Beatriz Asfora

Vikram Shree, Sarah Allen, Beatriz Asfora et al.

There has been a plethora of work towards improving robot perception and navigation, yet their application in hazardous environments, like during a fire or an earthquake, is still at a nascent stage. We hypothesize two key challenges here: first, it is difficult to replicate such scenarios in the real world, which is necessary for training and testing purposes. Second, current systems are not fully able to take advantage of the rich multi-modal data available in such hazardous environments. To address the first challenge, we propose to harness the enormous amount of visual content available in the form of movies and TV shows, and develop a dataset that can represent hazardous environments encountered in the real world. The data is annotated with high-level danger ratings for realistic disaster images, and corresponding keywords are provided that summarize the content of the scene. In response to the second challenge, we propose a multi-modal danger estimation pipeline for collaborative human-robot escape scenarios. Our Bayesian framework improves danger estimation by fusing information from robot's camera sensor and language inputs from the human. Furthermore, we augment the estimation module with a risk-aware planner that helps in identifying safer paths out of the dangerous environment. Through extensive simulations, we exhibit the advantages of our multi-modal perception framework that gets translated into tangible benefits such as higher success rate in a collaborative human-robot mission.

Beatriz Arruda Asfora

Robotics can be defined as the connection of perception to action. Taking this further, this project aims to drive a robot using an automated computer vision embedded system, connecting the robot's vision to its behavior. In order to implement a color recognition system on the robot, open source tools are chosen, such as Processing language, Android system, Arduino platform and Pixy camera. The constraints are clear: simplicity, replicability and financial viability. In order to integrate Robotics, Computer Vision and Image Processing, the robot is applied on a typical mobile robot's issue: line following. The problem of distinguishing the path from the background is analyzed through different approaches: the popular Otsu's Method, thresholding based on color combinations through experimentation and color tracking via hue and saturation. Decision making of where to move next is based on the line center of the path and is fully automated. Using a four-legged robot as platform and a camera as its only sensor, the robot is capable of successfully follow a line. From capturing the image to moving the robot, it's evident how integrative Robotics can be. The issue of this paper alone involves knowledge of Mechanical Engineering, Electronics, Control Systems and Programming. Everything related to this work was documented and made available on an open source online page, so it can be useful in learning and experimenting with robotics.

Vikram Shree, Beatriz Asfora, Rachel Zheng et al.

The ability to develop a high-level understanding of a scene, such as perceiving danger levels, can prove valuable in planning multi-robot search and rescue (SaR) missions. In this work, we propose to uniquely leverage natural language descriptions from the mission commander in chief and image data captured by robots to estimate scene danger. Given a description and an image, a state-of-the-art deep neural network is used to assess a corresponding similarity score, which is then converted into a probabilistic distribution of danger levels. Because commonly used visio-linguistic datasets do not represent SaR missions well, we collect a large-scale image-description dataset from synthetic images taken from realistic disaster scenes and use it to train our machine learning model. A risk-aware variant of the Multi-robot Efficient Search Path Planning (MESPP) problem is then formulated to use the danger estimates in order to account for high-risk locations in the environment when planning the searchers' paths. The problem is solved via a distributed approach based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework allows to plan safer yet highly successful search missions, abiding to the two most important aspects of SaR missions: to ensure both searchers' and victim safety.