This is paper describe a new method to built up a 3D geometrical model of objects from a single i... more This is paper describe a new method to built up a 3D geometrical model of objects from a single image. This method is based on a new concept, namely cylindrical projective geometry. This geometry enables one to compute automatically the shape of objects with axial symmetry using only one image of the object without any knowledge about the camera used. The mathematics of the concept are shown as well as their use in the modeling process. Some results are presented to show the efficiency and accuracy of our method
Effective control of autonomous robots evolving in dynamic and unpredictable environments is a ha... more Effective control of autonomous robots evolving in dynamic and unpredictable environments is a hard problem. The challenging issue is to achieve this control while the robot is performing a constrained and an interactive task. Namely, our aim is endow a mobile manipulator by controllers allowing safe and effective interactions with humans. This multi criteria optimization problem includes the coordination of two or more behaviors, in order to reach global goal. We propose in this paper a new concept to achieve multi-behaviors of catching objects and avoiding moving obstacles simultaneously for autonomous mobile robot arm. The mobile robot is equipped with an arm of 7 DOF. The robot's learns to avoid obstacles by moving (translation and rotation) its base while its arm tries to catch a given target.
... waphic rendering : IV ~ wi~P a.cliieve navigation 11y upclat,iiig two of the graphic c-arnera... more ... waphic rendering : IV ~ wi~P a.cliieve navigation 11y upclat,iiig two of the graphic c-arnera parameters (the camera. position a.nd he camera point of view). The ca.iiiera position is liscxl (acxrorcling t.0 t,he VE st,a.tic frame) at t,he be-t,or ryes posit,ion, or at, t,o ail a jproximative ...
In this paper, we investigated depth perception in real and virtual environments when binocular d... more In this paper, we investigated depth perception in real and virtual environments when binocular disparity is the sole distance cue. The observers were asked to estimate the relative depth of spheres verbally in virtual and actual environments. Constant apparent sized stimuli were used to measure the just-noticeable difference in depth perception, thus avoiding providing a size gradient cue. Results of the experiments revealed individual differences in virtual reality in contrast to reality. Specifically a subgroup of observers had difficulty perceiving the depth of virtual spheres in virtual reality, which may indicated that they rely on apparent size for judging depth. Furthermore, the just-noticeable differences was more variable in the virtual environment than with real objects. Our results reveal individual differences when the disparity-driven convergence cue is the only distance cue provided in virtual reality.
This study compares the usage vibrotactile and visual feedbacks as navigational cues supporting t... more This study compares the usage vibrotactile and visual feedbacks as navigational cues supporting tele-operated 3D pointing tasks within cluttered environments. In this perspective, subjects were asked to reach a target in the remote 3D space with an industrial robot arm while keeping the robot arm always touching a soft foam surface. Visual feedback was provided through a real-time video stream from robot's site while the vibro-tactile one was delivered through HANDISSIMA, the wireless vibrotactile glove we developed and which is based on the Frequency Modulation Based Vibrotactile metaphor (FMBV). As expected, the results we obtained show better results in terms of execution time for the visual feedback. As well, the trajectory length with both feedbacks was found similar. However, the average amount of force applied by operators obtained with the visual feedback is considerably larger the one with FMBV feedback.
This paper presents a new approach to solve multi robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SL... more This paper presents a new approach to solve multi robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem by allowing fast and efficient features exchange among teammates. Each mate is able to build its own SLAM solution by using feature based Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter algorithm. This scheme proposes that every feature extracted by individual mate should be shared with all team mates no matter that some features are viewed by more than one member. As the information exchange comprises only on small features set so the time taken to accommodate the information is small which makes it a good solution for distributed multi-robot system working with limited communication range and bandwidth. This paper presents experimental results for two different environments by using different platforms.
This preliminary study looks into how visual information affects motion planning in a gravitation... more This preliminary study looks into how visual information affects motion planning in a gravitational environment. Recently, it has been shown that goal-directed tasks, e.g. simple pointing actions, are performed using a combination of a priori knowledge and closed-loop information, coming from proprioceptive-vestibular and visual feedback. In particular it has been observed that visual information is used by the central nervous system to reorganize motor planning when visuo-motor conflicts occur. The aim of our work is to investigate deeper the contribution of the visual channel in motor planning by means of virtual reality tools. Indeed, virtual reality technology is used here to modify the nature of visual input, leading to test several scenarios from minimalist and impoverished scenes to fully immersive and realistic environments. In fact we want to understand how the richness of the visual information is relevant in influencing our motor planning. We describe here our experimental setup and protocols. Moreover we present some preliminary results and we discuss the ongoing developments.
International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2009
Distant E-learning is a main issue nowadays, and it is strongly motivated by social and economica... more Distant E-learning is a main issue nowadays, and it is strongly motivated by social and economical considerations. The increased people mobility and the reduction of educational costs push to develop ad hoc solutions enabling to access to knowledge regardless to geographical situation and economical capabilities. These parameters should not be limits for good training: learning material's pertinence and efficiency have to remain the core of educational activities. In this paper we address the problem through SyTroN: a tele-learning system. This system combines virtual reality and teleoperation techniques to offer an open platform with two main objectives. The first one is to propose intuitive virtual classrooms/desks, including a real teacher supervision and supporting collaborative and individual distant learning. The second goal is to place learners in real conditions with remote connections to real devices allowing distant experimentations. Both goals participate to increase learning impacts and to reduce costs, that is, sharing costly real devices from anywhere at any time. After 5 years of development, our work has been validated by an extensive use at a high engineering school. In situ tests and learning impact studies have been done. They show some advantages and some drawbacks of our global solution.
... We choose the thumb to be the CH. The hand control frame was linked to the 1009 Page 4. opera... more ... We choose the thumb to be the CH. The hand control frame was linked to the 1009 Page 4. operator virtual thumb. It was represented by an XYZ red frame, see Fig. 2. To keep this functionality, one of each robot gripper fingertips was candidate to correspond to the thumb. ...
Proc. of 18th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot & Human …, Jan 1, 2009
We are daily and continuously interacting with machines and so-called 'intelligent' manmade entit... more We are daily and continuously interacting with machines and so-called 'intelligent' manmade entities. We push buttons and we read instructions to get money from cashdispensers, we tune the washing machine or microwave oven with more or less efforts quasi-every day. Following that, one can easily admit that our era is heavily based on manmachines interactions and the easiness one has in handling such machines is capital, mainly in terms economical, social and psychological impacts. Robots, as a singular sub-set of these machines, are also subject to the same constraints and preoccupations. Moreover and unlikely to mobile phones, PDA or other intelligent devices, interactions with or through robots (tele-operation scheme) are more critical and more specific: interactions with robots are critical because robots are designed to achieve complex tasks within versatile, changing and hazardous environments. They are specific because robots are used instead (sometimes as extensions) of humans (for safety or for economical reasons) leading to confusions between machine-robot and living-robot concepts. The objective robot (the machine executing a program) and the subjective robot (the anthropomorphic robot and its image in folks mind) are entities too complex to be seen only as simple input-output black boxes. We believe that interactions with and through robots need very advanced and multi-disciplinary methodologies for designing human-robots communication, co-operation and collaboration interfaces. In this chapter, we give our vision for human-robots interactions. For this purpose, we propose to revisit the robotics timeline. We will show through this timeline the strong relations between robotics and tele-operation. These relations will be depicted under two perspectives: firstly, from human-robots interactions point of view and then from robots autonomy one. The natural and effective junction between these two visions will take place with the companion robot, e.g. the autonomous robot which is able to co-operate and to collaborate with humans. We belive that before reaching this robotics' ultimate goal, one must answer to a central problem: how humans perceive robots? This formultaion and the answers one can give to the question will undoubtly lead to design effective robots and simplified tools allwoing natural and transparent human-robts intercations. The document is organized as follow: the first part gives some historical hints letting the reader have a synthetic view of robotics' story. In the second part, we develop our theory about human robots interactions. We will see how we can built a new framework, namely 6 www.intechopen.com Remote and Telerobotics 92 the anthropomorphic robotics, by combining existing theories coming from neuroscience, psychology and psycho-physics. We show then that this theory can support simple teleoperation problems (delays, cognitive overloads, physical distance, etc.) as well as advanced human-robots co-operation issues. We finish by presenting some tools we are developing and some exemples of researches we are conucting to assess our hypothesis.
Nos travaux portent sur le suivi et l'interprétation des mouvements de la main avec une seule cam... more Nos travaux portent sur le suivi et l'interprétation des mouvements de la main avec une seule caméra fixe. Ils visent à fournir une interface homme-machine de faible-coût permettant de commander des systèmes via une simple WebCam. Bien que l'utilisation d'un tel matériel laisse supposer la limitation à un jeu de commandes minimum, i.e. un nombre limité de configurations de la main, nous montrons ici que ce jeu est suffisant pour réaliser des tâches complexes tel que le pilotage de robots. Dans ce papier, nous proposons un schéma de détection de la main de l'utilisateur et une méthode de recalage de cette dernière sur un modèle 3D articulé et ce en temps réel. Des résultats de tests réels ainsi que des commentaires relatifs à notre approche sont donnés.
Cette thèse porte sur l'utilisation de la vision en robotique mobile. Deux principau... more Cette thèse porte sur l'utilisation de la vision en robotique mobile. Deux principaux thèmes sont abordés. D'une part nous traitons du problème de la reconstruction géométrique d'une scène polyédrique en utilisant l'analyse de séquence d'images(l'extraction des droites 3 D ...
The possibilities of communication by gestures with the machines have been improved with the appe... more The possibilities of communication by gestures with the machines have been improved with the appearance of the instrumented gloves, provided with many sensors measuring the angles of the articulations and the position of the hand in space. Unfortunately, such gloves are still ...
3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society bec... more 3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society because it is useful in a great number of applications such as human machine interface, companion robots animation or human activity analysis. However there is a challenging problem: the complexity of usual tracking algorithms, that exponentially increases with the dimension of the state vector, becomes too difficult to handle. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach that combines several annealing particle filters defined independently for each limb and belief propagation method to add geometrical constraints between individual filters. Experimental results on a real human gestures sequence will show that this combined approach leads to reliable results.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in b... more The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
Intelligent Robotics and Applications, Jan 1, 2009
3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society bec... more 3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society because it is useful in a great number of applications such as human machine interface, companion robots animation or human activity analysis. However there is a challenging problem: the complexity of usual tracking algorithms, that exponentially increases with the dimension of the state vector, becomes too difficult to handle. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach that combines several annealing particle filters defined independently for each limb and belief propagation method to add geometrical constraints between individual filters. Experimental results on a real human gestures sequence will show that this combined approach leads to reliable results.
When interacting with robots we show a plethora of affective reactions typical of natural communi... more When interacting with robots we show a plethora of affective reactions typical of natural communications. Indeed, emotions are embedded on our communications and represent a predominant communication channel to convey relevant, high impact, information. In recent years more and more researchers have tried to exploit this channel for human robot (HRI) and human computer interactions (HCI). Two key abilities are needed for this purpose: the ability to display emotions and the ability to automatically recognize them. In this work we present our system for the computer based automatic recognition of emotions and the new results we obtained on a small dataset of quasi unconstrained emotional videos extracted from TV series and movies. The results are encouraging showing a recognition rate of about 74%.
This is paper describe a new method to built up a 3D geometrical model of objects from a single i... more This is paper describe a new method to built up a 3D geometrical model of objects from a single image. This method is based on a new concept, namely cylindrical projective geometry. This geometry enables one to compute automatically the shape of objects with axial symmetry using only one image of the object without any knowledge about the camera used. The mathematics of the concept are shown as well as their use in the modeling process. Some results are presented to show the efficiency and accuracy of our method
Effective control of autonomous robots evolving in dynamic and unpredictable environments is a ha... more Effective control of autonomous robots evolving in dynamic and unpredictable environments is a hard problem. The challenging issue is to achieve this control while the robot is performing a constrained and an interactive task. Namely, our aim is endow a mobile manipulator by controllers allowing safe and effective interactions with humans. This multi criteria optimization problem includes the coordination of two or more behaviors, in order to reach global goal. We propose in this paper a new concept to achieve multi-behaviors of catching objects and avoiding moving obstacles simultaneously for autonomous mobile robot arm. The mobile robot is equipped with an arm of 7 DOF. The robot's learns to avoid obstacles by moving (translation and rotation) its base while its arm tries to catch a given target.
... waphic rendering : IV ~ wi~P a.cliieve navigation 11y upclat,iiig two of the graphic c-arnera... more ... waphic rendering : IV ~ wi~P a.cliieve navigation 11y upclat,iiig two of the graphic c-arnera parameters (the camera. position a.nd he camera point of view). The ca.iiiera position is liscxl (acxrorcling t.0 t,he VE st,a.tic frame) at t,he be-t,or ryes posit,ion, or at, t,o ail a jproximative ...
In this paper, we investigated depth perception in real and virtual environments when binocular d... more In this paper, we investigated depth perception in real and virtual environments when binocular disparity is the sole distance cue. The observers were asked to estimate the relative depth of spheres verbally in virtual and actual environments. Constant apparent sized stimuli were used to measure the just-noticeable difference in depth perception, thus avoiding providing a size gradient cue. Results of the experiments revealed individual differences in virtual reality in contrast to reality. Specifically a subgroup of observers had difficulty perceiving the depth of virtual spheres in virtual reality, which may indicated that they rely on apparent size for judging depth. Furthermore, the just-noticeable differences was more variable in the virtual environment than with real objects. Our results reveal individual differences when the disparity-driven convergence cue is the only distance cue provided in virtual reality.
This study compares the usage vibrotactile and visual feedbacks as navigational cues supporting t... more This study compares the usage vibrotactile and visual feedbacks as navigational cues supporting tele-operated 3D pointing tasks within cluttered environments. In this perspective, subjects were asked to reach a target in the remote 3D space with an industrial robot arm while keeping the robot arm always touching a soft foam surface. Visual feedback was provided through a real-time video stream from robot's site while the vibro-tactile one was delivered through HANDISSIMA, the wireless vibrotactile glove we developed and which is based on the Frequency Modulation Based Vibrotactile metaphor (FMBV). As expected, the results we obtained show better results in terms of execution time for the visual feedback. As well, the trajectory length with both feedbacks was found similar. However, the average amount of force applied by operators obtained with the visual feedback is considerably larger the one with FMBV feedback.
This paper presents a new approach to solve multi robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SL... more This paper presents a new approach to solve multi robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem by allowing fast and efficient features exchange among teammates. Each mate is able to build its own SLAM solution by using feature based Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter algorithm. This scheme proposes that every feature extracted by individual mate should be shared with all team mates no matter that some features are viewed by more than one member. As the information exchange comprises only on small features set so the time taken to accommodate the information is small which makes it a good solution for distributed multi-robot system working with limited communication range and bandwidth. This paper presents experimental results for two different environments by using different platforms.
This preliminary study looks into how visual information affects motion planning in a gravitation... more This preliminary study looks into how visual information affects motion planning in a gravitational environment. Recently, it has been shown that goal-directed tasks, e.g. simple pointing actions, are performed using a combination of a priori knowledge and closed-loop information, coming from proprioceptive-vestibular and visual feedback. In particular it has been observed that visual information is used by the central nervous system to reorganize motor planning when visuo-motor conflicts occur. The aim of our work is to investigate deeper the contribution of the visual channel in motor planning by means of virtual reality tools. Indeed, virtual reality technology is used here to modify the nature of visual input, leading to test several scenarios from minimalist and impoverished scenes to fully immersive and realistic environments. In fact we want to understand how the richness of the visual information is relevant in influencing our motor planning. We describe here our experimental setup and protocols. Moreover we present some preliminary results and we discuss the ongoing developments.
International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2009
Distant E-learning is a main issue nowadays, and it is strongly motivated by social and economica... more Distant E-learning is a main issue nowadays, and it is strongly motivated by social and economical considerations. The increased people mobility and the reduction of educational costs push to develop ad hoc solutions enabling to access to knowledge regardless to geographical situation and economical capabilities. These parameters should not be limits for good training: learning material's pertinence and efficiency have to remain the core of educational activities. In this paper we address the problem through SyTroN: a tele-learning system. This system combines virtual reality and teleoperation techniques to offer an open platform with two main objectives. The first one is to propose intuitive virtual classrooms/desks, including a real teacher supervision and supporting collaborative and individual distant learning. The second goal is to place learners in real conditions with remote connections to real devices allowing distant experimentations. Both goals participate to increase learning impacts and to reduce costs, that is, sharing costly real devices from anywhere at any time. After 5 years of development, our work has been validated by an extensive use at a high engineering school. In situ tests and learning impact studies have been done. They show some advantages and some drawbacks of our global solution.
... We choose the thumb to be the CH. The hand control frame was linked to the 1009 Page 4. opera... more ... We choose the thumb to be the CH. The hand control frame was linked to the 1009 Page 4. operator virtual thumb. It was represented by an XYZ red frame, see Fig. 2. To keep this functionality, one of each robot gripper fingertips was candidate to correspond to the thumb. ...
Proc. of 18th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot & Human …, Jan 1, 2009
We are daily and continuously interacting with machines and so-called 'intelligent' manmade entit... more We are daily and continuously interacting with machines and so-called 'intelligent' manmade entities. We push buttons and we read instructions to get money from cashdispensers, we tune the washing machine or microwave oven with more or less efforts quasi-every day. Following that, one can easily admit that our era is heavily based on manmachines interactions and the easiness one has in handling such machines is capital, mainly in terms economical, social and psychological impacts. Robots, as a singular sub-set of these machines, are also subject to the same constraints and preoccupations. Moreover and unlikely to mobile phones, PDA or other intelligent devices, interactions with or through robots (tele-operation scheme) are more critical and more specific: interactions with robots are critical because robots are designed to achieve complex tasks within versatile, changing and hazardous environments. They are specific because robots are used instead (sometimes as extensions) of humans (for safety or for economical reasons) leading to confusions between machine-robot and living-robot concepts. The objective robot (the machine executing a program) and the subjective robot (the anthropomorphic robot and its image in folks mind) are entities too complex to be seen only as simple input-output black boxes. We believe that interactions with and through robots need very advanced and multi-disciplinary methodologies for designing human-robots communication, co-operation and collaboration interfaces. In this chapter, we give our vision for human-robots interactions. For this purpose, we propose to revisit the robotics timeline. We will show through this timeline the strong relations between robotics and tele-operation. These relations will be depicted under two perspectives: firstly, from human-robots interactions point of view and then from robots autonomy one. The natural and effective junction between these two visions will take place with the companion robot, e.g. the autonomous robot which is able to co-operate and to collaborate with humans. We belive that before reaching this robotics' ultimate goal, one must answer to a central problem: how humans perceive robots? This formultaion and the answers one can give to the question will undoubtly lead to design effective robots and simplified tools allwoing natural and transparent human-robts intercations. The document is organized as follow: the first part gives some historical hints letting the reader have a synthetic view of robotics' story. In the second part, we develop our theory about human robots interactions. We will see how we can built a new framework, namely 6 www.intechopen.com Remote and Telerobotics 92 the anthropomorphic robotics, by combining existing theories coming from neuroscience, psychology and psycho-physics. We show then that this theory can support simple teleoperation problems (delays, cognitive overloads, physical distance, etc.) as well as advanced human-robots co-operation issues. We finish by presenting some tools we are developing and some exemples of researches we are conucting to assess our hypothesis.
Nos travaux portent sur le suivi et l'interprétation des mouvements de la main avec une seule cam... more Nos travaux portent sur le suivi et l'interprétation des mouvements de la main avec une seule caméra fixe. Ils visent à fournir une interface homme-machine de faible-coût permettant de commander des systèmes via une simple WebCam. Bien que l'utilisation d'un tel matériel laisse supposer la limitation à un jeu de commandes minimum, i.e. un nombre limité de configurations de la main, nous montrons ici que ce jeu est suffisant pour réaliser des tâches complexes tel que le pilotage de robots. Dans ce papier, nous proposons un schéma de détection de la main de l'utilisateur et une méthode de recalage de cette dernière sur un modèle 3D articulé et ce en temps réel. Des résultats de tests réels ainsi que des commentaires relatifs à notre approche sont donnés.
Cette thèse porte sur l'utilisation de la vision en robotique mobile. Deux principau... more Cette thèse porte sur l'utilisation de la vision en robotique mobile. Deux principaux thèmes sont abordés. D'une part nous traitons du problème de la reconstruction géométrique d'une scène polyédrique en utilisant l'analyse de séquence d'images(l'extraction des droites 3 D ...
The possibilities of communication by gestures with the machines have been improved with the appe... more The possibilities of communication by gestures with the machines have been improved with the appearance of the instrumented gloves, provided with many sensors measuring the angles of the articulations and the position of the hand in space. Unfortunately, such gloves are still ...
3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society bec... more 3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society because it is useful in a great number of applications such as human machine interface, companion robots animation or human activity analysis. However there is a challenging problem: the complexity of usual tracking algorithms, that exponentially increases with the dimension of the state vector, becomes too difficult to handle. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach that combines several annealing particle filters defined independently for each limb and belief propagation method to add geometrical constraints between individual filters. Experimental results on a real human gestures sequence will show that this combined approach leads to reliable results.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in b... more The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
Intelligent Robotics and Applications, Jan 1, 2009
3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society bec... more 3D upper body tracking and modeling is a topic greatly studied by the computer vision society because it is useful in a great number of applications such as human machine interface, companion robots animation or human activity analysis. However there is a challenging problem: the complexity of usual tracking algorithms, that exponentially increases with the dimension of the state vector, becomes too difficult to handle. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach that combines several annealing particle filters defined independently for each limb and belief propagation method to add geometrical constraints between individual filters. Experimental results on a real human gestures sequence will show that this combined approach leads to reliable results.
When interacting with robots we show a plethora of affective reactions typical of natural communi... more When interacting with robots we show a plethora of affective reactions typical of natural communications. Indeed, emotions are embedded on our communications and represent a predominant communication channel to convey relevant, high impact, information. In recent years more and more researchers have tried to exploit this channel for human robot (HRI) and human computer interactions (HCI). Two key abilities are needed for this purpose: the ability to display emotions and the ability to automatically recognize them. In this work we present our system for the computer based automatic recognition of emotions and the new results we obtained on a small dataset of quasi unconstrained emotional videos extracted from TV series and movies. The results are encouraging showing a recognition rate of about 74%.
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Papers by Chellali Ryad