Center successful in securing new funding

CRAS members were very successful in securing new funding from the Czech Science Foundation. The following three-years projects start 01/2017:

  • K. Zimmermann. Robust motion planning and control on rough unstructured terrain.
  • M. Hoffmann. Robot self-calibration and safe physical human-robot interaction inspired by body representations in primate brains
  • M. Saska. Stabilization and control of teams of relatively-localized micro aerial vehicles in high obstacle density areas
  • M. Saska. Methods of Identification and Visualization of Tunnels for Flexible Ligands in Dynamic Proteins
  • T. Krajník: Spatio-temporal representations for lifelong mobile robot navigation

Our robots helps with mapping of historical monuments

CTU

Scanning of historical buildings with inaccessible areas is difficult task for archaeologists and restorers. Members of CRAS from Multi-robot Systems group (MRS) help with scanning of such inaccessible areas using their own drones.
At February 26, MRS together with National Heritage Institute in Olomouc scanned the church in Sternberg. During the scanning of high placed areas such as copula and wall paintings, we used our methods for stabilization of autonomous helicopter formation.

Nowadays we negotiate with other heritage institutions to scan other historical buildings.

Report about scanning taken by Czech Television (only in czech language).

Participation in Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge

Team of Czech Technical University in Prague, University of Pennsylvania and University of Lincoln, where members of CRAS play key roles, has been selected for gaining sponsorship for participating in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) out of 143 applicants from the most prestigious universities in the world. The international team, which is led by Martin Saska,  will compete with the worldwide best universities in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) in two Challenges. The first is to autonomously localize a moving vehicle in the arena by a single MAV and then land on a landing platform carried by the vehicle. The second Challenge is to search the arena for various static and moving color objects, then pick them and move them to dedicated area. For more information about our participation in MBZIRC see sites of Multi-Robot Systems group.

Seminar by Tom Krajnik : FreMEn: Frequency Map Enhancement for Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots

CS Seminar series14:00, Friday, 12.02.2015, Room KN:E-2015

Tom Krajnik, University of Lincoln, UK

Abstract:

While robotic mapping of static environments has been widely studied, long-term mapping in non-stationary environments is still an open problem. In this talk, we present an approach for long-term representation of populated environments, where many of the observed changes are caused by humans performing their daily activities. We propose to model the environment’s dynamics by its frequency spectrum, as a combination of harmonic functions that correspond to periodic processes influencing the environment.

Such a representation not only allows representation of environment dynamics over arbitrary time-scales with constant memory requirements, but also prediction of future environment states and anomaly detection. The main advantage of the proposed approach is its universality – it can extend most of the environment models used in mobile robotics.

The proposed approach is applied to several environment representations created by a mobile robot autonomously patrolling indoor environments for several months. In particular, we apply the approach to occupancy grids, feature-based representations and topological maps and show that the approach can represent billions of observations with a few spectral components achieving compression rates up to 1:100000, significantly improves localization robustness in dynamic environments, allows for more efficient path planning, speeds-up tasks like object search or activity classification, and allows to perform 4D spatio-temporal exploration.

More details about FreMEn

GA ČR Project – Efficient Information Gathering with Dubins Vehicles in Persitent Monitoring and Surveillance Missions

A new project funded by Czech Science Foundations has been awarded to Jan Faigl a member of CRAS. This basic research project for 2016-2018 aims to investigate properties of efficient solutions for information gathering with non-holonomic vehicles in problems motivated by persitent monitoring and surveillance missions.