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LAR - Laboratory for Automation and Robotics [Events and activities]
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Events and activities

This page shows the most relevant activities and events associated to the LAR, such as invited talks, demonstrations, etc. Each tab below contains one year with multiple entries.

  • 2013
  • 2014
  • 2015
  • 2016
  • 2017
  • 2018
  • 2019
  • 2020
Invited Talk - 20 Feb 2013 - Dr. Ángel Sappa - Auditório DEM - 15:00 click here

3D Information: Extraction and Representation

by Dr. Ángel Sappa

This talk will present recent work that has been doing at the CVC in this domain. The first part will describe a new framework for extracting disparity maps from a multispectral stereo rig. The system is constructed with an infrared and a color camera. It is intended to explore novel multimodal stereo matching approaches, going from sparse to dense representations (both disparity and depth maps). In the second part will be summarized some contributions in the shape representation and registration field. Both of them are unified under the umbrella of implicit functions. This compact representation becomes a robust tool to handle noisy data and outliers, hence it can be exploited in different computer vision applications. During the presentation, the Computer Vision Center as well as its main research activities will also be presented.

Invited Talk - 21 Feb 2013 - Dr. Miguel Ángel Sotelo - Anfiteatro IEETA - 10:00 click here

Toward recovering 3D structure from a static image

by Dr. Miguel Ángel Sotelo

Developing a solution for accurate 3D structure recovery of generic objects in static 2D images from uncalibrated cameras is a complex challenge in the field of computer vision. The final goal is to unveil the intrinsic 3D information contained in static images by using prior knowledge obtained from experience by learning, just as humans do. No motion cues will be used neither needed. Thus, virtual 3D reconstruction from a monocular still image will be targeted, with special emphasis on 3D recovery of human pose and other articulated objects. For this purpose, statistical generative models and parts-based pattern recognition techniques can be combined. By doing so, we will bridge the current gap between 2D-based objects recognition techniques and 3D-based techniques for structure recovery and human pose detection using low dimensional embeddings, such as latent spaces, and probabilistic learning. Current state-of-the-art solutions for 3D human pose detection are mostly based on multi-camera approaches, which are expensive and difficult to calibrate, or 2.5D sensors, such as expensive laser-based sensors or the more recent kinect range sensor. Although kinect is a cheap, high performance sensor, it is restricted to indoor environments and requires supporting mechanic systems to get full 3D object reconstruction by revolution. Structure From Motion (SFM) techniques have traditionally been used for recovering 3D structure from a sequence of images acquired by a monocular camera. However, the approach proposed in this talk is not constrained by the availability of motion. No motion cues are considered at all in order to enable the managing of images provided by a static camera and, even the management of a single static image. A proposal is made to apply geometric and anthropometric constraints for lifting the feasible poses into 3D, in order to significantly enhance the performance of state-of-the-art monocular-based object recognition systems. Geometric and anthropometric constraints will be learnt from experience and coded in a probabilistic framework. The result will be the categorization of all relevant, previously learnt objects in the scene together with the recovery of their 3D structure and relative pose. By doing so, any monocular (2D) camera can be transformed into a virtual three-dimensional (3D) camera. This result would allow for the massive use of any type of monocular camera in a great variety of fields, such as robotics, image understanding and activity recognition, context-based 3D scene interpretation, human recognition through gait analysis, road safety, security and surveillance, sports and rehabilitation medicine, motion pictures, markerless motion capture, humancomputer interaction, and gaming.

PhD discussion - 21 Feb 2013 - Miguel Oliveira - Sala de Actos, Reitoria - 14:00 click here

Automatic Information and Safety Systems for Driving Assistance

by Miguel Oliveira
The main object of this thesis is the study of algorithms for automatic information processing and representation, in particular information provided by onboard sensors (2D and 3D), to be used in the context of driving assistance. The work focuses on some of the problems facing todays Autonomous Driving (AD) systems and Advanced Drivers Assistance Systems (ADAS). The document is composed of two parts. The first part describes the design, construction and development of three robotic prototypes, including remarks about onboard sensors, algorithms and software architectures. These robots were used as test beds for testing and validating the developed techniques; additionally, they have participated in several autonomous driving competitions with very good results. The second part of this document presents several algorithms for generating intermediate representations of the raw sensor data. They can be used to enhance existing pattern recognition, detection or navigation techniques, and may thus benefit future AD or ADAS applications. Since vehicles often contain a large amount of sensors of different natures, intermediate representations are particularly advantageous; they can be used for tackling problems related with the diverse nature of the data (2D, 3D, photometric, etc.), with the asynchrony of the data (multiple sensors streaming data at different frequencies), or with the alignment of the data (calibration issues, different sensors providing different measurements of the same object). Within this scope, novel techniques are proposed for computing a multicamera multi-modal inverse perspective mapping representation, executing color correction between images for obtaining quality mosaics, or to produce a scene representation based on polygonal primitives that can cope with very large amounts of 3D and 2D data, including the ability of refining the representation as new information is continuously received.
Academia de Verão - 8 Julho 2013 - Sessão de robótica - 14:00-17:00 - LAR click here
Activity inserted in the "Academia de Verão" event. This session will be coordinated by Dr. Ricardo Pascoal.
Masters discussion - 15 Jul 2013 - José Viana Bettencourt - Auditório DEM - 10:00 click here
E-Stop e consola de controlo e monitorização para o AtlasCar
The AtlasCar vehicle is a robot developed at the Automation and Robotics laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engeneering at the University of Aveiro. The main objective of this project is to develop both active and passive advanced security systems, for implementation in driver assistance system and autonomous vehicles. The main goal of this work is the development of a remote emergency E-stop, with a control console, and also the creation of a vehicle monitoring system. These twosystem complient each other in the question of safety. The E-Stop and the control console are part of a remote atuation system that manages three diferent states of atuation by user order: The three states are RUN, PAUSE and DISABLE. This system is mandatory to be eligle to participate in the international ELROB competion. Both software and hardware were developed with this goal in mind, acording to the competition directives. The monitoring system consists of a SQL database whose fields are published in a webpage. The refresh of the database is in charge of a ROS software module running on the atlascar using either a wifi or a 3g internet connection.
Both systems were tested and validated in real operation.
Masters Discussion - 16 Jul 2013 - Diogo Matos - Auditório DEM - 10:00 click here
Deteção do Espaço Navegável para o ATLASCAR usando informação 3D
This work presents a method for detecting the navigability of the environment using 3D data of the vehicle’s surroundings. In this work the 3D data is achieved by a 2D laser on continuous rotation. Initially the hardware of the 3D acquisition system was refined in order to achieve better data quality due to the rotational movement of the planar laser unit; afterwards, a software module to store the different 2D scans and to create a point cloud of the environment was developed. In the second stage, a software module for detecting the navigability of the environment, using the elevation of the terrain as well as the normal average was developed. The space was divided into a two-dimensional grid with cells that contain several properties in order to calculate the accessibility average, the result is a sort of extended elevation maps that may be used to calculate navigability of any trajectory, that were designated accessibility maps. The results indicate a clear improvement in the quality of the 3D data obtained with the planar laser unit and were also made studies and analyzes of the influence algorithms’ parameters’ for the calculation of accessibility maps.
Masters Discussion - 17 Jul 2013 - Pedro Silva- Auditório DEM - 14:30 click here
Visual Pedestrian Detection using Integral Channels for ADAS
This work exploits a vision based pedestrian recognition technique to build a framework capable of performing detection in images of urban setting. This method takes advantage of the richness of information present in multiple channels of an image to assemble different detection techniques in a simple and generic infrastructure. The general idea behind this method is that pedestrians present specific visual properties that can be used to differentiate them apart from a scene. So, to exploit such properties, features are extracted from the channels in an optimized manner through the use of integral images and a machine learning engine based on AdaBoost is trained through positive and negative examples the relationship of those features with the presence of pedestrians on visual data. This framework then integrates a multi-scale, sliding window approach to perform visual pedestrian detection. To evaluate the algorithm, tests were carried out in two distinct datasets and results confirm its validity.
Masters Discussion - 17 Jul 2013 - Daniel Coimbra- Auditório DEM - 16:00 click here
LIDAR Target Detection and Segmentation in Road Environment
In this project a comparative and exhaustive evaluation of several 2D laser data segmentation algorithms in road scenarios is performed. In a rst stage, the segmentation algorithms are implemented using the ROS programming environment; the algorithms are applied to the raw laser scan data in order to extract groups of measurement points which share similar spatial properties and that probably will belong to one single object. Each algorithm has at least one threshold condition parameter that is con gurable, and one of the goals is to try to determine the best value of that parameter for road environments. The following stage was the de nition of the Groundtruth where multiple laser scans were hand-labelled. The next step was the comparison between the Ground-truth and the segmentation algorithms in order to test their validity. With the purpose of having a quantitative evaluation of the methods' performance, six evaluation metrics were created and compared.
Masters Discussion - 4 Dec 2013 - Telmo Rafeiro- Auditório DEM - 14:00 click here
Rede de Sensores Inerciais para Equilíbrio de um Robô Humanoide
O objetivo principal desta dissertação é o desenvolvimento de uma rede de sensores inerciais composta por um conjunto de Inertial Measurement Units, constituídos por acelerómetros, giroscópios e magnetómetros (os últimos foram descartados no projeto). É pretendido que esta rede de sensores permita ao robô humanóide do PHUA - Projeto Humanoide da Universidade de Aveiro adquirir informação necessária ao seu equilíbrio. O primeiro passo deste trabalho passou pela caraterização de dois tipos de unidades inerciais, o RAZOR - SEN 10736 - 9 gdl e o POLOLU - MinIMUv2 - 9 gdl, com auxílio de um braço robótico antropomórfico. Os resultados desta avaliação são apresentados no trabalho. De seguida, foi desenvolvida a estrutura da rede inercial com recurso a uma unidade de processamento central, uma plataforma de desenvolvimento Arduino com controlo multiplexado de oito unidades assente no protocolo de comunicação I2C, acrescido de uma comunicação RS232 com a nona unidade. A rede desenvolvida suporta um máximo de nove unidades inerciais, com uma taxa de aquisição de 7 Hz. O funcionamento da rede não está dependente do número de unidades utilizadas, podendo operar com qualquer número de unidades compreendidas entre 1 e 9 unidades. A rede inercial foi instalada no robô humanóide, e testada durante a execução de movimentos simples, permitindo concluir da viabilidade da rede em diversas situações.
Invited Talk - 11 Dec 2013 - Dr. Luis Merino - Auditório DEM - 11:00 click here

Service robots in human-inhabited spaces

by Dr. Luis Merino (short biography)

Service robots is one of the most promising applications of robotics. It is expected that technology will allow in the mid-term to deploy robots in everyday environments to offer services like guidance, transport of people and goods, etc. Several challenges lay ahead, though, before robots can act robustly in these scenarios. In the talk, different related aspects and techniques will be described, like localization and navigation in crowded environments. Furthermore, it will be shown how robots can be integrated within the infrastructure of cities, and collaborate with fixed sensors and actuators embedded in this infrastructure to perform their services. Finally, it will be described how human-awareness should be integrated into these robots to enhance their acceptance, becoming real social robots. The talk will describe real robot deployments in pedestrian scenarios in the frame of the EU projects URUS and FROG.

This talk is sponsored by Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica / Centro de Tecnologia Mecânica e Automação

PhD discussion - 11 Dec 2013 - Procópio Stein- Sala do Senado, Reitoria - 15:00 click here

Navigation in Dynamic Environments taking Advantage of Moving Agents

by Procópio Stein
This thesis proposes a di erent form of robotic navigation in dynamic environments, where the robot takes advantage of the motion of pedestrians, in order to improve its own navigation capabilities. The main idea is that, instead of treating persons as dynamic obstacles that should be avoided, they should be treated as special agents with an expert knowledge of navigating in dynamic scenarios. To bene t from the motion of pedestrians, this work proposes that the robot select and follow them, so it can move along optimal paths, deviate from undetected obstacles, improve navigation in densely populated areas and increase its acceptance by other humans. To accomplish this proposition, novel approaches are developed in the area of leader selection, where two methods are explored. The rst uses motion prediction approaches while the second uses a machine learning method, to evaluate the leader quality of subjects, which is trained with real examples. Finally, the leader selection methods are integrated with motion planning algorithms and experiments are conducted in order to validate the proposed techniques.
Academia de Verão 2014 - LAR - 10 & 11 Jul, 9:30-12:30  
Atividades da Academia de Verão no contexto de Robótica
Master Thesis Public Discussion- 16 Jul 2014, Auditório DEM - 10:00, Gonçalo Carpinteiro  

Medição de Orientações Relativas de um Veículo em Movimento

Este trabalho descreve um método de obtenção das orientações de um veículo em movimento. O facto de o veículo estar em movimento vai adicionar variação das orientações ao sistema desenvolvido. Para obter as orientações mediu-se a distância da estrutura do veículo à estrada por unidades locais de medição: ULM. Foi implementada uma unidade central de integração, UCI, que recebe a informação das ULM e envia para a unidade computacional do veículo. A leitura da distância foi realizada através de sensores de medição por infravermelhos da Sharp. Para que os dados provenientes desses sensores fossem o mais preciso possível, foi levado a cabo um estudo e caracterização destes mesmos sensores. Cada sensor foi calibrado individualmente, de modo a se obter a relação da diferença de potencial lida com a distância à estrada. Foi levado a cabo um estudo de qual o melhor método matemático para obter as orientações com base nas distâncias à estrada. Foram ainda conduzidos vários testes de modo a estimar o erro do sistema desenvolvido. Por fim, testou-se o sistema final em ambiente real.

Master Thesis Public Discussion- 16 Jul 2014, Auditório DEM - 16:00, Pedro Mendes  

Intelligent Monitoring of Human Actuations on Automobile Vehicle Pedals

Nowadays, there is a huge socio-economic effort to reduce driving accidents. To do so, there are many safety methods and emphasis has been given to methods based on computer vision techniques. However, most of these techniques require high computational power and economical cost. As an alternative there are other techniques that exploit the vehicle-driver interfaces, such as the vehicle pedals. Considering the pedals as a powerful tool to monitor the driver actions, a system to monitor the driver actuations in automobile vehicle pedals was developed. In doing so, several possible conflicting requirements were taking into account, such as: low cost, real-time monitoring and accurate, robustness, non-invasiveness, flexible and easy-to use. To evaluate if the developed system fulfilled these requirements, tests were carried out under both stationary and real driving conditions. Overall, the system developed presented the necessary requirements and was able to successful monitor the driver actuation on automobile vehicle pedals.

Master Thesis Public Discussion- 16 Jul 2014, Auditório DEM - 14:30, Sérgio Pinho  

Caixa Automáatica e Manobras Especiais no ATLASCAR

O AtlasCar é um protótipo de um veículo desenvolvido pelo Laboratóorio de Automaçãoo e Robótica (LAR) do Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica da Universidade de Aveiro, em que, o principal objetivo é o desenvolvimento
e estudo de sistemas de condução autónoma, de conduçãao assistida (ADAS) e de segurança. Entre todos os desafios deste projeto, a inexistência de um sistema de comutação de velocidades automático fiável limitou, em muito, a condução autóonoma. Este trabalho teve como objetivo a reconstrução de todo o sistema de comutação, necessitando da construçãoo de um novo sistema mecânico (baseado no modelo anterior), da calibração/reajustes do sistema de comutaçãao (unidade de controlo), da implementação do sistema no veículo e do desenvolvimento de software no sistema computacional (para realização de manobras especiais). Para o efeito são utilizados protocolos de comunicação entre o firmware e o software do AtlasCar, software de calibração e um modo ROS para comunicação com todo o sistema. Esta dissertação aborda o desenvolvimento de um novo comutador de mudanças que teve como base o modelo existente. Após concluído o comutador, implementou-se uma nova segurançaa no sistema eletrónico e tornou-se
a unidade de controlo mais compacta e robusta, juntando as várias unidades de controlo num único bloco. Por último, desenvolveu-se um software para a realizaçãoo de manobras especiais como: avançar, recuar, estacionar, estacionar paralelamente, inverter marchar e parar. Apos realizados todos os trabalhos, concluiu-se que o comutador de mudanças é funcional e robusto, e as manobras além de serem realizadas não contêm um grande grau de repetibilidade.

Master Thesis Public Discussion- 22 Jul 2014, Auditório DEM - 15:00, Luis Carrão  

Sistema de visão para guiamento de AGV em ambiente industrial

Este trabalho propõe um sistema de posicionamento utilizando visão artificial, baseada em marcadores, para guiamento em ambiente industrial. Numa primeira instância foi determinado o tipo de informação que seria representada pelos marcadores, assim como de que forma esta seria interpretada. Posteriormente foi escolhido que tipo de marcadores existentes seriam os mais adequados para as condições da aplicação desejada. De seguida foi utilizada uma biblioteca, de uso livre, para leitura de códigos DataMatrix, com a qual é possível descodficar e obter a posição dos marcadores na imagem. Posteriormente, conhecendo a informação relativa à geometria dos marcadores tanto real como na imagem foram medidas as suas distâncias. Sabendo o seu posicionamento na imagem foram ainda calculados os ângulos entre estes e o eixo ótico da câmara. Finalmente, utilizando a informação relativa a estas medições e sabendo a posição de apenas dois marcadores, foi possível calcular o posicionamento (X, Y e ϕ) do AGV, com recurso a um método híbrido entre trilateração e triangulação. Os resultados foram aferidos com um sistema de medição baseado em laser.

Master Thesis Public Discussion- 22 Jul 2014, Auditório DEM - 16:30, Ricardo Silva  

Removable Odometry Unit for Vehicles with Ackerman Steering

The main objective of this work is to develop a solution of odometry for vehicles with Ackermann steering. The solution had to be portable, flexible and easy to mount. After the study of the state of the art and a survey of solutions, the solution chosen was based on visual odometry. The following steps of the work were to study the feasibility to use line scan image sensors for visual odometry. The image sensor was used to compute the longitudinal velocity; and the orientation of motion was computed using two gyroscopes. To test the method, several experiments were made; the experiments took place indoor, under controlled conditions. It was tested the ability to measure velocity on straight line movements, diagonal movements, circular movements and movements with a changing distance from the ground. The data was processed with correlation algorithms and the results were documented. Based on the results it is safe to conclude that odometry with line scan sensors aided by inertial sensors has a potential for a real world applicability.

Master Thesis Public Discussion- 20 Nov 2014, Auditório DEM - 15:00, Ricardo Morais  

Parametrização de algoritmos para deteção de estrada a bordo do ATLASCAR

O veículo AtlasCar é um protótipo desenvolvido pelo Laboratório de Automação e Robótica do Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica da Universidade de Aveiro, para o estudo de sistemas de segurança ativos e passivos e soluções de condução
autónoma. O objetivo deste trabalho é dotar o AtlasCar de um sistema de visão artificial capaz de reconhecer os limites da estrada, sendo para isso necessária a procura de marcas na estrada e/ou características das mesmas.
Este trabalho encontra-se dividido em duas partes principais: o desenvolvimento de módulos de software para a implementaçãao de algoritmos com metodologias de deteçãao distintas e o estudo dos parâmetros que os compõem. O primeiro algoritmo baseia-se no método de RANSAC para efetuar a aproximação de uma spline aos limites da estrada, por sua vez o segundo algoritmo utiliza a transformada de Hough para efetuar esta aproximação. Os métodos apresentados foram testados em condições reais e foram analisadas as situações de falha, vantagens e desvantagens da aplicação de um método em relativamente ao outro.
Com a implementação deste sistema será possível a distinguir as zonas navegáveis das não navegáveis em contexto de estrada, permitindo assim a outros processos fazer um planeamento local da navegação.

Events for 2015 not listed
C++ Workshop, 22 Feb 2016
Workshop lectured by Prof. Miguel Oliveira to prepare the attendees for a ROS workshop. Check further details and materials here.
Workshop on ROS, 29 Feb 2016 & 11 Mar 2016
Workshop sessions lectured by Prof. Miguel Oliveira. Check for aditional details and materials here.
C++ & ROS Workshops, 2 and 3 Mar 2017

C++ Workshop lectured by Prof. Miguel Oliveira to prepare the attendees for a ROS workshop. Check further details and materials here.

Workshop sessions lectured by Prof. Miguel Oliveira. Check for aditional details and materials here.

C++ & ROS Workshops, 1, 2 and 8 Mar 2018

C++/ROS Workshop lectured by Prof. Miguel Oliveira. Check further details and materials here.

First LAR meetings of the semester, 16 Mar 2018

No events for 2019
No events for 2020

 

 

 

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