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Article
Publication date: 7 August 2017

Shenglan Liu, Muxin Sun, Xiaodong Huang, Wei Wang and Feilong Wang

Robot vision is a fundamental device for human–robot interaction and robot complex tasks. In this paper, the authors aim to use Kinect and propose a feature graph fusion (FGF) for…

Abstract

Purpose

Robot vision is a fundamental device for human–robot interaction and robot complex tasks. In this paper, the authors aim to use Kinect and propose a feature graph fusion (FGF) for robot recognition.

Design/methodology/approach

The feature fusion utilizes red green blue (RGB) and depth information to construct fused feature from Kinect. FGF involves multi-Jaccard similarity to compute a robust graph and word embedding method to enhance the recognition results.

Findings

The authors also collect DUT RGB-Depth (RGB-D) face data set and a benchmark data set to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method. The experimental results illustrate that FGF is robust and effective to face and object data sets in robot applications.

Originality/value

The authors first utilize Jaccard similarity to construct a graph of RGB and depth images, which indicates the similarity of pair-wise images. Then, fusion feature of RGB and depth images can be computed by the Extended Jaccard Graph using word embedding method. The FGF can get better performance and efficiency in RGB-D sensor for robots.

Details

Assembly Automation, vol. 37 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-5154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 October 2018

Lin Feng, Yang Liu, Zan Li, Meng Zhang, Feilong Wang and Shenglan Liu

The purpose of this paper is to promote the efficiency of RGB-depth (RGB-D)-based object recognition in robot vision and find discriminative binary representations for RGB-D based…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to promote the efficiency of RGB-depth (RGB-D)-based object recognition in robot vision and find discriminative binary representations for RGB-D based objects.

Design/methodology/approach

To promote the efficiency of RGB-D-based object recognition in robot vision, this paper applies hashing methods to RGB-D-based object recognition by utilizing the approximate nearest neighbors (ANN) to vote for the final result. To improve the object recognition accuracy in robot vision, an “Encoding+Selection” binary representation generation pattern is proposed. “Encoding+Selection” pattern can generate more discriminative binary representations for RGB-D-based objects. Moreover, label information is utilized to enhance the discrimination of each bit, which guarantees that the most discriminative bits can be selected.

Findings

The experiment results validate that the ANN-based voting recognition method is more efficient and effective compared to traditional recognition method in RGB-D-based object recognition for robot vision. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed bit selection method is also validated to be effective.

Originality/value

Hashing learning is applied to RGB-D-based object recognition, which significantly promotes the recognition efficiency for robot vision while maintaining high recognition accuracy. Besides, the “Encoding+Selection” pattern is utilized in the process of binary encoding, which effectively enhances the discrimination of binary representations for objects.

Details

Assembly Automation, vol. 39 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-5154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 June 2017

Michał R. Nowicki, Dominik Belter, Aleksander Kostusiak, Petr Cížek, Jan Faigl and Piotr Skrzypczyński

This paper aims to evaluate four different simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems in the context of localization of multi-legged walking robots equipped with compact…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to evaluate four different simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems in the context of localization of multi-legged walking robots equipped with compact RGB-D sensors. This paper identifies problems related to in-motion data acquisition in a legged robot and evaluates the particular building blocks and concepts applied in contemporary SLAM systems against these problems. The SLAM systems are evaluated on two independent experimental set-ups, applying a well-established methodology and performance metrics.

Design/methodology/approach

Four feature-based SLAM architectures are evaluated with respect to their suitability for localization of multi-legged walking robots. The evaluation methodology is based on the computation of the absolute trajectory error (ATE) and relative pose error (RPE), which are performance metrics well-established in the robotics community. Four sequences of RGB-D frames acquired in two independent experiments using two different six-legged walking robots are used in the evaluation process.

Findings

The experiments revealed that the predominant problem characteristics of the legged robots as platforms for SLAM are the abrupt and unpredictable sensor motions, as well as oscillations and vibrations, which corrupt the images captured in-motion. The tested adaptive gait allowed the evaluated SLAM systems to reconstruct proper trajectories. The bundle adjustment-based SLAM systems produced best results, thanks to the use of a map, which enables to establish a large number of constraints for the estimated trajectory.

Research limitations/implications

The evaluation was performed using indoor mockups of terrain. Experiments in more natural and challenging environments are envisioned as part of future research.

Practical implications

The lack of accurate self-localization methods is considered as one of the most important limitations of walking robots. Thus, the evaluation of the state-of-the-art SLAM methods on legged platforms may be useful for all researchers working on walking robots’ autonomy and their use in various applications, such as search, security, agriculture and mining.

Originality/value

The main contribution lies in the integration of the state-of-the-art SLAM methods on walking robots and their thorough experimental evaluation using a well-established methodology. Moreover, a SLAM system designed especially for RGB-D sensors and real-world applications is presented in details.

Details

Industrial Robot: An International Journal, vol. 44 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-991X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 September 2021

Wahyu Rahmaniar, W.J. Wang, Chi-Wei Ethan Chiu and Noorkholis Luthfil Luthfil Hakim

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework and improve a bi-directional people counting technique using an RGB-D camera to obtain accurate results with fast…

162

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework and improve a bi-directional people counting technique using an RGB-D camera to obtain accurate results with fast computation time. Therefore, it can be used in real-time applications.

Design/methodology/approach

First, image calibration is proposed to obtain the ratio and shift values between the depth and the RGB image. In the depth image, a person is detected as foreground by removing the background. Then, the region of interest (ROI) of the detected people is registered based on their location and mapped to an RGB image. Registered people are tracked in RGB images based on the channel and spatial reliability. Finally, people were counted when they crossed the line of interest (LOI) and their displacement distance was more than 2 m.

Findings

It was found that the proposed people counting method achieves high accuracy with fast computation time to be used in PCs and embedded systems. The precision rate is 99% with a computation time of 35 frames per second (fps) using a PC and 18 fps using the NVIDIA Jetson TX2.

Practical implications

The precision rate is 99% with a computation time of 35 frames per second (fps) using a PC and 18 fps using the NVIDIA Jetson TX2.

Originality/value

The proposed method can count the number of people entering and exiting a room at the same time. If the previous systems were limited to only one to two people in a frame, this system can count many people in a frame. In addition, this system can handle some problems in people counting, such as people who are blocked by others, people moving in another direction suddenly, and people who are standing still.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 41 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 April 2019

Chengchao Bai, Jifeng Guo and Hongxing Zheng

The purpose of this paper is to verify the correctness and feasibility of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm based on red-green-blue depth (RGB-D) camera in…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to verify the correctness and feasibility of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm based on red-green-blue depth (RGB-D) camera in high precision navigation and localization of celestial exploration rover.

Design/methodology/approach

First, a positioning algorithm based on depth camera is proposed. Second, the realization method is described from the five aspects of feature detection method, feature point matching, point cloud mapping, motion estimation and high precision optimization. Feature detection: taking the precision, real-time and motion basics as the comprehensive consideration, the ORB (oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF) features extraction method is adopted; feature point matching: solves the similarity measure of the feature descriptor vector and how to remove the mismatch point; point cloud mapping: the two-dimensional information on RGB and the depth information on D corresponding; motion estimation: the iterative closest point algorithm is used to solve point set registration; and high precision optimization: optimized by using the graph optimization method.

Findings

The proposed high-precision SLAM algorithm is very effective for solving high precision navigation and positioning of celestial exploration rover.

Research limitations/implications

In this paper, the simulation validation is based on an open source data set for testing; the physical verification is based on the existing unmanned vehicle platform to simulate the celestial exploration rover.

Practical implications

This paper presents a RGB-D camera-based navigation algorithm, which can be obtained by simulation experiment and physical verification. The real-time and accuracy of the algorithm are well behaved and have strong applicability, which can support the tests and experiments on hardware platform and have a better environmental adaptability.

Originality/value

The proposed SLAM algorithm can deal with the high precision navigation and positioning of celestial exploration rover effectively. Taking into account the current wide application prospect of computer vision, the method in this paper can provide a study foundation for the deep space probe.

Details

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 91 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1748-8842

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 June 2017

Ge Wu, Duan Li, Yueqi Zhong and PengPeng Hu

The calibration is a key but cumbersome process for 3D body scanning using multiple depth cameras. The purpose of this paper is to simplify the calibration process by introducing…

Abstract

Purpose

The calibration is a key but cumbersome process for 3D body scanning using multiple depth cameras. The purpose of this paper is to simplify the calibration process by introducing a new method to calibrate the extrinsic parameters of multiple depth cameras simultaneously.

Design/methodology/approach

An improved method is introduced to enhance the accuracy based on the virtual checkerboards. Laplace coordinates are employed for a point-to-point adjustment to increase the accuracy of scanned data. A system with eight depth cameras is developed for full-body scanning, and the performance of this system is verified by actual results.

Findings

The agreement of measurements between scanned human bodies and the real subjects demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed method. The entire calibration process is automatic.

Originality/value

A complete algorithm for a full human body scanning system is introduced in this paper. This is the first publically study on the refinement and the point-by-point adjustment based on the virtual checkerboards toward the scanning accuracy enhancement.

Details

International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, vol. 29 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0955-6222

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 27 April 2020

Yongxiang Wu, Yili Fu and Shuguo Wang

This paper aims to design a deep neural network for object instance segmentation and six-dimensional (6D) pose estimation in cluttered scenes and apply the proposed method in…

448

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to design a deep neural network for object instance segmentation and six-dimensional (6D) pose estimation in cluttered scenes and apply the proposed method in real-world robotic autonomous grasping of household objects.

Design/methodology/approach

A novel deep learning method is proposed for instance segmentation and 6D pose estimation in cluttered scenes. An iterative pose refinement network is integrated with the main network to obtain more robust final pose estimation results for robotic applications. To train the network, a technique is presented to generate abundant annotated synthetic data consisting of RGB-D images and object masks in a fast manner without any hand-labeling. For robotic grasping, the offline grasp planning based on eigengrasp planner is performed and combined with the online object pose estimation.

Findings

The experiments on the standard pose benchmarking data sets showed that the method achieves better pose estimation and time efficiency performance than state-of-art methods with depth-based ICP refinement. The proposed method is also evaluated on a seven DOFs Kinova Jaco robot with an Intel Realsense RGB-D camera, the grasping results illustrated that the method is accurate and robust enough for real-world robotic applications.

Originality/value

A novel 6D pose estimation network based on the instance segmentation framework is proposed and a neural work-based iterative pose refinement module is integrated into the method. The proposed method exhibits satisfactory pose estimation and time efficiency for the robotic grasping.

Details

Industrial Robot: the international journal of robotics research and application, vol. 47 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-991X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 15 February 2022

Xiaojun Wu, Peng Li, Jinghui Zhou and Yunhui Liu

Scattered parts are laid randomly during the manufacturing process and have difficulty to recognize and manipulate. This study aims to complete the grasp of the scattered parts by…

Abstract

Purpose

Scattered parts are laid randomly during the manufacturing process and have difficulty to recognize and manipulate. This study aims to complete the grasp of the scattered parts by a manipulator with a camera and learning method.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a cascaded convolutional neural network (CNN) method for robotic grasping based on monocular vision and small data set of scattered parts is proposed. This method can be divided into three steps: object detection, monocular depth estimation and keypoint estimation. In the first stage, an object detection network is improved to effectively locate the candidate parts. Then, it contains a neural network structure and corresponding training method to learn and reason high-resolution input images to obtain depth estimation. The keypoint estimation in the third step is expressed as a cumulative form of multi-scale prediction from a network to use an red green blue depth (RGBD) map that is acquired from the object detection and depth map estimation. Finally, a grasping strategy is studied to achieve successful and continuous grasping. In the experiments, different workpieces are used to validate the proposed method. The best grasping success rate is more than 80%.

Findings

By using the CNN-based method to extract the key points of the scattered parts and calculating the possibility of grasp, the successful rate is increased.

Practical implications

This method and robotic systems can be used in picking and placing of most industrial automatic manufacturing or assembly processes.

Originality/value

Unlike standard parts, scattered parts are randomly laid and have difficulty recognizing and grasping for the robot. This study uses a cascaded CNN network to extract the keypoints of the scattered parts, which are also labeled with the possibility of successful grasping. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the grasping of those scattered parts.

Details

Industrial Robot: the international journal of robotics research and application, vol. 49 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-991X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 July 2022

Lin Zhang and Yingjie Zhang

This paper aims to quickly obtain an accurate and complete dense three-dimensional map of indoor environment with lower cost, which can be directly used in navigation.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to quickly obtain an accurate and complete dense three-dimensional map of indoor environment with lower cost, which can be directly used in navigation.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes an improved ORB-SLAM2 dense map optimization algorithm. This algorithm consists of three parts: ORB feature extraction based on improved FAST-12, feature point extraction with progressive sample consensus (PROSAC) and the dense ORB-SLAM2 algorithm for mapping. Here, the dense ORB-SLAM2 algorithm adds LoopClose optimization thread and dense point cloud map and octree map construction thread. The dense map is computationally expensive and occupies a large amount of memory. Therefore, the proposed method takes higher efficiency, voxel filtering can reduce the memory while ensuring the density of the map and then use the octree format to store the map to further reduce memory.

Findings

The improved ORB-SLAM2 algorithm is compared with the original ORB-SLAM2 algorithm, and the experimental results show that the map through improved ORB-SLAM2 can be directly used in navigation process with higher accuracy, shorter tracking time and smaller memory.

Originality/value

The improved ORB-SLAM2 algorithm can obtain a dense environment map, which ensures the integrity of data. The comparisons of FAST-12 and improved FAST-12, RANSAC and PROSAC prove that the improved FAST-12 and PROSAC both make the feature point extraction process faster and more accurate. Voxel filter helps to take small storage memory and low computation cost, and octree map construction on the dense map can be directly used in navigation.

Details

Assembly Automation, vol. 42 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-5154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 September 2023

Yong Qin and Haidong Yu

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the challenges and potential solutions in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), laying the foundation for its…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the challenges and potential solutions in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), laying the foundation for its applications in autonomous navigation, intelligent driving and other related domains.

Design/methodology/approach

In analyzing the latest research, the review presents representative achievements, including methods to enhance efficiency, robustness and accuracy. Additionally, the review provides insights into the future development direction of Visual SLAM, emphasizing the importance of improving system robustness when dealing with dynamic environments. The research methodology of this review involves a literature review and data set analysis, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the current status and prospects in the field of Visual SLAM.

Findings

This review aims to comprehensively evaluate the latest advances and challenges in the field of Visual SLAM. By collecting and analyzing relevant research papers and classic data sets, it reveals the current issues faced by Visual SLAM in complex environments and proposes potential solutions. The review begins by introducing the fundamental principles and application areas of Visual SLAM, followed by an in-depth discussion of the challenges encountered when dealing with dynamic objects and complex environments. To enhance the performance of SLAM algorithms, researchers have made progress by integrating different sensor modalities, improving feature extraction and incorporating deep learning techniques, driving advancements in the field.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the originality of this review lies in its in-depth analysis of current research hotspots and predictions for future development, providing valuable references for researchers in this field.

Details

Industrial Robot: the international journal of robotics research and application, vol. 50 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-991X

Keywords

1 – 10 of 360