Wrinkle direction detection and its application on robotic cloth wrinkle removal

Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) is an important field of research as it contributes to practical tasks such as cloth handling, cable routing, surgical operation etc. The sensing in DOM is now considered as one of the major challenges in robotics due to the complex dynamics and high degree of freedom of deformable objects. One challenge is...

Contour Moments Based Manipulation of Composite Rigid-Deformable Objects With Finite Time Model Estimation and Shape/Position Control

The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e., those with mixed nonhomogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has not been sufficiently studied in the literature. To deal with this issue, in this article, we propose a...

Automated Docking of an Offshore Gangway: A Predictive Control Approach

Objects floating on or near the water surface (e.g. vessels, and floating wind-turbines) suffer from motions induced by waves of varying height, direction, and frequency. This not only causes unpleasantness for passengers and crew of ships but also it limits the accessibility to the offshore platforms. Bosch Rexroth with their partner Barge...

Onboard Visual Control of a Quadcopter MAV performing a Landing Task: on a Platform of Unknown Size and Location

Vision based control allows Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) to move autonomously in GPS-denied environments, for example in indoor applications. An open issue in this field is landing on an unknown platform. The difficulty in visual control w.r.t. such an unknown platform, is a lack of scale. Without knowledge of the scale of offsets and object sizes ...

Musical NAO: Instrument Playing Humanoid Using Monocular Vision

Humanoid robots are becoming part of modern societies mainly involving the education and entertainment fields. Therefore, providing techniques that enable a humanoid to autonomously play instruments like the metallophone we enrich its usefulness. <br/><br/>In this work we present an approach for making humanoid robot NAO play the metallophone....

Autonomous landing of Micro Air Vehicles through bio-inspired monocular vision

Range imaging and visual servoing for industrial applications

High-tech systems play a key role in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing. Two of these systems are presented in this thesis. The first system is range imaging, which is a measuring technique for determining three-dimensional shape. The second system is visual servoing, which is a method of adaptively controlling a mechanical system by...