Relative Pose Determination of Uncooperative Spacecraft Based on Circle Feature

This paper investigates the problem of spacecraft relative navigation with respect to an unknown target during the close-proximity operations in the on-orbit service system. The serving spacecraft is equipped with a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera for object recognition and feature detection. A fast and robust relative navigation strategy for acquisition is presented without any extra information about the target by using the natural circle features. The architecture of the proposed relative navigation strategy consists of three ingredients. First, a point cloud segmentation method based on the auxiliary gray image is developed for fast extraction of the circle feature point cloud of the target. Secondly, a new parameter fitting method of circle features is proposed including circle feature calculation by two different geometric models and results’ fusion. Finally, a specific definition of the coordinate frame system is introduced to solve the relative pose with respect to the uncooperative target. In order to validate the efficiency of the segmentation, an experimental test is conducted based on real-time image data acquired by the ToF camera. The total time consumption is saved by 94%. In addition, numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate the proposed navigation algorithm. It shows good robustness under the different levels of noises.

A Path Planning Strategy for Multi-Robot Moving with Path-Priority Order Based on a Generalized Voronoi Diagram

This paper proposes a new path planning strategy called the navigation strategy with path priority (NSPP) for multiple robots moving in a large flat space. In the space, there may be some static or/and dynamic obstacles. Suppose we have the path-priority order for each robot, then this article aims to find an efficient path for each robot from its starting point to its target point without any collision. Here, a generalized Voronoi diagram (GVD) is used to perform the map division based on each robot’s path-priority order, and the proposed NSPP is used to do the path planning for the robots in the space. This NSPP can be applied to any number of robots. At last, there are several simulations with a different number of robots in a circular or rectangular space to be shown that the proposed method can complete the task effectively and has better performance in average trajectory length than those by using the benchmark methods of the shortest distance algorithm (SDA) and reciprocal orientation algorithm (ROA).

From HRI to CRI: Crowd Robot Interaction—Understanding the Effect of Robots on Crowd Motion

How does the presence of a robot affect pedestrians and crowd dynamics, and does this influence vary across robot type? In this paper, we took the first step towards answering this question by performing a crowd-robot gate-crossing experiment. The study involved 28 participants and two distinct robot representatives: A smart wheelchair and a Pepper humanoid robot. Collected data includes: video recordings; robot and participant trajectories; and participants’ responses to post-interaction questionnaires. Quantitative analysis on the trajectories suggests the robot affects crowd dynamics in terms of trajectory regularity and interaction complexity. Qualitative results indicate that pedestrians tend to be more conservative and follow “social rules” while passing a wheelchair compared to a humanoid robot. These insights can be used to design a social navigation strategy that allows more natural interaction by considering the robot effect on the crowd dynamics.

Human Diver-Inspired Visual Navigation: Towards Coverage Path Planning of Shipwrecks

This work proposes vision-only navigation strategies for an autonomous underwater robot. This approach is a step towards solving the coverage path planning problem in a 3-D environment for surveying underwater structures. Given the challenging conditions of the underwater domain, it is very complicated to obtain accurate state estimates reliably. Consequently, it is a great challenge to extend known path planning or coverage techniques developed for aerial or ground robot controls. In this work, we are investigating a navigation strategy utilizing only vision to assist in covering a complex underwater structure. We propose to use a navigation strategy akin to what a human diver will execute when circumnavigating around a region of interest, in particular when collecting data from a shipwreck. The focus of this article is a step towards enabling the autonomous operation of lightweight robots near underwater wrecks in order to collect data for creating photo-realistic maps and volumetric 3-D models while at the same time avoiding collisions. The proposed method uses convolutional neural networks to learn the control commands based on the visual input. We have demonstrated the feasibility of using a system based only on vision to learn specific strategies of navigation with 80% accuracy on the prediction of control command changes. Experimental results and a detailed overview of the proposed method are discussed.

Impediments Perception Assistant for Efficacious Assistive Locomotion for Purblind Personage

Visually impaired or partially blind people measure usually counts on exterior aid which could be delivered by humans, educated dogs, or completely different electronic appliances as backing techniques for the bigger psychological feature techniques. The most downside with blind individuals is that they navigate their path to where they need to travel. They usually need assistance from others. This project is determined to support the blind person to beat the deficit of visual ability, by victimization different senses like sound and bit. This project is determined to support the visually impaired person to whip the absence of visual-sense modality, by using distinct connotations like touch and sound (Voice). The detector module is aspired to utilize the precept of ultrasonic ripples to see the change in incoming/outgoing object. The structure also comprises a buzzer to receive an alarm tone (prebuild vocal instructions) and a motor to come up with vibration signals. The network uses ultrasonic ripple signals to acquaint the visually impaired person about incoming/outgoing hurdles. As the expanse between the band and hurdle decreases, the force of vibration signals increases. Thus, the structure formulates the navigation strategy for the needy easy. This architecture bids an inexpensive, credible, mobile, low energy consuming, and athletic solution for navigation with noticeable quick interruptions. The architecture also has another module in which it revamps images into a speech layout. This module will assist visually undermined people in browsing various images as they will be able to read them by hearing them. The Optical Character Recognition [OCR] is expended to do these tasks.