile robots using mutual coupling

In this article, the formation control problem for unicycle mobile robots is studied. A distributed virtual structure control strategy with mutual coupling between the robots is proposed. The rationale behind the introduction of the coupling terms is the fact that these introduce additional robustness of the formation with respect to...

Efficient Trajectory Bending with Applications to Loop Closure

In robotic applications the absolute pose is often obtained as the integral of successive relative rigid-body motions. As each relative rigid-body motion is typically the product of statistical inference, the integrated absolute pose will exhibit error build-up and the estimated trajectory will differ from the true trajectory undertaken by the...

Position control of a wheeled mobile robot including tire behavior

Advanced driver assistance systems are increasingly available on road vehicles. These systems require a thorough development procedure, an important part of which consists of hardware-in-the-loop experiments in a controlled environment. To this end, a facility called Vehicle Hardware-In-the-Loop (VeHIL) is operated, aiming at testing the entire...

Control design for a mobile robot including tire behavior

In order to support the development process of Advanced Driver Assistance systems for road vehicles, TNO is operating a hardware-in-the-loop test setup. In this facility, called VeHIL, vehicles in the direct neighborhood of the test vehicle are simulated using wheeled mobile robots. Due to the required type of maneuvers, these robots have...

Stereo based Obstacle Detection with Uncertainty in Rough Terrain

Autonomous robot vehicles that operate in offroad terrain should avoid obstacle hazards. In this paper we present a stereo vision based method that is able to cluster reconstructed terrain points into obstacles by evaluating their relative angles and distances. In our approach, constraints are enforced on these geometric properties by a set of...

Control design for an overactuated wheeled mobile robot

In order to simulate road vehicles in a hardware-in-the-loop test setup, TNO has developed a wheeled mobile robot with independently driven and steered wheels. This robot is overactuated, i.e. the number of actuators exceeds the number of spatial degrees of freedom to be controlled. A position controller based on feedback linearization is...

Colour based off-road environment and terrain type classification

Terrain classification is an important problem that still remains to be solved for off-road autonomous robot vehicle guidance. Often, obstacle detection systems are used which cannot distinguish between solid obstacles such as rocks or soft obstacles such as tall patches of grass. Terrain classification is needed to prevent that the robot is...

Camera-based platform and sensor motion tracking for data fusion in a landmine detection system

Vehicles that serve in the role as landmine detection robots could be an important tool for demining former conflict areas. On the LOTUS platform for humanitarian demining, different sensors are used to detect a wide range of landmine types. Reliable and accurate detection depends on correctly combining the observations from the different...