Object tracking becomes critical especially when similar objects are present in the same area. Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches are proposed based on taking a matching network with a heavy structure to distinguish the target from other objects in the area which indeed drastically downgrades the performance of the tracker in terms of speed. Besides, several candidates are considered and processed to localize the intended object in a region of interest for each frame which is time-consuming. In this article, a special architecture is proposed based on which in contrast to the previous approaches, it is possible to identify the object location in a single shot while taking its template into account to distinguish it from the similar objects in the same area. In brief, first of all, a window containing the object with twice the target size is considered.

Both recognition and 3D tracking of frontal dynamic objects are crucial problems in an autonomous vehicle, while depth estimation as an essential issue becomes a challenging problem using a monocular camera. Since both camera and objects are moving, the issue can be formed as a structure from motion (SFM) problem. In this paper, to elicit features from an image, the YOLOv3 approach is utilized beside an OpenCV tracker. Subsequently, to obtain the lateral and longitudinal distances, a nonlinear SFM model is considered alongside a state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) filter and a newly developed observation model.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a challenging problem that needs advanced solutions than using handcrafted features to achieve a desirable performance. Deep learning has been proposed as a solution to obtain more accurate HAR systems being robust against noise. In this paper, we introduce ARC-Net and propose the utilization of capsules to fuse the information from multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) to predict the activity performed by the subject. We hypothesize that this network will be able to tune out the unnecessary information and will be able to make more accurate decisions through the iterative mechanism embedded in capsule networks. We provide heatmaps of the priors, learned by the network, to visualize the utilization of each of the data sources by the trained network. By using the proposed network, we were able to increase the accuracy of the state-of-the-art approaches by 2%. Furthermore, we investigate the directionality of the confusion matrices of our results and discuss the specificity of the activities based on the provided data.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries need very precise monitor of the state of charge (SOC) to ensure a long cycle life.
Hence, a knowledge of the SOC is important for Li-ion batteries. Although SOC cannot be measured directly, it can be estimated from direct measurement variables based on a model of the battery. Single-Particle-Model (SPM), a reduced-order nonlinear electrochemical model, is commonly used for this purpose. State-dependent-
Riccati-equation (SDRE) filter is chosen as the estimator due to its high-flexibility in handling the model’s nonlinearity. However, performance of this filter is limited in presence of uncertainties. To tackle this problem,
in this paper, a switching concept is induced into SDRE filter, in the form of switched estimation error covariance
matrix with a certain frequency. Thus, by changing the Riccati equation dynamic in SDRE filter and proper
adjustment of estimation error covariance matrix eigenvalues, performance and robustness of the common SDRE
filter is significantly improved for Li-ion SOC estimation. To analyze the fidelity of such a filter in further
applications, stability analysis is carried out on a class of nonlinear systems, and ultimate bound of estimation error is analytically obtained, and the influence of switching is investigated. Simulation results reveal effec-
tiveness of the proposed filter compared to common SDRE filter, extended Kalman filter and variable structure approaches. Furthermore, experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in practice.

Real-time instrument tracking is an essential element of minimally invasive surgery and has several applications in computer-assisted analysis and interventions

The attitude control of a quadrotor is a fundamental problem, which has a pivotal role in a
quadrotor stabilization and control. What makes this problem more challenging is the
presence of uncertainty such as unmodelled dynamics and unknown parameters. In this
paper, to cope with uncertainty, an H1 control approach is adopted for a real quadrotor.
To achieve H1 controller, first a continuous-time system identification is performed on the experimental data to encapsulate a nominal model of the system as well as a multiplicative uncertainty. By this means, H1 controllers for both roll and pitch angle are synthesized. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers, some real experiments
and simulations are carried out. Results verify that the designed controller does retain robust stability, and provide a better tracking performance in comparison with a well-tuned PID and a l synthesis controller.

The primary purpose of path planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is a necessary prerequisite toward an autonomous UAV, is to guide the robot to
the predefined target while the chosen path is optimized. This
paper addresses the problem of path planning for an unmanned
aerial vehicle in a 2D indoor environment, considering motion uncertainty. To cope with this challenge, the problem of
motion planning is formulated in three parts. A vision-based
extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to localize the UAV in
the unstructured environment. To overcome motion uncertainty,
the problem is modeled as a Markov decision problem (MDP).
Finally, a novel dynamic feedback linearization based switching
controller is proposed for point-to-point motion. Simulation and
experimental results are given to show the effectiveness of the
proposed path planning method in practice

In this paper, the multi-goal motion planning problem of an environment with some background information about its map is addressed in detail. The motion planning goal is to find a policy in belief space for the robot to traverse through a number of goal points. This problem is modeled as an asymmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP) in the belief space using Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework. Then, feedback-based information roadmap (FIRM) algorithm is utilized to reduce the computational burden and complexity. By generating a TSP-FIRM graph, the search policy is obtained and an algorithm is proposed for online execution of the policy. Moreover, approaches to cope with challenges such as map updating, large deviations and high uncertainty in localization, which are more troublesome in a real implementation, are carefully addressed. Finally, in order to evaluate applicability and performance of the proposed algorithms, it is implemented in a simulation environment as well as on a physical robot in which some challenges such as kidnapping and discrepancies between real and computational models and map are examined.

Point clouds as measurements of 3D sensors have many applications in various fields such as object modeling, environment mapping and surface representation. Storage and processing of raw point clouds is time consuming and computationally expensive. In addition, their high dimensionality shall be considered, which results in the well known curse of dimensionality. Conventional methods either apply reduction or approximation to the captured point clouds in order to make the data processing tractable. B-spline curves and surfaces can effectively represent 2D data points and 3D point clouds for most applications. Since processing all available data for B-spline curve or surface fitting is not efficient, based on the Group Testing theory an algorithm is developed that finds salient points sequentially. The B-spline curve or surface models are updated by adding a new salient point to the fitting process iteratively until the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) is met. Also, it has been proved that the proposed method finds a unique solution so as what is defined in the group testing theory. From the experimental results the applicability and performance improvement of the proposed method in relation to some state-of-the-art B-spline curve and surface fitting methods, may be concluded.

In this paper, a monocular vision based autonomous flight and obstacle avoidance system for a commercial quadrotor is presented. The video stream of the front camera and the navigation data measured by the drone is sent to the ground station laptop via wireless connection. Received data processed by the vision based ORB-SLAM to compute the 3D position of the robot and the environment 3D sparse map in the form of point cloud. An algorithm is proposed for enrichment of the reconstructed map, and furthermore, a Kalman Filter is used for sensor fusion. The scaling factor of the monocular slam is calculated by the linear fitting. Moreover, a PID controller is designed for 3D position control. Finally, by means of the potential field method and Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT) path planning algorithm, a collision-free road map is generated. Moreover, experimental verifications of the proposed algorithms are reported.

Point clouds as measurements of 3D sensors have many applications in various fields such as object modeling, environment mapping and surface representation. Storage and processing of raw point clouds is time consuming and computationally expensive. In addition, their high dimensionality shall be considered, which results in the well known curse of dimensionality. Conventional methods either apply reduction or approximation to the captured point clouds in order to make the data processing tractable. B-spline curves and surfaces can effectively represent 2D data points and 3D point clouds for most applications. Since processing all available data for B-spline curve or surface fitting is not efficient, based on the Group Testing theory an algorithm is developed that finds salient points sequentially. The B-spline curve or surface models are updated by adding a new salient point to the fitting process iteratively until the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) is met. Also, it has been proved that the proposed method finds a unique solution so as what is defined in the group testing theory. From the experimental results the applicability and performance improvement of the proposed method in relation to some state-of-the-art B-spline curve and surface fitting methods, may be concluded.

Fast Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is capable of real-time implementation due to logarithmic time complexity which results in decrease of computational cost. In this algorithm state vector of a robot merely includes planar location of the robot and its angle to the horizontal plane. It has fewer components comparing to state vector in extended Kalman filter method which consists of location of all environmental features. In existing methods for implementing this algorithm, robot movement is considered to be totally in planar movement; while if moving on a slope changes the pitch angle of the robot, it causes errors in the algorithm. Correcting these errors will lead to a precise 2D mapping and 3D localization. This paper details the modification added to conventional Fast-Slam algorithm to accommodate this requirement by using an IMU. Simulation and experimental results shows the effectiveness of such modification.

The 3D representation of objects and scenes as a point cloud or range image has been made simple by means of sensors such as Microsoft Kinect, stereo camera or laser scanner. Various tasks, such as recognition, modeling and classification can not be performed on raw measurements because of the curse of high dimensionality, computational and algorithm complexity. Non Uniform Rational Basis Splines (NURBS) are a widely used representation technique for 3D objects in various robotics and Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications. In this paper, a similarity measurement from information theory is employed in order to recognize an object sample from a set of objects. From a NURBS model fitted to the observed point cloud, a complexity based representation is derived which is transformation invariant in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity. Experimental results on a set of 3D objects grabbed by a Kinect sensor indicates the applicability of the proposed method for object recognition tasks. Furthermore, the results of the proposed method is compared to that of some state of the art algorithms.

There is an issue called maximum likelihood estimation in SLAM that corresponds to a nonlinear least-square problem. It is expected to earn an accurate solution for large-scale environments with high speed of convergence. Although all the applied optimization methods might be accepted in terms of accuracy and speed of convergence for small datasets, their solutions for large-scale datasets are often far from the ground truth. In this paper, a double Dogleg trust region method is proposed and adjusted with iSAM2 to level up performance and accuracy of the algorithm especially in large-scale datasets. Since the trust region methods are sensitive to their own parameters, Gould parameters are chosen to obtain better performance. Simulations are done on some large-scale datasets and the results indicate that the proposed method is more efficient compared to the conventional iSAM2 algorithm.

FastSLAM is a framework for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, FastSLAM algorithm has two serious drawbacks, namely the linear approximation of nonlinear functions and the derivation of the Jacobian matrices. For solving these problems, UFastSLAM has been recently proposed. However, UFastSLAM is inconsistent over time due to the loss of particle diversity that is caused mainly by the particle depletion in the resampling step and incorrect a priori knowledge of process and measurement noises. To improve consistency, intelligent UFastSLAM with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) move step is proposed. In the proposed method, the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system supervises the performance of UFastSLAM. Furthermore, the particle impoverishment caused by resampling is restrained after the resample step with MCMC move step. Simulations and experiments are presented to evaluate the performance of algorithm in comparison with UFastSLAM. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper addresses a new method for navigation in dynamic environment. The proposed method is based on force field method and it is supposed that the robot performs SLAM and autonomous navigation in dynamic environment without any predefined information about dynamic obstacles. The movement of dynamic obstacles is predicted by Kalman filter and is used for collision detection purpose. In the time of collision detection, a modifying force is added to repulsive and attractive forces corresponding to the static environment and leads robot to avoid collision. Moreover, a safe turning angle is defined to assure safe navigation of the robot. The performance of proposed method, named Escaping Algorithm, is verified through different simulation and experimental tests. The results show the proper performance of Escaping Algorithm in term of dynamic obstacle avoidance as a practical method for autonomous navigation.

In this paper a new controller for nonholonomic system is introduced. This feedback error learning controller benefits from both nonlinear and adaptive controller properties. The nonlinear controller is used to stabilize the nonholonomic behavior of the systems. This controller is a sliding mode controller which is designed based on backstepping method. The adaptive controller tries to face with uncertainty and unknown dynamic of the mobile robot. This part uses neural network controller for adaptation. The experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed controller and suitable and robust tracking performance of a mobile robot, which is significantly better than traditional controllers.

This paper proposes a method for mobile robot exploration based on the idea of frontier exploration which suggests navigating the robot toward the boundaries between free and unknown areas in the map. A global occupancy grid map of the environment is constantly updated, based on which a global frontier map is calculated. Then, a histogram based approach is adopted to cluster frontier cells and score these clusters based on their distance from the robot as well as the number of frontier cells they contain. In each stage of the algorithm, a sub-goal is set for the robot to navigate. A combination of distance transform and A* search algorithms is utilized to generate a plausible path toward the sub-goal through the free space. This way keeping a reliable distance from obstacles is guaranteed while searching for the shortest path toward the sub-goal. When such a path is generated, a B-spline interpolated and smoothed trajectory is produced as the control reference for the mobile robot to follow. The whole process is iterated until no unexplored area remains in the map. The efficiency of the method is shown through simulated and real experiments.

We introduce a very fast and robust localization and 2D environment representation algorithm in this paper. This innovative method matches lines extracted from the LASER range finder distance data with the lines that construct the map, in order to calculate the local translation and rotation. This matching is done with a simple least square with no iterations. The algorithm is suitable for any indoor environment with mostly polygonal structure and has proven high speed and robustness in the experimental tests on our innovatively designed tracked mobile rescue robot ldquoSilverrdquo. One experimental test is presented in the last section of this paper where the outputs are presented. These outputs are: 1-drift free raster map made of points and 2- A gallery of lines providing a linear ground truth.

Theoretical analysis and implementation of autonomous staircase detection and stair climbing algorithms on a novel rescue mobile robot are presented in this paper. The main goals are to find the staircase during navigation and to implement a fast, safe and smooth autonomous stair climbing algorithm. Silver is used here as the experimental platform. This tracked mobile robot is a tele-operative rescue mobile robot with great capabilities in climbing obstacles in destructed areas. Its performance has been demonstrated in rescue robot league of international RoboCup competitions. A fuzzy controller is applied to direct the robot during stair climbing. Controller inputs are generated by processing the range data from two laser range finders which scan the environment one horizontally and the other vertically. The experimental results of stair detection algorithm and stair climbing controller are demonstrated at the end.

This paper proposes a method for augmenting the information of a monocular camera and a range finder. This method is a valuable step towards solving the SLAM problem in unstructured environments free from problems of using encoderspsila data. Proposed algorithm causes the robot to benefit from a feature-based map for filtering purposes, while it exploits an accurate motion model, based on point-wise raw range scan matching rather than unreliable feature-based range scan matching, in unstructured environments. Moreover, robust loop closure detection procedure is the other consequence of this method. Experiments with a low-cost IEEE 1394 webcam and a range finder illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in drift-free SLAM at loop closing motions in unstructured environments.

in this paper, we propose a new technique in wavelet domain for real time object detection and tracking in a sequence of images. The object to be tracked is identified in the first frame. Our proposed algorithm consists of two phases: the first, wavelet based edge detection is used to form ground boundary map. Then, Object dimensions estimation is implemented to determine probabilistic object areas. finally, target detection based on finding best match using feature vectors is applied. We defined dispersion of wavelet detail coefficient in object area as feature to be matched. Also we proposed a new color model for images to be used in processing algorithm. Our experimental results show that the algorithm is robust and fast. It is also insensitive to changing illumination condition and size of target