19 accepted papers
In modern human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications, multiple perception modules jointly extract visual, auditory, and contextual cues to achieve comprehensive scene understanding, enabling the robot to provide appropriate assistance to human agents intelligently. While executing multiple percept…
Inspired by the human ability to selectively focus on relevant information, this paper introduces relevance, a novel dimensionality reduction process that enables robots to identify relevant scene elements in a scene and generate responses that are seamless, fast, and accurate. To accurately and eff…
Human brain possesses the ability to effectively focus on important environmental components, which enhances perception, learning, reasoning, and decision-making. Inspired by this cognitive mechanism, we introduced a novel concept termed relevance for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Relevance is a
Perception plays a pivotal role in enhancing the functionality of autonomous agents. However, the intricate relationship between robotic perception metrics and actuation metrics remains unclear, leading to ambiguity in the development and fine-tuning of perception algorithms. In this paper, we intro…
Robotic 3D Concrete Printing (3DCP) is a process of additive manufacturing using building materials. The system that performs 3DCP is a complex system consisting of multiple parts that are independent of each other. However, conventional 3DCP workflows usually lack automatic monitoring of print qual…
Condition synthesis is vital for generating data for fault detection and diagnosis studies. Traditional methods rely heavily on human labor. This study proposes a robotic method and its instru-ment to efficiently synthesize faulty conditions and mass-produce data to develop fault detection and diagn…
The time-series datasets commonly applied for anomaly detection research showcase specific suboptimal properties. This work novelly conceptualizes condition state synthesis to improve the data-synthetic pipeline of an anomalous-event dataset. We demonstrate two technical contributions in this study.…
This paper focuses on problems associated with the deployment of automatic agents for last-mile delivery. We propose a framework and methodology to systematically evaluate and compare different hybrid strategies. Performance metrics in agent noise, delivery time, energy consumption, coverage rate, p…
Data synthesizing is crucial for data-driven anomaly prognostics on physical machines. We propose the first general-purpose anomalous scenario synthesizer, GPASS, for rotary equipment. More specifically, we present a design of implementing modular rotational damping, large lateral force, with high-f…
The recent development of in-pipe robots (IPR) with locomotion and inspection functions provides a new possibility to water distribution pipe maintenance - to rehabilitate pipe defects internally. Yet only a limited number of Rehabilitation in-pipe robots (R-IPR) have been proposed. One primary conc…
Automatic targeting of plant cells to perform tasks like extraction of chloroplast is often desired in the study of plant biology. Hence, this paper proposes an improved cell segmentation method combined with a robust tracking algorithm for vision-guided micromanipulation in plant cells. The objecti…
Virtually every mechanized form of transportation, power generation system, industrial equipment, and robotic system has rotating shafts. As the shaft is often the main means of mechanical power transmission, measuring the torque, speed, vibration, and bending of the shaft can be used in many cases…
This letter presents an image-based approach to simultaneously estimate the lateral position of a powered-two-wheeled vehicle on the road, its steering behavior and predict the road curvature ahead of the motorcycle. This letter is based on the inverse perspective mapping technique combined with a r
Coal mines pose a high safety risk for human workers. An autonomous inspection drone would enable a coal mine operation to reduce this risk by minimizing the time spent by workers inside the mine. This inspection drone must be highly robust to the harsh and dangerous environment of an underground co…
Water pipe leakage is a common and significant problem around the world. In recent years, an increasing amount of effort has been put into developing effective leak detection solutions for water pipes. Among them, the pressure gradient based method developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
Robotic image-guided micromanipulation contributes towards the ease of operation, speed, accuracy, and repeatability in cell manipulation. However, such technology is not fully exploited because of the challenges in the integration of robotic modules with existing microscope systems, and the difficu…
In this paper, we propose a workflow algorithm for timely tracking of the tool tip during cell manipulation using a template-based approach augmented with low level feature detection. Doing so addresses the problem of adverse influences on template-based tracking during tool-cell interaction while m…
Micromanipulation during live microscopic imaging relies heavily on good manual controls, dexterity, and hand-eye coordination. However, unassisted manual operations in these procedures greatly limit the speed, repeatability, and ease of operation. This is especially challenging in the case of micro…
Autonomous underwater robots provide opportunities to perform missions in confined environments such as water pipe networks. They can carry sensors in these pipes and perform tasks such as mapping and inspection. Those robots must have a high level of maneuverability in order to navigate through com…