Systems, Robotics & Vision GroupOn the 6th of July, SRV showed a newly developed ASV called Xiroi. The platform was showcased during Felanitx Tech Weekend, where the activity arqROV made a practical introduction at 12-to-16-year-old children to the construction of vehicles, virtual reality, electronic circuits, 3D printing, application development and 360º audio-visual systems. The ultimate goal is to build a vehicle underwater ROV to perform a mission to locate and signalling underwater archaeological remains.
Our SRV Underwater team is aboard Le Roisin (Navy Patrol Vessel) with our robot Turbot AUV during the experiments of the European Project eUReady4OS.
A see you soon better than a goodbye. Best wishes for your new personal voyage.
Yesterday some members of SRV visited IMEDEA quarters to learn how GLIDERS are ballasted for a target seawater.
On the 7th of June, SRV attented to the sea trials on board of R/V Clara Campoamor for the project eUReady4OS in Cartagena. Six AUVs, one ASV and one UAV tracked a Rhodamine spill to test the capabilities of multi-vehicle cooperation.
Paper
Emilio GARCIA-FIDALGO, Alberto ORTIZ
“Hierarchical Place Recognition for Topological Mapping”
has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics journal, handled by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. This paper describes a hierarchical solution for vision-based topological mapping, achieving higher performance than state of the art solutions regarding visual loop closure capabilities, mapping and computational complexity. This work is part of the research performed by Emilio Garcia-Fidalgo as his PhD Thesis.
During the month of March, the group participated in the experiments of the project SUPERION in waters of the coast of Girona.
The experiments consisted in the recovery of archaeological remains by a ROV equipped with an autonomous arm and with a support AUV that provides an additional point of view to the ROV operator.
The SRV group provided software to perform visual servoing, 3D target identification and pose estimation, and collision avoidance between both robots.
Three members of SRV attended from 22nd to 26th of August the ERL/TRADR Summer School at Oulu, Finland. The summer school was designed as a five-day course to provide participants with a full overview and hands-on experience with multi-domain (ground, water, air) real robotic systems for deployment in disaster-response scenarios.
An Optitrack motion capture (mocap) system from NaturalPoint Inc. is now available at the SRV lab. The mocap system comprises 8 cameras —4x PRIME13W (FOV 82º, at the laboratory mid points) and 4x PRIME13 (FOV 56º, at the laboratory corners)— and a 24-port Ethernet switch, together with a desktop computer running the motion capture software. (Funded in the context of the MOCAP project by the Government of the Balearic Islands and by FEDER fundings.)
On June 25, 2016, Joan Morro, from Drones Mallorca (http://www.dronesmallorca.es), visited the SRV facilities. A brief summary of the visit can be found at http://www.dronesmallorca.es/2016/06/25/visita-al-grupo-investigacion-robotica-la-uib/. During the meeting, the respective views about UAV capabilities and state of the art regarding their industrial applications were exchanged.