This paper investigates modeling indoor environments using a low-cost compact active range camera, known as BIRIS , mounted onto a pan and tilt motor unit. The BIRIS sensor, developed at the National Research Council of Canada, is a rugged small camera with no moving parts. The contributions of this paper are mainly in three areas: it demonstrates the viability of the use of a low-cost range se...

PS receiver has dominated the field of positioning and navigation for decades [1]. However, its performance depends on the signal environments. It provides a continuous navigation solution only when more than four satellites are in view. In order to solve this problem, other navigation systems, e.g., inertial navigation system, are often employed to integrate with GPS for having a robust and co...

This paper presents an evaluation of the map-matching scheme of an integrated GPS/INS system in urban areas. Data fusion using a Kalman filter and map matching are effective approaches to improve the performance of navigation system applications based on GPS/MEMS IMUs. The study considers the curve-to-curve matching algorithm after Kalman filtering to correct mismatch and eliminate redundancy. ...

We propose a local orientation and navigation framework based on visual features that provide location recognition, context augmentation, and viewer localization information to a human user. Mosaics are used to map local areas to ease user navigation through streets and hallways, by providing a wider field of view (FOV) and the inclusion of more decisive features. Within the mosaics, we extract...

Faceted navigation is being increasingly employed as an effective technique for exploring large query results on structured databases. This technique of mitigating the information overload problem leverages metadata of the query results to provide users with facet conditions that can be used to progressively refine the user’s query and filter the query results. However, the number of facet cond...

With real-time instrument tracking and in-situ guidance projection directly integrated in a handheld ultrasound imaging probe, needle-based interventions such as biopsies become much simpler to perform than with conventionally-navigated systems. Stereo imaging with needle detection can be made sufficiently robust and accurate to serve as primary navigation input. We describe the low-cost, easy-...

Faceted navigation can effectively reduce user efforts of reaching targeted resources in databases, by suggesting dynamic facet values for iterative query refinement. A key issue is minimizing the navigation cost in a user query session. Conventional navigation scheme assumes that at each step, users select only one suggested value to figure out resources containing it. To make faceted navigati...

For navigation on outdoor surfaces, usually having different kind of roughness and soft irregularities, this paper proposal is that a wheeled robot combines the gradient method for path planning, alongside it adjusts velocity based on a multi-layer fuzzy neural network; the network integrates information about the roughness and the soft slopes of the terrain to compute the navigation velocity. ...

Low cost inertial sensors are often promoted as the solution to indoor navigation. However, in reality, the quality of the measurements is poor, and as a result, the sensors can only be used to navigate for a few seconds at a time before the drift becomes too large to be useful. Therefore, it is necessary to regularly update the sensors with measurements from external systems such as GPS or oth...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention in recent years. Low-cost platforms using inexpensive sensor payloads have been shown to provide satisfactory flight and navigation capabilities. In this report, we survey vision and control methods that can be applied to low-cost UAVs, and we list some popular inexpensive platforms and application fields where they are useful. W...