Anthony Cowley - IEEE Xplore Author Profile

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We present an empirical investigation of a new mapping system based on a graph of panoramic depth images. Panoramic images efficiently capture range measurements taken by a spinning lidar sensor, recording fine detail on the order of a few centimeters within maps of expansive scope on the order of tens of millions of cubic meters. The flexibility of the system is demonstrated by running the same map...Show More
Currently, GPS is by far the most popular global localization method. However, it is not always reliable or accurate in all environments. SLAM methods enable local state estimation but provide no means of registering the local map to a global one, which can be important for inter-robot collaboration or human interaction. In this work, we present a real-time method for utilizing semantics to global...Show More
Robotic exploration of underground environments is a particularly challenging problem due to communication, endurance, and traversability constraints which necessitate high degrees of autonomy and agility. These challenges are further exacerbated by the need to minimize human intervention for practical applications. While legged robots have the ability to traverse extremely challenging terrain, th...Show More
In this work, we present an information based exploration strategy tailored for the generation of high resolution 3D maps. We employ RGBD panoramas because they have been shown to provide memory efficient high quality representations of space. Robots explore the environment by selecting locations with maximal Cauchy-Schwarz Quadratic Mutual Information (CSQMI) computed on an angle enhanced occupan...Show More
This work demonstrates the use of depth panoramas in the construction of detailed 3D models of extended environments. The paper describes an approach to the acquisition of such panoramic images using a robotic platform that collects sequences of depth images with a commodity depth sensor. These sequences are stitched into panoramic images that efficiently capture scene information while reducing n...Show More
Mobile manipulators have brought a new level of flexibility to traditional automation tasks such as tabletop manipulation, but are not yet capable of the same speed and reliability as industrial automation. We present approaches to 3D perception and manipulator motion planning that enable a general purpose robotic platform to recognize and manipulate a variety of objects at a rate of one pick-and-...Show More
Transport of individual cells or chemical payloads on a subcellular scale is an enabling tool for the study of cellular communication, cell migration, and other localized phenomena. We present a magnetically actuated robotic system for the fully automated manipulation of cells and microbeads. Our strategy uses autofluorescent robotic transporters and fluorescently labeled microbeads to aid trackin...Show More
The decomposition of robotics software into a collection of loosely coupled processes has become a core design principle of virtually every large robotics software engineering effort over the past decade. Recently, the ROS software platform from Willow Garage has gained significant traction due to its adoption of sound design principles and significant software library contributions from Willow Ga...Show More
The management of finite resources is central to many robot behaviors. Some robotic systems must maintain invariants regarding the disposition of feet for balancing, others have grippers for manipulating their environments, while yet others must respect strict rules governing the usage of objects in the environment. Yet the specifics of such resource management responsibilities are almost universa...Show More
Multi-robot map building has advanced to the point where high quality occupancy grid data may be collected by multiple robots collaborating with only intermittent connectivity. However, the tasking of these agents to most efficiently build the map is a problem that has seen less attention. Unfamiliar, highly cluttered environments can confound exploration strategies that rely solely on occupancy g...Show More
This paper presents a scheme which takes as input a 3D point cloud and an associated color image and parses the scene into a collection of salient planar surfaces. The scheme makes use of a fast color segmentation scheme to divide the color image into coherent regions and the groupings suggested by this procedure are used to inform and accelerate a RANSAC based interpretation process. Results on r...Show More
For such biomedical applications as single cell manipulation and targeted delivery of chemicals, it is important to fabricate microstructures that can be powered and controlled without a tether in fluidic environments. In this work, we describe the construction and operation of micronsized, biocompatible ferromagnetic microtransporters driven by external magnetic fields capable of exerting forces ...Show More
A functional approach to programming robot swarms brings with it well-defined properties that allow for automated concurrency and distributed execution. Further, the particular expressiveness of a pure functional language with first-class closures captures so cleanly certain biologically-inspired behaviors that program specification often becomes compact enough to allow a programmer to visually in...Show More
Inter-component communication has received considerable attention by robotic software architects as various frameworks and toolkits have matured. While the resulting software platforms have proven useful for abstracting hardware interfaces and the complex networking issues that are often present in robot deployment scenarios, they typically present users with arduous paths for integrating new hard...Show More
Communication is essential for coordination in most cooperative control and sensing paradigms. In this paper, we present an experimental study of strategies for maintaining end-to-end communication links for tasks such as surveillance and search and rescue where team connectivity is essential for providing situational awareness to a base station. We consider the differences between monitoring poin...Show More
We describe our implementation of a distributed sensor database that was designed to support the activities of teams of mobile robots as they explore an environment. Importantly, this approach effectively separates the process of acquiring sensor data from that of exploiting it. This allows us to develop applications where robots and human users can automatically discover and utilize sensor measur...Show More
This paper presents ROCI, a framework for developing applications for multi-robot teams. In ROCI, each robot is considered a node, which contains several modules and may export different types of services and capabilities to other nodes. Each node runs a kernel that mediates the interactions of the robots in a team. This kernel keeps an updated database of all nodes and the functionalities that th...Show More