Negative Obstacle Detection Using LiDAR Sensors for a Robotic Wheelchair

Author(s):  
Taylor E. Baum ◽  
Kelilah L. Wolkowicz ◽  
Joseph P. Chobot ◽  
Sean N. Brennan

The objective of this work is to develop a negative obstacle detection algorithm for a robotic wheelchair. Negative obstacles — depressions in the surrounding terrain including descending stairwells, and curb drop-offs — present highly dangerous navigation scenarios because they exhibit wide characteristic variability, are perceptible only at close distances, and are difficult to detect at normal operating speeds. Negative obstacle detection on robotic wheelchairs could greatly increase the safety of the devices. The approach presented in this paper uses measurements from a single-scan laser range-finder and a microprocessor to detect negative obstacles. A real-time algorithm was developed that monitors time-varying changes in the measured distances and functions through the assumption that sharp increases in this monitored value represented a detected negative obstacle. It was found that LiDAR sensors with slight beam divergence and significant error produced impressive obstacle detection accuracy, detecting controlled examples of negative obstacles with 88% accuracy for 6 cm obstacles and above on a robotic development platform and 90% accuracy for 7.5 cm obstacles and above on a robotic wheelchair. The implementation of this algorithm could prevent life-changing injuries to robotic wheelchair users caused by negative obstacles.

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (05) ◽  
pp. 1640005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryota Suzuki ◽  
Yoshinori Kobayashi ◽  
Yoshinori Kuno ◽  
Taichi Yamada ◽  
Keiichi Yamazaki ◽  
...  

To meet the demands of an aging society, research on intelligent/robotic wheelchairs have been receiving a lot of attention. In elderly care facilities, care workers are required to communicate with the elderly in order to maintain both their mental and physical health. While this is regarded as important, having a conversation with someone on a wheelchair while pushing it from behind in a traditional setting would interfere with their smooth and natural conversation. So we are developing a robotic wheelchair system which allows companions and wheelchair users to move in a natural formation. This paper reports on an investigation to learn the patterns of human behavior when the wheelchair users and their companions communicate while walking together. The ethnographic observation reveals a natural formation of positioning for both companions and wheelchair users. Based on this investigation, we propose a multiple robotic wheelchair system which can maintain desirable formations for communication between wheelchairs.


ROBOT ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaochuan ZHAO ◽  
Peizhi LIU ◽  
Min ZHANG ◽  
Lihui YANG ◽  
Jianchang SHI

Author(s):  
Dongxian Yu ◽  
Jiatao Kang ◽  
Zaihui Cao ◽  
Neha Jain

In order to solve the current traffic sign detection technology due to the interference of various complex factors, it is difficult to effectively carry out the correct detection of traffic signs, and the robustness is weak, a traffic sign detection algorithm based on the region of interest extraction and double filter is designed.First, in order to reduce environmental interference, the input image is preprocessed to enhance the main color of each logo.Secondly, in order to improve the extraction ability Of Regions Of Interest, a Region Of Interest (ROI) detector based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) and Wave Equation (WE) was defined, and candidate Regions were selected through the ROI detector.Then, an effective HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) descriptor is introduced as the detection feature of traffic signs, and SVM (Support Vector Machine) is used to classify them into traffic signs or background.Finally, the context-aware filter and the traffic light filter are used to further identify the false traffic signs and improve the detection accuracy.In the GTSDB database, three kinds of traffic signs, which are indicative, prohibited and dangerous, are tested, and the results show that the proposed algorithm has higher detection accuracy and robustness compared with the current traffic sign recognition technology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1909
Author(s):  
Jiahuan Jiang ◽  
Xiongjun Fu ◽  
Rui Qin ◽  
Xiaoyan Wang ◽  
Zhifeng Ma

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has become one of the important technical means of marine monitoring in the field of remote sensing due to its all-day, all-weather advantage. National territorial waters to achieve ship monitoring is conducive to national maritime law enforcement, implementation of maritime traffic control, and maintenance of national maritime security, so ship detection has been a hot spot and focus of research. After the development from traditional detection methods to deep learning combined methods, most of the research always based on the evolving Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing power to propose more complex and computationally intensive strategies, while in the process of transplanting optical image detection ignored the low signal-to-noise ratio, low resolution, single-channel and other characteristics brought by the SAR image imaging principle. Constantly pursuing detection accuracy while ignoring the detection speed and the ultimate application of the algorithm, almost all algorithms rely on powerful clustered desktop GPUs, which cannot be implemented on the frontline of marine monitoring to cope with the changing realities. To address these issues, this paper proposes a multi-channel fusion SAR image processing method that makes full use of image information and the network’s ability to extract features; it is also based on the latest You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLO-V4) deep learning framework for modeling architecture and training models. The YOLO-V4-light network was tailored for real-time and implementation, significantly reducing the model size, detection time, number of computational parameters, and memory consumption, and refining the network for three-channel images to compensate for the loss of accuracy due to light-weighting. The test experiments were completed entirely on a portable computer and achieved an Average Precision (AP) of 90.37% on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD), simplifying the model while ensuring a lead over most existing methods. The YOLO-V4-lightship detection algorithm proposed in this paper has great practical application in maritime safety monitoring and emergency rescue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 6016
Author(s):  
Jinsoo Kim ◽  
Jeongho Cho

For autonomous vehicles, it is critical to be aware of the driving environment to avoid collisions and drive safely. The recent evolution of convolutional neural networks has contributed significantly to accelerating the development of object detection techniques that enable autonomous vehicles to handle rapid changes in various driving environments. However, collisions in an autonomous driving environment can still occur due to undetected obstacles and various perception problems, particularly occlusion. Thus, we propose a robust object detection algorithm for environments in which objects are truncated or occluded by employing RGB image and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) bird’s eye view (BEV) representations. This structure combines independent detection results obtained in parallel through “you only look once” networks using an RGB image and a height map converted from the BEV representations of LiDAR’s point cloud data (PCD). The region proposal of an object is determined via non-maximum suppression, which suppresses the bounding boxes of adjacent regions. A performance evaluation of the proposed scheme was performed using the KITTI vision benchmark suite dataset. The results demonstrate the detection accuracy in the case of integration of PCD BEV representations is superior to when only an RGB camera is used. In addition, robustness is improved by significantly enhancing detection accuracy even when the target objects are partially occluded when viewed from the front, which demonstrates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional RGB-based model.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1081
Author(s):  
Tamon Miyake ◽  
Shintaro Yamamoto ◽  
Satoshi Hosono ◽  
Satoshi Funabashi ◽  
Zhengxue Cheng ◽  
...  

Gait phase detection, which detects foot-contact and foot-off states during walking, is important for various applications, such as synchronous robotic assistance and health monitoring. Gait phase detection systems have been proposed with various wearable devices, sensing inertial, electromyography, or force myography information. In this paper, we present a novel gait phase detection system with static standing-based calibration using muscle deformation information. The gait phase detection algorithm can be calibrated within a short time using muscle deformation data by standing in several postures; it is not necessary to collect data while walking for calibration. A logistic regression algorithm is used as the machine learning algorithm, and the probability output is adjusted based on the angular velocity of the sensor. An experiment is performed with 10 subjects, and the detection accuracy of foot-contact and foot-off states is evaluated using video data for each subject. The median accuracy is approximately 90% during walking based on calibration for 60 s, which shows the feasibility of the static standing-based calibration method using muscle deformation information for foot-contact and foot-off state detection.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaromir Przybyło ◽  
Eliasz Kańtoch ◽  
Mirosław Jabłoński ◽  
Piotr Augustyniak

Abstract Videoplethysmography is currently recognized as a promising noninvasive heart rate measurement method advantageous for ubiquitous monitoring of humans in natural living conditions. Although the method is considered for application in several areas including telemedicine, sports and assisted living, its dependence on lighting conditions and camera performance is still not investigated enough. In this paper we report on research of various image acquisition aspects including the lighting spectrum, frame rate and compression. In the experimental part, we recorded five video sequences in various lighting conditions (fluorescent artificial light, dim daylight, infrared light, incandescent light bulb) using a programmable frame rate camera and a pulse oximeter as the reference. For a video sequence-based heart rate measurement we implemented a pulse detection algorithm based on the power spectral density, estimated using Welch’s technique. The results showed that lighting conditions and selected video camera settings including compression and the sampling frequency influence the heart rate detection accuracy. The average heart rate error also varies from 0.35 beats per minute (bpm) for fluorescent light to 6.6 bpm for dim daylight.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming Xia ◽  
Peiliang Sun ◽  
Xiaoyan Wang ◽  
Yan Jin ◽  
Qingzhang Chen

Localization is a fundamental research issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In most existing localization schemes, several beacons are used to determine the locations of sensor nodes. These localization mechanisms are frequently based on an assumption that the locations of beacons are known. Nevertheless, for many WSN systems deployed in unstable environments, beacons may be moved unexpectedly; that is, beacons are drifting, and their location information will no longer be reliable. As a result, the accuracy of localization will be greatly affected. In this paper, we propose a distributed beacon drifting detection algorithm to locate those accidentally moved beacons. In the proposed algorithm, we designed both beacon self-scoring and beacon-to-beacon negotiation mechanisms to improve detection accuracy while keeping the algorithm lightweight. Experimental results show that the algorithm achieves its designed goals.


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