No abstract

Calibration of the transformation between two planes, the image plane and the 2D platform, is important for applications where 2D metric information on the image plane is used to compute the 3D information in a world coordinate system. Efforts have been taken in computer vision literature to perform a full-scale camera calibration, including intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. For some applications, calibration of intrinsic parameters is not required as often as that of the extrinsic parameters. This paper addresses the problem of calibrating a camera's extrinsic parameters with respect to a 2D platform to which a camera is observing. A rational approximation method is proposed. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed rational approximation method achieves comparable accuracy with the well-known homographybased approach. This work is motivated by our mobile sensor network project. Other relevant applications include vision-based metrology.Index Terms-Extrinsic parameter calibration, homographybased method, sensor networks.

Swarm robotics is an innovative approach to the control and coordination of multi-agent systems that use naturally inspired swarm intelligent methods to perform tasks. A swarm based approach can decrease the complexity and the cost of designing a cooperative multi-robot system. This paper proposes a general engineering approach to develop a robotic swarm that focuses on how to synthesize an emergent behavior and the associated inputs to this end. We validate our methodology by engineering a swarm to simultaneously rendezvous on a stationary light source. Furthermore, we also considered the case when the light source is slowly moving. The design is simulated in NetLogo, an agent-based modeling software, and implemented on the MASnet robot platform. This work demonstrates the basic knowledge and tools required to engineer a robotic swarm.

In this paper, we experimentally implement and validate distributed consensus algorithms on a mobile actuator and sensor network platform under directed, possibly switching interaction topologies to explore issues and challenges in distributed multi-vehicle cooperative control. Distributed consensus algorithms are applied to three target applications namely rendezvous, axial alignment, and formation maneuvering. In the rendezvous application, multiple mobile robots simultaneously arrive at a common a priori unknown target location determined through team negotiation. In the axial alignment application, multiple mobile robots collectively align their final positions along a line. In the formation maneuvering application, multiple mobile robots form a rigid geometric shape and maneuver as a group with a given group velocity. The experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the consensus algorithms even in the presence of platform physical limitations, packet loss, information delay, etc.