Staircase Detection, Characterization and Approach Pipeline for Search and Rescue Robots

Currently, most rescue robots are mainly teleoperated and integrate some level of autonomy to reduce the operator’s workload, allowing them to focus on the primary mission tasks. One of the main causes of mission failure are human errors and increasing the robot’s autonomy can increase the probabili...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: José Armando Sánchez-Rojas, José Aníbal Arias-Aguilar, Hiroshi Takemura, Alberto Elías Petrilli-Barceló
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: MDPI AG 2021
Materias:
ROS
T
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/a50392ef13b448a4818881d766b3ec9e
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Currently, most rescue robots are mainly teleoperated and integrate some level of autonomy to reduce the operator’s workload, allowing them to focus on the primary mission tasks. One of the main causes of mission failure are human errors and increasing the robot’s autonomy can increase the probability of success. For this reason, in this work, a stair detection and characterization pipeline is presented. The pipeline is tested on a differential drive robot using the ROS middleware, YOLOv4-tiny and a region growing based clustering algorithm. The pipeline’s staircase detector was implemented using the Neural Compute Engines (NCEs) of the OpenCV AI Kit with Depth (OAK-D) RGB-D camera, which allowed the implementation using the robot’s computer without a GPU and, thus, could be implemented in similar robots to increase autonomy. Furthermore, by using this pipeline we were able to implement a Fuzzy controller that allows the robot to align itself, autonomously, with the staircase. Our work can be used in different robots running the ROS middleware and can increase autonomy, allowing the operator to focus on the primary mission tasks. Furthermore, due to the design of the pipeline, it can be used with different types of RGB-D cameras, including those that generate noisy point clouds from low disparity depth images.