Table Of ContentRobotics
Robotics
Science and Systems IV
edited by Oliver Brock, Jeff Trinkle, and Fabio Ramos
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
(cid:2)c 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (4th : 2008 : Swiss Federal Institute of Tech-
nology)
Robotics: scienceandsystemsIV/editedbyOliverBrock, JeffTrinkle, andFabioRamos.
p. cm.
“Papers presented at Robotics: Science and Systems 2008, held at the Swiss Federal In-
stituteofTechnology(ETH)inZurich, Switzerland, fromJune25toJune28, 2008”—Pref.
ISBN 978-0-262-51309-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Robotics—Congresses. I. Brock, Oliver. II. Trinkle, Jeffrey C. III. Ramos, Fabio. IV.
Title.
TJ210.3.R6435 2009
629.8’92—dc22 2008054715
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Organizing Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
Program Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Multi-Sensor Lane Finding in Urban Road Networks
Albert S. Huang, David Moore, Matthew Antone, Edwin Olson, and Seth Teller . . 1
Laser and Vision Based Outdoor Object Mapping
Bertrand Douillard, Dieter Fox, and Fabio Ramos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Fast Probabilistic Labeling of City Maps
Ingmar Posner, Mark Cummins, and Paul Newman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Clustering Sensor Data for Terrain Identification using a Windowless Algorithm
Philippe Giguere and Gregory Dudek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Distributed Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles
Stanislav Funiak, Michael P. Ashley-Rollman, Padmanabhan Pillai, Seth Copen Gold-
stein, and Jason D. Campbell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Controlling Shapes of Ensembles of Robots of Finite Size with Nonholonomic Con-
straints
Nathan Michael and Vijay Kumar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Stochastic Recruitment: A Limited-Feedback Control Policy for Large Ensemble Sys-
tems
Lael Odhner and Harry Asada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Prior Data and Kernel Conditional Random Fields for Obstacle Detection
Carlos Vallespi and Anthony Stentz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
SARSOP:EfficientPoint-BasedPOMDPPlanningbyApproximatingOptimallyReach-
able Belief Spaces
Hanna Kurniawati, David Hsu, and Wee Sun Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Detection of Principal Directions in Unknown Environments for Autonomous Naviga-
tion
Dmitri Dolgov and Sebastian Thrun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Approximation Schemes for Two-Player Pursuit Evasion Games with Visibility Con-
straints
Sourabh Bhattacharya and Seth Hutchinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
v
A Numerically Robust LCP Solver for Simulating Articulated Rigid Bodies in Contact
Katsu Yamane and Yoshihiko Nakamura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Hybrid Motion Planning Using Minkowski Sums
Jyh-Ming Lien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Bridging the Gap of Abstraction for Probabilistic Decision Making on a Multi-Modal
Service Robot
Sven R. Schmidt-Rohr, Steffen Knoop, Martin L¨osch, Ru¨diger Dillmann . . . . . . 105
Adaptive Body Scheme Models for Robust Robotic Manipulation
Ju¨rgen Sturm, Christian Plagemann, and Wolfram Burgard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Bearing-Only Control Laws For Balanced Circular Formations of Ground Robots
Nima Moshtagh, Nathan Michael, Ali Jadbabaie, and Kostas Daniilidis . . . . . . . 119
CPG-based Control of a Turtle-like Underwater Vehicle
Keehong Seo, Soon-Jo Chung, and Jean-Jacques E. Slotine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
HyPE:HybridParticle-ElementApproachforRecursiveBayesianSearching-and-Tracking
Benjamin Lavis and Tomonari Furukawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Abstractions and Algorithms for Cooperative Multiple Robot Planar Manipulation
Peng Cheng, Jonathan Fink, and Vijay Kumar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
A Local Collision Avoidance Method for Non-strictly Convex Polyhedra
Fumio Kanehiro, Florent Lamiraux, Oussama Kanoun, Eiichi Yoshida, and Jean-Paul
Laumond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
BiSpace Planning: Concurrent Multi-Space Exploration
Rosen Diankov, Nathan Ratliff, Dave Ferguson, Siddhartha Srinivasa,
and James Kuffner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Structural Improvement Filtering Strategy for PRM
Roger Pearce, Marco Morales, and Nancy M. Amato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Model Based Vehicle Tracking for Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments
Anna Petrovskaya and Sebastian Thrun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Improving Localization Robustness in Monocular SLAM Using a High-Speed Camera
Peter Gemeiner, Andrew J. Davison, and Markus Vincze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Simplex-Tree Based Kinematics of Foldable Objects as Multi-body Systems Involving
Loops
Li Han and Lee Rudolph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
fMRI-Compatible Robotic Interfaces with Fluidic Actuation
Ningbo Yu, Christoph Hollnagel, Armin Blickenstorfer, Spyros Kollias,
and Robert Riener . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Proofs and Experiments in Scalable, Near-Optimal Search by Multiple Robots
Geoffrey Hollinger and Sanjiv Singh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Planning Long Dynamically-Feasible Maneuvers for Autonomous Vehicles
Maxim Likhachev and Dave Ferguson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Friction-Induced Velocity Fields for Point Parts Sliding on a Rigid Oscillated Plate
Thomas H. Vose, Paul Umbanhowar, and Kevin M. Lynch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
vi
Metastable Walking on Stochastically Rough Terrain
Katie Byl and Russ Tedrake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Target Enumeration via Integration Over Planar Sensor Networks
Yuliy Baryshnikov and Robert Ghrist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Using Recognition to Guide a Robot’s Attention
Alexander Thomas, Vittorio Ferrari, Bastian Leibe, Tinne Tuytelaars, and Luc Van
Gool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Learning to Manipulate Articulated Objects in Unstructured Environments Using a
Grounded Relational Representation
Dov Katz, Yuri Pyuro, and Oliver Brock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
High Performance Outdoor Navigation from Overhead Data using Imitation Learning
David Silver, J. Andrew Bagnell, and Anthony Stentz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Classifying Dynamic Objects: An Unsupervised Learning Approach
Matthias Luber, Kai O. Arras, Christian Plagemann, and Wolfram Burgard . . . . 270
Probabilistic Models of Object Geometry for Grasp Planning
Jared Glover, Daniela Rus, and Nicholas Roy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Dynamic Modeling of Stick Slip Motion in an Untethered Magnetic Micro-Robot
Chytra Pawashe, Steven Floyd, and Metin Sitti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Super-Flexible Skin Sensors Embedded on the Whole Body, Self-Organizing Based on
Haptic Interactions
Tomoyuki Noda, Takahiro Miyashita, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita . . . . 294
NanoNewton Force Sensing and Control in Microrobotic Cell Manipulation
Xinyu Liu, Keekyoung Kim, Yong Zhang, and Yu Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
Gas Distribution Modeling using Sparse Gaussian Process Mixture Models
Cyrill Stachniss, Christian Plagemann, Achim Lilienthal, and Wolfram Burgard . . 310
vii
Preface
This volume contains the papers presented at Robotics: Science
and Systems 2008, held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technol-
ogy (ETH) in Zurich Switzerland, from June 25 to June 28, 2008.
This year’s meeting brought together more than 280 researchers
from Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. The papers
presented at the meeting and compiled here cover a wide range
of topics in robotics spanning computer vision, mapping, terrain
identification, distributed systems, localization, manipulation, collision avoidance,
multibody dynamics, obstacle detection, micro-robotic systems, pursuit-evasion,
grasping and manipulation, tracking, spatial kinematics, machine learning, sensor
networks, and applications such as autonomous driving and design of manipulators
for use in functional-MRI.
Following the RSS tradition, there were a number of invited talks: two Early
CareerSpotlighttalksbyrisingstarsintheroboticscommunity,onebanquetspeaker,
and six invited talks on topics on the fringes of robotics. The latter talks were chosen
to give the audience new motivating perspectives on what is possible and on new
ways to approach robotics problems.
• Prof. Armin Gruen of ETH delivered “Positioning Modeling and Navigation
with Photogrammetric Techniques,” in which he argued convincingly for the
use of photogrammetric techniques in robotics and showed impressive results
in which accuracy on the order of one part per million was obtained.
• Prof. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University spoke about “Computing with Neu-
ral Ensembles.” In this excellent talk, he discussed the functioning of neural
ensembles in animals providing evidence that the ensemble of neurons that
controls a given task is not fixed, thus raising questions about the design of
bio-inspired robot controllers.
• Prof. Jean-Louis Deneubourg of the Universit Libre de Bruxelles shared his
thoughtson“SharedDecision-MakinginMixedSocietiesofAnimalsandRobots.”
He provided deep insights into the “emergent” global behavior of large colonies
of small animals capable of only simple local communication.
• Dr. Kevin O’Regan, Director of Research of the Laboratory of the Psychology
of Perception at CNRS Paris discussed robot consciousness in his talk “How to
Build Consciousness into a Robot: the Sensori-motor Approach.” This was a
highly engaging talk, in which it was conjectured that given today’s computing
power, it is only a matter of time before robots become self-aware, which gives
rise to many complex questions of ethics.
• Prof. Howard Berg of Harvard University presented “Motile Behavior of E-
coli: a Remarkable Robot.” He showed detailed pictures of the inner workings
of the remarkable nano-machines called “flagella,” how they are constructed
by bacteria, and how they provide propulsion and directional control.
viii
• Prof. Toshio Yanagida of Osaka University described the engineering principles
behindbiologicalmolecularmotorsinhistalk“MechanismInvolvedinUtilizing
Thermal Fluctuations by Muscle Molecular Motor.” He showed how molecular
motors exploit thermal noise to achieve energy efficiency and talked about the
implications for building artificial muscles.
• Prof. RobWoodofHarvardUniversitygaveanengagingEarlyCareerSpotlight
presentation on his progress on meso-scale bio-inspired vehicles, that fly, walk,
and swim. These would be useful in many many applications ranging from
environmental monitoring to border surveillance. He covered aspects of design,
fabrication, analysis, and control.
• Prof. EricKlavinsoftheUniversityofWashingtonwasthesecondEarlyCareer
Spotlight speaker. He spoke about the motivations behind his Self-Organizing
Systems Lab and a string of results. Along the way, he provided insights into
the aspects of systems that lead to self-organization and robustness of global
behaviors He showed the application of these ideas to a macro-scale testbed
and discussed DNA applications.
• In an extremely engaging banquet talk, Prof. Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon
Institute focused on the unwitting use of humans to solve difficult problems
while playing games on the Web. Among many other intriguing ideas, his talk,
“Human Computation,” described how the use of capchas to verify that a real
human is interacting with a web application, is also providing free labor to
translate old texts, not amenable to optical character recognition.
Thanks to the efforts of Workshop Chair Charlie Kemp of Georgia Tech., the
fourth day of RSS 2008 was devoted to the following well-attended workshops:
• Control of Locomotion: From Animals to Robots organized by Auke Ijspeert,
Paolo Dario, Sten Grillner;
• Underwater Robotics ... at the Microscale organized by Brad Nelson, Vijay
Kumar, Sylvain Martel, Metin Sitti, Lixin Dong;
• TopologyandMinimalisminRoboticsandSensorNetworksorganizedbyRobert
Ghrist, Steve LaValle, George J. Pappas;
• Teaching with RobotsorganizedbyChrisRogers, PedroLima, RolandSiegwart,
Illah Nourbakhsh, Aaron Dollar;
• Design and Control of Variable Impedance Actuators for Physical Interaction
of Robots with Humans and their Environment organized by Antonio Bicchi,
Alin Albu Schaeffer, Bram Vanderborght;
• Robot Manipulation: Intelligence in Human EnvironmentsorganizedbyRobert
Platt, Sami Haddadin, Charlie Kemp, Lorenzo Natale, Neo Ee Sian;
ix
• Interactive Robot LearningorganizedbyAndreaThomaz, Geert-JanM.Kruijff,
Henrik Jacobsson, Danijel Skocaj;
• Inside Data Association organized by Udo Frese, Jose Neira, Diedrich Wolter,
Jorg Kurlbaum;
• QuantitativePerformanceEvaluationofNavigationSolutionsforMobileRobots
organized by Raj Madhavan, Chris Scrapper, Alex Kleiner;
• Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics Research organized
by Fabio Bonsignorio, John Hallam, Angel P. del Pobil;
• Advances in Simulation of Robot and Task Dynamics organized by Evan Drum-
wright, Kurt Anderson, Roy Featherstone; and
• Grand Challenges in Microrobotics and Microassembly organized by Pierre
Lambert, Stephane Regnier, Metin Sitti.
RSS 2008 was a success thanks to the efforts of many people. We gratefully
acknowledge the enormous time spent by the area chairs, who each handled about
20 papers and flew to Zurich for the in-person area chair meeting. The area chairs
were: Antonio Bicchi (University of Pisa), Karl Bohringer (University of Washing-
ton), Jaydev P. Desai (University of Maryland, College Park), Hugh Durrant-Whyte
(University of Sydney), Shin-ichi Hirai (Ritsumeikan University), Atsushi Konno
(Tohoku University), Kevin Lynch (Northwestern University), Yoky Matsuoka (Uni-
versity of Washington), Michael McCarthy (UC Irvine), Jose Neira (University of
Zaragoza), Giuseppe Oriolo (University of Rome), Nick Roy (Massachusetts Insti-
tuteofTechnology), ThierrySimeon(LAAS-CNRS,Toulouse), MetinSitti(Carnegie
MellonUniversity), FrankvanderStappen(UtrechtUniversity), andKazuhitoYokoi
(AIST). Together, their expertise covered an extraordinarily broad swath of the
robotics landscape.
Paper reviewing was rigorous. All but two papers received four or more double-
blind reviews (neither the authors nor the reviewers knew each others’ identities) -
that’s over 650 reviews from 196 program committee members. After the reviews
were completed, the program committee members and area chairs discussed reviews
for each paper in an on-line forum within the conference management system. Then
the authors were invited to rebut the reviews. Following the rebuttals, the program
committee members reconsidered and finalized their reviews. Final acceptance de-
cisions and presentation categories were made at the area chair meeting in Zurich,
also attended by the program chair and general chair. Of the 163 submissions, 20
were selected for poster presentation and 20 were selected for oral presentation.
The local arrangement chairs were Roland Siegwart and Brad Nelson of ETH.
They and their support staff did a fantastic job in organizing everything from the
Travel Kit to the poster session at the faculty club to the alphorn player in the
opening ceremony to the banquet in the restaurant overlooking the lake and the
city. We particularly want to thank Cornelia Della Casa and Luciana Borsatti for
sweatingallthedetailswithsuchgraceandefficiency. Wecannotthankthemenough.
x
We sincerely thank Rudi Triebel and Ralf Ka¨stner for taking the roles of general
Webmaster for the Conference. Finally our thanks go out to Janosch Nikolic and
StefanBertschifordealingwithallcomputerandwirelessissuesandtoMarkusBhler
and Dario Fenner for setting up the welcoming reception.
RSS 2008 had many sponsors; thanks to ABB, Evolution Robotics, Intel, Mi-
crosoft Research, and Willow Garage, for providing funds for general conference use
and to the National Science Foundation and the Naval Research Lab for providing
funds to support student travel. Last, but not least, we thank Springer for providing
a $2500 prize for the best student paper award. The competition was fierce.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the members of the robotics
community who have adopted RSS and its philosophy, and who have made RSS
2008 an outstanding meeting by submitting manuscripts, participating in the review
process, and by attending the Conference. We look forward to many more exciting
meetings of RSS in the years to come.
OliverBrock,UniversityofMassachusettsAmherst
Jeff Trinkle, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Fabio Ramos, University of Sydney
July 2008
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