Vision-based mobile robot navigation is a vibrant area of research with numerous algorithms having been developed, the vast majority of which either belong to the scene-oriented simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) or fall into the category of robot-oriented lane-detection/trajectory tracking. These methods suffer from high computational cost and require stringent labelling and calibrat...

A symmetric Kullback-Leibler metric based tracking system, capable of tracking moving targets, is presented for a bionic spherical parallel mechanism to minimize a tracking error function to simulate smooth pursuit of human eyes. More specifically, we propose a real-time moving target tracking algorithm which utilizes spatial histograms taking into account symmetric Kullback-Leibler metric. In ...

Spherical robotics is an emerging research field due to a ball’s characteristic to be holonomic, have a sealed internal environment, and rebound from collisions easily. As the research moves forward, individual groups have begun to develop unique methods of propulsion, each having distinctive engineering trade-offs: weight is sacrificed for power; speed is forfeited for control accuracy, etc. E...

In this paper, a novel off-line robot simulation package is developed for the industrial robot manipulators. The package allows interactive simulation of fundamental robot manipulators classified by Huang and Milenkovic [1]. The new package using Matlab Graphical User Interface (GUI) commands provides an interactive environment for serial-link robot manipulators. In the new package, there are s...

In this paper, the path following control of a spherical robot rolling without slipping on an inclined plane is discussed. We first study the kinematic constraints of the spherical robot and develop the dynamic model of the robot through the constrained Lagrange method. We then present a state space realization of this constrained system through the null space method and using nonlinear feedbac...

The paper presents a method to guide the self-organised development of behaviours of autonomous robots. In earlier publications we demonstrated how to use the homeokinesis principle and dynamical systems theory to obtain self-organised playful but goal-free behaviour. Now we extend this framework by reinforcement signals. We validate the mechanisms with two experiment with a spherical robot. Th...

Optical Rails is a purely view-based method for steering a robot through a network of positions in a known environment. Navigation is based on images aquired by an upward-looking omnidirectional camera; even a very modest quality of the optical system is sufficient, since all views are represented in terms of low-order basis functions (spherical harmonics). The theoretical concept of Optical Ra...

This paper describes a prototype and analytical studies of a spherical rolling robot, a new design of a nonholonomic system. The spherical robot is driven by two remotely controlled, internally mounted rotors that induce the ball to roll and spin on a fiat surface. It is tracked on the plane by an overhead camera. A mathematical model of the robot's motion was developed using the nonholonomic c...

The role of input noise is seldom considered in robot calibration. The methodology of total least squares may be applied to handle both input and output noise in robot calibration. Experimentally, we apply this method towards joint torque sensor calibration, and towards kinematic calibration of a redundant parallel-drive spherical joint in a variant called the implicit loop method.

In this paper, we develop a featureless visual navigation algorithm for the autonomous robot mounting a spherical imaging system. The spherical image is the normalised image for omnidirectional images. Differences of the depth from the camera to the objects yield the disparity on the image. Using the disparity of optical flow vectors on the spherical image, we construct a method to compute the ...