Design of Automated R2C Cars for Cooperative Driving Experiments

Cooperative driving controllers are becoming interesting subjects for future research in automated driving with the increase in connectivity. Using true-scale<br/>autonomous vehicles to properly test new control algorithms can be a challenge<br/>due to three main factors: costs, safety, and space requirements. To overcome<br/>these problems,...

Sensing soft robots' shape with cameras: an investigation on kinematics-aware SLAM

The nature of continuum soft robots calls for novel perception solutions, which can provide information on the robot's shape while not substantially modifying their bodies' softness. One way to achieve this goal is to develop innovative and completely deformable sensors. However, these solutions tend to be less reliable than classic sensors for...

Multi-class Road User Detection with 3+1D Radar in the View-of-Delft Dataset

Next-generation automotive radars provide elevation data in addition to range-, azimuth- and Doppler velocity. In this experimental study, we apply a state-of-the-art object detector (PointPillars), previously used for LiDAR 3D data, to such 3+1D radar data (where 1D refers to Doppler). In ablation studies, we first explore the benefits of...

Using Retinanet to determine local graspability for a suction actuator

Suction based robotic actuators have potential for the bin-picking industry, but are currently not usable due the needed speed, accuracy and ability to handle novel and adversarial objects. An evaluation of the state of the art grasp pipeline developed by Mahler et al. [1] for detecting grasps on novel objects lead us to split the problem of...

Development of a Platform for Stereo Visual Odometry based Platooning

As autonomous driving is a popular and ever growing field of research, real world experiments provide a required manner of testing. In this thesis a driving research platform is developed, with a focus on platooning using visual messaging. These visual messages are conveyed using LED matrices. This thesis proposes two methods of LED matrix...

VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change

Visual place recognition (VPR) is the process of recognising a previously visited place using visual information, often under varying appearance conditions and viewpoint changes and with computational constraints. VPR is related to the concepts of localisation, loop closure, image retrieval and is a critical component of many autonomous...

A Joint Extrinsic Calibration Tool for Radar, Camera and Lidar

We address joint extrinsic calibration of lidar, camera and radar sensors. To simplify calibration, we propose a single calibration target design for all three modalities, and implement our approach in an open-source tool with bindings to Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tool features three optimization configurations, namely using error...

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,...