The main goal of this paper is to describe the application of two self-localization methods, based on Kalman filter and Monte Carlo fusion of odometry and visual information, to omni-directional soccer robots. The two methods are compared, and the usage of several candidates for the robot posture, provided by the vision-based observation step, is discussed. Simulated and real robot results are ...

The UQ RoboRoos have been developed to participate in the RoboCup robot soccer small size league over several years. RoboCup 2001 saw a focus on the mechanical design of the RoboRoos, with the introduction of an omni-directional drive system and a high power kicker. The change in mechanical design had implications for the rest of the system particularly navigation and multi-robot planning. In a...

This paper presents the results of a project to develop an omni-directional robotic system at NASA Langley’s Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab. The robot, named Mobius, was created as part of an investigation into omni-directional motion (using four Mecanum wheels) and fuzzy-logic control. The robot uses a highlevel processor running Linux to connect to wireless networks, process user-input...

robot to mass (with friction) Force in, velocity out causality Ewoud Vos 6 Mass Impedance Legged robot controller Fig. 1: Abstraction of a legged robot to an omni-directional moving mass that can then, for instance, be controlled by an impedance controller. Fig. 1. This scheme requires a gait controller that ensures that the legs move to support the motion of the robot. The gait generator as pr...

A directional sensor network is composed of many directional sensor nodes. Unlike conventional omni-directional sensors that always have an omni-angle of sensing range; directional sensors may have a limited angle of sensing range due to technical constraints or cost considerations. Area coverage is still an essential issue in a directional sensor network. In this paper, we study the area cover...

Robot motion planning has applications in a wide range of areas such as robot navigation and medical surgery. Among the topics that are related to motion planning, computing time-optimal trajectories is challenging and of great importance. We want to move a robot from the start to the goal in the shortest time. There are four different vehicle designs that are considered in our work: Dubins car...

mobile robot navigation is one of the basic problems in robotics. in this paper, a new approachis proposed for autonomous mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment. the proposedapproach is based on learning virtual parallel paths that propel the mobile robot toward the trackusing a multi-layer, feed-forward neural network. for training, a human operator navigates themobile robot in some...

Broadcast has been widely used in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as a communication means to disseminate information to all reachable nodes. However, the conventional broadcast scheme that broadcast packets omni directionally suffers from several drawbacks: excessive amount of redundant traffic, exaggerated interference/contention among neighboring nodes, and limited coverage (as a result of c...

In this paper, our focus is on certain applications for mobile robotic networks, where reconfiguration is driven by factors intrinsic to the network rather than changes in the external environment. In particular, we study a version of the coverage problem useful for surveillance applications, where the objective is to position the robots in order to minimize the average distance from a random p...

In the past decade there has been a significant increase in the use of omni-directional video — video that captures information in all directions. The bulk of this research has concentrated on the use of omni-directional video for navigation and for obstacle avoidance. This paper reviews omni-directional research at the VAST lab that address other applications; in particular, we review advances...