1. |
- Ahlberg, Carl, et al.
(författare)
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The Black Pearl: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
- 2013
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Black Pearl is a custom made autonomous underwater vehicle developed at Mälardalen University, Sweden. It is built in a modular fashion, including its mechanics, electronics and software. After a successful participation at the RoboSub competition in 2012 and winning the prize for best craftsmanship, this year we made minor improvements to the hardware, while the focus of the robot's evolution shifted to the software part. In this paper we give an overview of how the Black Pearl is built, both from the hardware and software point of view.
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2. |
- Akan, Batu, 1981-
(författare)
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Human Robot Interaction Solutions for Intuitive Industrial Robot Programming
- 2012
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the past few decades the use of industrial robots has increased the efficiency as well as competitiveness of many companies. Despite this fact, in many cases, robot automation investments are considered to be technically challenging. In addition, for most small and medium sized enterprises (SME) this process is associated with high costs. Due to their continuously changing product lines, reprogramming costs are likely to exceed installation costs by a large margin. Furthermore, traditional programming methods for industrial robots are too complex for an inexperienced robot programmer, thus assistance from a robot programming expert is often needed. We hypothesize that in order to make industrial robots more common within the SME sector, the robots should be reprogrammable by technicians or manufacturing engineers rather than robot programming experts. In this thesis we propose a high-level natural language framework for interacting with industrial robots through an instructional programming environment for the user. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to bring robot programming to a stage where it is as easy as working together with a colleague.In this thesis we mainly address two issues. The first issue is to make interaction with a robot easier and more natural through a multimodal framework. The proposed language architecture makes it possible to manipulate, pick or place objects in a scene through high level commands. Interaction with simple voice commands and gestures enables the manufacturing engineer to focus on the task itself, rather than programming issues of the robot. This approach shifts the focus of industrial robot programming from the coordinate based programming paradigm, which currently dominates the field, to an object based programming scheme.The second issue addressed is a general framework for implementing multimodal interfaces. There have been numerous efforts to implement multimodal interfaces for computers and robots, but there is no general standard framework for developing them. The general framework proposed in this thesis is designed to perform natural language understanding, multimodal integration and semantic analysis with an incremental pipeline and includes a novel multimodal grammar language, which is used for multimodal presentation and semantic meaning generation.
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3. |
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4. |
- Asplund, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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The Gurkh Project : A Framework for Verification and Execution of Mission Critical Applications
- 2003
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Ingår i: AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference - Proceedings, vol. 2. - 078037844X ; , s. 10.B.1/1-10.B.1/9
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The paper contributes with three methods that together will make a complete tool-set for verification of mission critical applications. The first method is the transformation of existing Ada or VHDL code into an intermediate form. This form is used for verification by numerous different model checkers. The second method is a predictable runtime kernel that has both a verifiable formal model and is implemented in hardware to achieve full predictability. Finally, a method for transforming the intermediate form of the complete system into a hardware unit, the SafetyChip that performs runtime control of the system. This SafetyChip can catch 'out-of-state' behaviors.
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5. |
- Björnfot, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Distributed Run-Time System, a Protocol for Ada
- 1993
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Ingår i: Proc. Ada-Europe'93, LNCS 688. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ; , s. 249-263
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The requirements and specification of a protocol for low level communication between the run-time systems in a distributed Ada environment is presented. This allows an Ada system to be separated into software resources and run-time controllers. Calls to the local run-time system of a node, concerning task management, are transformed into remote calls to the controller, that schedules all tasks in the application. The calls to the run-time system together with all messages, requests and replies, that are triggered as a consequence, are described. The controller will be implemented in hardware separate from the processors. Communication between processors and controllers are by means of high speed (Gigabit) networks. In the proposed system, partitioning and distribution of Ada programs can fully utilize the inherent and strong type checking in Ada.
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6. |
- Björnfot, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Distribution of Tasks Within a Centrally Scheduled Local Area Network
- 1994
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Ingår i: Proc. Ada-Europe'94, LNCS 887. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ; , s. 421-432
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Distribution of a single Ada program on a local area network is accomplished by partitioning the run-time system into two parts. A central scheduling module is responsible for task management. Distributed run-time executives handle context switches and remote entry calls; however all activities are supervised by the scheduler. The scheduler can be implemented in hardware in order to achieve high efficiency. A network based on optical fibers is necessary due to the high speed required for system calls. Asynchronous Transfer Mode is suggested as the protocol for the communication. We describe an implementation of the divided run-time system on an Ethernet network, using MC68030-based micro computers as targets and an Ada program executing on a Rational host as the scheduler.
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7. |
- Björnfot, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Termination of Ada Tasks in Hardware
- 1995
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Ingår i: Proc. TRI-Ada'95. - New York, New York, USA : ACM Press. - 0897917057 ; , s. 474-486
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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8. |
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9. |
- Ekstrand, Fredrik, 1974-
(författare)
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Resource Optimized Stereo Matching in Reconfigurable Hardware for Autonomous Systems
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is a need for compact, high-speed, and low-power vision systems for enabling real-time mobile autonomous applications. The best approach to achieve this is to implement the bulk of the application in hardware. Reconfigurable hardware meet these requirements without the limitation of fixed functionality that accompanies application-specific circuits. Resource constraints of reconfigurable hardware calls for optimized implementations i terms of resource usage with maintained performance. The research group in Robotics at Mälardalen University is moving toward the completion of a reconfigurable hardware-platform for stereo vision, coupled with a compact embedded computer. This system will incorporate hardware-based preprocessing components enabling visual perception for autonomous machines. This thesis covers the reconfigurable hardware section of the vision system concerning the realization of scene depth extraction. It shows the advantages of image preprocessing in hardware and propose a resource optimized approach to stereo matching. The work quantifies the impact of reduced resource utilization and a desire for increased accuracy in disparity estimation. The implemented stereo matching approach performs on par with recent similar implementations in terms of accuracy, but excels in terms of resource utilization and resource sharing, as the external memory requirement is removed for larger images. Future work aims to further include processes for navigation, and structure and object recognition. Furthermore, the system will be adapted to real world scenarios, both indoors and outdoors.
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10. |
- Ekstrand, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Utilization and Performance Considerations in Resource Optimized Stereo Matching for Real-Time Reconfigurable Hardware
- 2012
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Ingår i: VISAPP 2012 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Application, vol. 2. - 9789898565044 ; , s. 415-418
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents a set of approaches for increasing the accuracy of basic area-based stereo matching methods. It is targeting real-time FPGA systems for dense disparity map estimation. The methods are focused on low resource usage and maximized improvement per cost unit to enable the inclusion of an autonomous system in an FPGA. The approach performs on par with other area-matching implementations, but at substantially lower resource usage. Additionally, the solution removes the requirement for external memory for reconfigurable hardware together with the limitation in image size accompanying standard methods. As a fully piped complete on-chip solution, it is highly suitable for real-time stereo-vision systems, with a frame rate over 100 fps for Megapixel images.
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