A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

This document reports the progress of the RIVERWATCH experiment from week 8 to week 16. All tasks progressed considerably in this reporting period. During the reporting period all the equipment has been selected and quotation requests issued. The development of the simulation environment was carried out. It is composed of two...

The project aims at enabling environmental monitoring of rivers with a robotic team composed of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and a quad-copter. The major challenges to be faced in the project are related to autonomous navigation in riverine environments and complex interactions between the two robotic platforms....

At the current stage of the project several incremental milestones have been achieved. First of all, robust person detection, combining several computer vision techniques. Secondly, face, facial feature and facial expression detection and tracking. Then, body part detection, tracking and body expression coding. And finally...

The effort in the past two months was focused on collecting and analyzing user feedback on the usability of the EduFill software toolbox. The users are the students who were involved in the EPRo course where the toolbox has been used for developing robotic applications. This includes two activities which are: 1. Analyzing the...

In March and April, the work focused on the important task of human pose recognition based on an ICP[1] approach, and the environment modeling, done with the OpenGL framework. To improve the results of the ICP approach, a second method[2] will be incorporated in the estimation process. Therefore, a rendering pipeline has been...

In January and February most of the work was put into the implementation of essential elements from the cognitive system, like the core software framework and the optical flow estimation module. The structure of the core framework strictly implements the idea of modular system design. Essential modules were programmed,...

The work in 2011 was focused on defining requirements and characterizing components of the system,which will be used to carry out the experiments. In cooperation with our partners, Reis Robotics and KUKA, the experiments were discussed. As our partners are developers and manufacturers in the field of industrial robotics,...

In this step of the experiment conception, the robot control design took place. There is now a robot control architecture with an extended impedance controller and an open communication interface to the industrial robot control box. Further the safety system has beeing integrated into the robot control and the experiment...

In July and August the work was focused on the completion of task 2 and task 3. At the end of August a meeting with our partners KUKA and Reis was held at the IPR[1], where the results of task 2 and 3 were presented. Also their role in the upcoming tasks 4 and 5 were discussed and defined. For the completion of the tasks 2...

In November and December the focus lay on tasks 4 and 5 for the IPR, in which gesture and action recognition and path planning was to be incorporated into the framework. For task 4, the conceptual design of the gesture based interaction was determined and two gesture classes were identified. In task 5 especially the path...