Direct perception of traversibility affordance on range images through learning on a mobile robot

Download
2006
Uğur, Emre
In this thesis, we studied how physical affordances of the environment, such as traversibility for a mobile robot, can be learned. In particular, we studied how the physical properties of the environment, as acquired from range images obtained from a 3D laser scanner mounted on a mobile robot platform, can specify the traversibility affordance. A physics based simulation environment is used during exploration trials, where the traversibility affordances and the relevant features for each behavior are learned through physical interactions with the environment. The prediction accuracy in perceiving the traversibility affordances of the world, which includes several spherical, cylindrical and box shaped objects, is found to be 94 percent. Furthermore, it is observed that the robot uses only 1.1 percent of extracted features while perceiving the affordances. This in turn saves the time 76.6 percent in scanning and 81percent in feature processing. The robot is later tested in a simulated cluttered environment, surrounded by walls. It is able to successfully traverse in the environment, by selecting its behaviors based on the affordances provided, and performing them. The robot was able to avoid from the box shaped objects, and push-roll the spherical ones without making any object detection. In the last set of experiments, the trained affordance-based behavior selection scheme is partially veried in the real world with the Kurt3D robot.

Suggestions

Control of a mobile robot swarm via informed robots
Çelikkanat, Hande; Şahin, Erol; Department of Computer Engineering (2008)
In this thesis, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided by informing some of the robots within the flock about a preferred direction of motion. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, this behavior does not have a preferred direction and the flock would wander aimlessly. In this study, we incorporate a preference for a goal direction i...
Evolving aggregation behaviors for swarm robotics systems: a systematic case study
Bahçeci, Erkin; Şahin, Erol; Department of Computer Engineering (2005)
Evolutionary methods are shown to be useful in developing behaviors in robotics. Interest in the use of evolution in swarm robotics is also on the rise. However, when one attempts to use artificial evolution to develop behaviors for a swarm robotic system, he is faced with decisions to be made regarding some parameters of fitness evaluations and of the genetic algorithm. In this thesis, aggregation behavior is chosen as a case, where performance and scalability of aggregation behaviors of perceptron control...
Robot planing based on learned affordances
Çakmak, Maya; Şahin, Erol; Department of Computer Engineering (2007)
This thesis studies how an autonomous robot can learn affordances from its interactions with the environment and use these affordances in planning. It is based on a new formalization of the concept which proposes that affordances are relations that pertain to the interactions of an agent with its environment. The robot interacts with environments containing different objects by executing its atomic actions and learns the different effects it can create, as well as the invariants of the environments that aff...
A simulation tool for mc6811
Sarıkan (Tuncer), Nazlı; Güran, Hasan; Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2004)
The aim of this thesis study is to develop a simulator for an 8-bit microcontroller and the written document of this thesis study analyses the process of devoloping a software for simulating an 8 bit microcontroller, MC68HC11. In this simulator study a file processing including the parsing of the assembler code and the compilation of the parsed instructions is studied. Also all the instruction execution process containing the cycle and instruction execution and the interrupt routine execution is observed th...
A fluid dynamics framework for control of mobile robot networks
Paç, Muhammed Raşid; Erkmen, Aydan Müşerref; Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2007)
This thesis proposes a framework for controlling mobile robot networks based on a fluid dynamics paradigm. The approach is inspired by natural behaviors of fluids demonstrating desirable characteristics for collective robots. The underlying mathematical formalism is developed through establishing analogies between fluid bodies and multi-robot systems such that robots are modeled as fluid elements that constitute a fluid body. The governing equations of fluid dynamics are adapted to multi-robot systems and a...
Citation Formats
E. Uğur, “Direct perception of traversibility affordance on range images through learning on a mobile robot,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2006.