Diploma or Master Thesis
High-Speed and High-Precision Robotic Homing in Cluttered Environments
Guiding a mobile robot with high velocity and high accuracy to a labeled target, even when within the current sensory perception, is a non-trivial problem. Most sensors for such scenarios, as e.g. video cameras or laser range finders, face severe problems with reflections in non-laboratory environments. Furthermore, the amount of sensory data to be processed limits performance of real-world systems. In this master/diploma thesis the student shall (a) investigate in a new type of “Dynamic Vision Sensor” (DVS) for such robot homing problems, (b) design markers to label the robot’s home, (c) develop real-time vision-processing and motor-control algorithms, and (d) evaluate the system’s performance in real world experiments.
In the DVS - in contrast to standard cameras - each pixel operates asynchronously and transmits updates only when a change of contrast in the pixel’s field of view occurs. We have implemented several high-speed demonstration applications from counting and sorting to robotic pencil-balancing (http://www.lsr.ei.tum.de/research/EDVSPoleBalancing). The sensor is highly responsive to changing illumination in its field of view, which also frequently occurs during robot motion. The vision-based homing algorithm to be developed needs to distinguish between sensory signals caused by robot motion, and stimuli from the labeled home base. We suggest developing active labels (e.g. LEDs that flicker at well-known frequencies), such that the algorithm can reliably distinguish environment and labels. After designing such labels and algorithms, the complete system shall be implemented and evaluated on a mobile robot in real-world cluttered environments.
If successful, the result of such a project will have a large impact in various areas of mobile robotics, such as transportation in factories - but also for hot-research topics such as human-robot interaction in the context of the cluster of excellence <CoTeSys>.
Student:
Georg Müller