Distributed processing of Dutch AHN laser altimetry changes of the built-up area

The evolution and spreading of data capturing methods ranging from simple GPS devices like smart-phones to large scale imaging equipment – including very high resolution and hyperspectral cameras and LiDAR – resulted in an exponential growth in the amount of spatial data maintained by companies and organizations. At the same time methods for...

Radar-PointGNN: Graph Based Object Recognition for Unstructured Radar Point-cloud Data

Perception systems for autonomous vehicles are reliant on a comprehensive sensor suite to identify objects in the environment. While object recognition systems in the LiDAR and camera modalities are reaching maturity, recognition models on sparse radar point measurements have remained an open research challenge. An object recognition model is...

Geographical point cloud modelling with the 3D medial axis transform

A geographical point cloud is a detailed three-dimensional representation of the geometry of our geographic environment. Using geographical point cloud modelling, we are able to extract valuable information from geographical point clouds that can be used for applications in asset management, crisis management, city and landscape planning, and...

Context mitigates crowding: Peripheral object recognition in real-world images

Object recognition is often conceived of as proceeding by segmenting an object from its surround, then integrating its features. In turn, peripheral vision's sensitivity to clutter, known as visual crowding, has been framed as due to a failure to restrict that integration to features belonging to the object. We hand-segment objects from their...

Leveraging smart lights for passive localization

Localization based on visible light is gaining significant attention. But most existing studies rely on a key requirement: the object of interest needs to carry an optical receiver (camera or photodiode). We remove this requirement and investigate the possibility of achieving accurate localization in a passive manner, that is, without...

Active vision via extremum seeking for robots in unstructured environments: Applications in object recognition and manipulation

In this paper, a novel active vision strategy is proposed for optimizing the viewpoint of a robot's vision sensor for a given success criterion. The strategy is based on extremum seeking control (ESC), which introduces two main advantages: 1) Our approach is model free: It does not require an explicit objective function or any other task...

Scalable information extraction from point cloud data obtained by mobile laser scanner

The rise of intelligent transportation, autonomous driving and 3D virtual cities demands highly accurate and regularly updated 2D and 3D maps. However, traditional surveying andmapping techniques are inadequate as they are labor intensive and cost inefficient. Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems, which combine Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)...

Robust cylinder fitting in three-dimensional point cloud data

This paper investigates the problems of cylinder fitting in laser scanning three-dimensional Point Cloud Data (PCD). Most existing methods require full cylinder data, do not study the presence of outliers, and are not statistically robust. But especially mobile laser scanning often has incomplete data, as street poles for example are only...

Deep Learning Object-Recognition in a Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation Implementation

This paper presents a new instance in a series of discrete proof-of-concept implementations of comprehensively intelligent built-environments based on Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation (D2RP&O) principles developed at Delft University of Technology (TUD). With respect to D2RP, the featured implementation presents a customized...

Human centric object perception for service robots

The research interests and applicability of robotics have diversified and seen a<br/>tremendous growth in recent years. There has been a shift from industrial robots operating in constrained settings to consumer robots working in dynamic environments associated closely with everyday human activities. Personal service robots to assist elderly,...

Rope Caging and Grasping

We present a novel method for caging grasps in this paper by stretching ropes on the surface of a 3D object. Both topology and shape of a model to be grasped has been<br/>considered in our approach. Our algorithm can guarantee generating local minimal rings on every topological branches of a given model with the help of a Reeb graph. Cages and...

Active Grasp Synthesis for Grasping Unknown Objects

Manipulation is a key feature for robots which are designed to work in daily environments like homes, offices and streets. These robots do not often have manipulators that are specialized for specific tasks, but grippers that can grasp the target object. This makes grasping a crucial ability that enables many manipulation tasks. Robotic grasping...

Extending generalized hough transform to detect 3D objects in laser range data

Automated detection and 3D modelling of objects in laser range data is of great importance in many applications. Existing approaches to object detection in range data are limited to either 2.5D data (e.g. range images) or simple objects with a parametric form (e.g. spheres). This paper describes a new approach to the detection of 3D objects with...