scholarly journals Laser-Based People Detection and Obstacle Avoidance for a Hospital Transport Robot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuisong Zheng ◽  
Feng Wu ◽  
Xiaoping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Obstacle Avoidance ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
People Detection ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Reference Path ◽  
Laser Data ◽  
Differential Drive Robot ◽  
Path Planner

This paper describes the development of a laser-based people detection and obstacle avoidance algorithm for a differential-drive robot, which is used for transporting materials along a reference path in hospital domains. Detecting humans from laser data is an important functionality for the safety of navigation in the shared workspace with people. Nevertheless, traditional methods normally utilize machine learning techniques on hand-crafted geometrical features extracted from individual clusters. Moreover, the datasets used to train the models are usually small and need to manually label every laser scan, increasing the difficulty and cost of deploying people detection algorithms in new environments. To tackle these problems, (1) we propose a novel deep learning-based method, which uses the deep neural network in a sliding window fashion to effectively classify every single point of a laser scan. (2) To increase the speed of inference without losing performance, we use a jump distance clustering method to decrease the number of points needed to be evaluated. (3) To reduce the workload of labeling data, we also propose an approach to automatically annotate datasets collected in real scenarios. In general, the proposed approach runs in real-time, performs much better than traditional methods, and can be straightforwardly extended to 3D laser data. Secondly, conventional pure reactive obstacle avoidance algorithms can produce inefficient and oscillatory behaviors in dynamic environments, making pedestrians confused and possibly leading to dangerous reactions. To improve the legibility and naturalness of obstacle avoidance in human crowded environments, we introduce a sampling-based local path planner, similar to the method used in autonomous driving cars. The key idea is to avoid obstacles by switching lanes. We also adopt a simple rule to decrease the number of unnecessary deviations from the reference path. Experiments carried out in real-world environments confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

scholarly journals Laser-Based People Detection and Obstacle Avoidance for a Hospital Transport Robot

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 961
Author(s):  
Kuisong Zheng ◽  
Feng Wu ◽  
Xiaoping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Obstacle Avoidance ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
People Detection ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Reference Path ◽  
Differential Drive Robot ◽  
Hospital Transport ◽  
Path Planner

This paper describes the development of a laser-based people detection and obstacle avoidance algorithm for a differential-drive robot, which is used for transporting materials along a reference path in hospital domains. Detecting humans from laser data is an important functionality for the safety of navigation in the shared workspace with people. Nevertheless, traditional methods normally utilize machine learning techniques on hand-crafted geometrical features extracted from individual clusters. Moreover, the datasets used to train the models are usually small and need to manually label every laser scan, increasing the difficulty and cost of deploying people detection algorithms in new environments. To tackle these problems, (1) we propose a novel deep learning-based method, which uses the deep neural network in a sliding window fashion to effectively classify every single point of a laser scan. (2) To increase the speed of inference without losing performance, we use a jump distance clustering method to decrease the number of points needed to be evaluated. (3) To reduce the workload of labeling data, we also propose an approach to automatically annotate datasets collected in real scenarios. In general, the proposed approach runs in real-time and performs much better than traditional methods. Secondly, conventional pure reactive obstacle avoidance algorithms can produce inefficient and oscillatory behaviors in dynamic environments, making pedestrians confused and possibly leading to dangerous reactions. To improve the legibility and naturalness of obstacle avoidance in human crowded environments, we introduce a sampling-based local path planner, similar to the method used in autonomous driving cars. The key idea is to avoid obstacles by switching lanes. We also adopt a simple rule to decrease the number of unnecessary deviations from the reference path. Experiments carried out in real-world environments confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

scholarly journals Modules and Techniques for Motion Planning: An Industrial Perspective

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 420
Author(s):  
Stefano Quer ◽  
Luz Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Data Fusion ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Random Trees ◽  
Approximation Techniques ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Autonomous Cars ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Relative Errors ◽  
Path Planner ◽  
Many Core

Research on autonomous cars has become one of the main research paths in the automotive industry, with many critical issues that remain to be explored while considering the overall methodology and its practical applicability. In this paper, we present an industrial experience in which we build a complete autonomous driving system, from the sensor units to the car control equipment, and we describe its adoption and testing phase on the field. We report how we organize data fusion and map manipulation to represent the required reality. We focus on the communication and synchronization issues between the data-fusion device and the path-planner, between the CPU and the GPU units, and among different CUDA kernels implementing the core local planner module. In these frameworks, we propose simple representation strategies and approximation techniques which guarantee almost no penalty in terms of accuracy and large savings in terms of memory occupation and memory transfer times. We show how we adopt a recent implementation on parallel many-core devices, such as CUDA-based GPGPU, to reduce the computational burden of rapidly exploring random trees to explore the state space along with a given reference path. We report on our use of the controller and the vehicle simulator. We run experiments on several real scenarios, and we report the paths generated with the different settings, with their relative errors and computation times. We prove that our approach can generate reasonable paths on a multitude of standard maneuvers in real time.

scholarly journals Real - Time Trajectory and Velocity Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 439-448
Author(s):  
Hrishikesh Dey ◽  
Rithika Ranadive ◽  
Abhishek Chaudhari
Keyword(s):  
Path Planning ◽  
Velocity Profile ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Autonomous Vehicle ◽  
Optimal Path ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Navigation Algorithm ◽  
Velocity Planning ◽  
Planning Algorithm ◽  
Path Planner

Path planning algorithm integrated with a velocity profile generation-based navigation system is one of the most important aspects of an autonomous driving system. In this paper, a real-time path planning solution to obtain a feasible and collision-free trajectory is proposed for navigating an autonomous car on a virtual highway. This is achieved by designing the navigation algorithm to incorporate a path planner for finding the optimal path, and a velocity planning algorithm for ensuring a safe and comfortable motion along the obtained path. The navigation algorithm was validated on the Unity 3D Highway-Simulated Environment for practical driving while maintaining velocity and acceleration constraints. The autonomous vehicle drives at the maximum specified velocity until interrupted by vehicular traffic, whereas then, the path planner, based on the various constraints provided by the simulator using µWebSockets, decides to either decelerate the vehicle or shift to a more secure lane. Subsequently, a splinebased trajectory generation for this path results in continuous and smooth trajectories. The velocity planner employs an analytical method based on trapezoidal velocity profile to generate velocities for the vehicle traveling along the precomputed path. To provide smooth control, an s-like trapezoidal profile is considered that uses a cubic spline for generating velocities for the ramp-up and ramp-down portions of the curve. The acceleration and velocity constraints, which are derived from road limitations and physical systems, are explicitly considered. Depending upon these constraints and higher module requirements (e.g., maintaining velocity, and stopping), an appropriate segment of the velocity profile is deployed. The motion profiles for all the use-cases are generated and verified graphically.

Machine Learning Techniques for IoT-Based Indoor Tracking and Localization

2022 ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Pelin Yildirim Taser ◽  
Vahid Khalilpour Akram
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Indoor Localization ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Distance Estimation ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Localization Systems

The GPS signals are not available inside the buildings; hence, indoor localization systems rely on indoor technologies such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and RFID. These signals are used for estimating the distance between a target and available reference points. By combining the estimated distances, the location of the target nodes is determined. The wide spreading of the internet and the exponential increase in small hardware diversity allow the creation of the internet of things (IoT)-based indoor localization systems. This chapter reviews the traditional and machine learning-based methods for IoT-based positioning systems. The traditional methods include various distance estimation and localization approaches; however, these approaches have some limitations. Because of the high prediction performance, machine learning algorithms are used for indoor localization problems in recent years. The chapter focuses on presenting an overview of the application of machine learning algorithms in indoor localization problems where the traditional methods remain incapable.

Manifold Learning for Medical Image Registration, Segmentation, and Classification

2012 ◽  
pp. 351-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Aljabar ◽  
Robin Wolz ◽  
Daniel Rueckert
Keyword(s):  
Image Analysis ◽  
Image Registration ◽  
Manifold Learning ◽  
Medical Image ◽  
Biomarker Discovery ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Local Linear Embedding ◽  
Learning Techniques

The term manifold learning encompasses a class of machine learning techniques that convert data from a high to lower dimensional representation while respecting the intrinsic geometry of the data. The intuition underlying the use of manifold learning in the context of image analysis is that, while each image may be viewed as a single point in a very high-dimensional space, a set of such points for a population of images may be well represented by a sub-manifold of the space that is likely to be non-linear and of a significantly lower dimension. Recently, manifold learning techniques have begun to be applied to the field of medical image analysis. This chapter will review the most popular manifold learning techniques such as Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), Isomap, Local linear embedding, and Laplacian eigenmaps. It will also demonstrate how these techniques can be used for image registration, segmentation, and biomarker discovery from medical images.

Twitter sentiment analysis for the estimation of voting intention in the 2017 Chilean elections

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1141-1160
Author(s):  
Tomás Alegre Sepúlveda ◽  
Brian Keith Norambuena
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Support Vector Machines ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Actual Result ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Vector Machines

In this paper, we apply sentiment analysis methods in the context of the first round of the 2017 Chilean elections. The purpose of this work is to estimate the voting intention associated with each candidate in order to contrast this with the results from classical methods (e.g., polls and surveys). The data are collected from Twitter, because of its high usage in Chile and in the sentiment analysis literature. We obtained tweets associated with the three main candidates: Sebastián Piñera (SP), Alejandro Guillier (AG) and Beatriz Sánchez (BS). For each candidate, we estimated the voting intention and compared it to the traditional methods. To do this, we first acquired the data and labeled the tweets as positive or negative. Afterward, we built a model using machine learning techniques. The classification model had an accuracy of 76.45% using support vector machines, which yielded the best model for our case. Finally, we use a formula to estimate the voting intention from the number of positive and negative tweets for each candidate. For the last period, we obtained a voting intention of 35.84% for SP, compared to a range of 34–44% according to traditional polls and 36% in the actual elections. For AG we obtained an estimate of 37%, compared with a range of 15.40% to 30.00% for traditional polls and 20.27% in the elections. For BS we obtained an estimate of 27.77%, compared with the range of 8.50% to 11.00% given by traditional polls and an actual result of 22.70% in the elections. These results are promising, in some cases providing an estimate closer to reality than traditional polls. Some differences can be explained due to the fact that some candidates have been omitted, even though they held a significant number of votes.

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