Lab meeting Jan. 23, 2013 (Gene): Fully Distributed Scalable Smoothing and Mapping with Robust Multi-robot Data Association (IEEE 2012)

Title: Fully Distributed Scalable Smoothing and Mapping with Robust Multi-robot Data Association (IEEE 2012)
Authors: Alexander Chunningham, Kai M. Wurm, Wolfarm Burgard, and Frank Dellaert

Abstract:


In this paper we focus on the multi-robot perception problem, and present an experimentally validated end-to-end multi-robot mapping framework, enabling individual robots in a team to see beyond their individual sensor horizons. The inference part of our system is the DDF-SAM algorithm [1], which provides a decentralized communication and inference scheme, but did not address the crucial issue of data association.

One key contribution is a novel, RANSAC-based, approach for performing the between-robot data associations and initialization of relative frames of reference. We demonstrate this system with both data collected from real robot experiments, as well as in a large scale simulated experiment demonstrating the scalability of the proposed approach.

Link

Lab meeting Jan 9th 2013 (Bang-Cheng Wang): Kicking a Ball – Modeling Complex Dynamic Motions for Humanoid Robots

Presented by Bang-Cheng Wang

From RoboCup 2010: Robot Soccer World Cup XIV, ser. Lecture Notes 

in Artificial Intelligence, E. Chown, A. Matsumoto, P. Pl¨oger, 

and J. R. del Solar, Eds. Springer, to appear in 2011.

Authors:
Judith Müller, Tim Laue, and Thomas Röfer

Abstract:
Complex motions like kicking a ball into the goal are becoming
more important in RoboCup leagues such as the Standard Platform
League. Thus, there is a need for motion sequences that can be parameterized
and changed dynamically. This paper presents a motion engine
that translates motions into joint angles by using trajectories. These
motions are defined as a set of Bezier curves that can be changed online
to allow adjusting, for example, a kicking motion precisely to the actual
position of the ball. During the execution, motions are stabilized by
the combination of center of mass balancing and a gyro feedback-based
closed-loop PID controller.