Description

UPCommons: https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/354403

The Perception and Manipulation Group investigates in service robotics and has two TIAGo mobile manipulation robots and a laboratory simulating an apartment. This project wants to investigate the benefits of adding smart devices to this environment and making them available to the robot.
In recent years, a wide variety of IoT (Internet of Things) domestic devices have appeared that can monitor environmental variables and control active parts, as well as several initiatives that try to standardize protocols and access methods to these devices. On the other hand, service robotics has advanced enormously thanks to the existence of robust solutions for critical parties, such as voice recognition or navigation avoiding obstacles.
Now is the propitious moment to unite these two worlds and interconnect the robot with the environment. The robot would not only multiply its action capabilities but also increase its data acquisition capacity. For example, if you do not have enough information with your own sensors and cameras or it is ambiguous, you could connect to the surrounding network of cameras and obtain images from different points of view and places.

Objectives

This project will investigate the benefits of adding an intelligent agent based on an active vision system for searching, detecting and localizing objects in the environment in an efficient way. The aim is that both humans and robots can make queries to the agent about the presence of certain objects within the scene, and also their specific location. The project will study the current state of the art in computer vision that can solve this type of problem, evaluate the different techniques and implement the best solution.

Learning opportunities

• Learn IoT protocols and already well-established control frameworks
• ROS robotic framework
• Gather experience in robot use and Gazebo simulator

Background

• Interest in robotics
• Some experience in programming languages like C, C++ or Python

The work is under the scope of the following projects:

• BIoTRoS: Beneficios de integrar IoT en Robótica de Servicios (web)