NEUR 3850

Pose

The combination of position and orientation of an object. Can be described by means of a rotation and translation transformation which brings the object from a reference pose to the observed pose. This rotation transformation can be represented in different ways, such as a rotation matrix or a quaternion.

SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping)

The computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. Used in things such as self-driving cars, UAVs, autonomous underwater vehicles, and planetary rovers.

Atlas

A bipedal humanoid robot primarily developed by the American robotics company Boston Dynamics, with funding and oversight from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The 6ft robot is designed for a variety of search and rescue tasks.

Allocentric

A collectivist personality attribute whereby people centre their attention and actions on other people rather than themselves. These kind of people believe, feel, and act very much like collectivists do around the world. They tend to be interdependent, define themselves in terms of the group that they are part of, and behave according to that group's cultural norms. They tend to have a sense of duty and share beliefs with other allocentrics among their in-group. They appear to see themselves as an extension of their in-group and allow their own goals to be subsumed by the in-group's goals.

Microcontroller

A compact integrated circuit designed to govern a specific operation in an embedded system. A typical one includes a processor, memory, and I/O on a single chip. Found in vehicles, robots, office machines, medical devices, vending machines, etc.

Single-board computer

A complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, I/O, and other features required of a functional computer. Made as demonstration or development systems, for educational systems, or for use as embedded computer controllers. Unlike a desktop PC, these often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral functions or expansion.

Proportional integral derivative controller (PID)

A control loop feedback mechanism widely used in industrial control systems and a variety of other applications requiring continuously modulated control. It continuously calculates an error value as the difference between a desired setpoint and a measured process variable and applies a correction based on proportional, integral, and derivative terms. In practical terms it automatically applies accurate and responsive correction to a control function. Used in things such as cruise control on a car.

BigDog

A dynamically stable quadruped military robot created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station. It was funded by DARPA, but the project was shelved after the BigDog was deemed too loud for combat. It was designed to be able to serve as a robotic pack mule to accompany soldiers in terrain too rough for conventional vehicles.

Lego Mindstorms

A hardware software platform produced by Lego for the development of programmable robots based on Lega building blocks. Each version of the system includes an intelligent brick computer that controls the system, a set of modular sensors and motors, and Lego parts from the Technic line to create the mechanical systems.

ASIMO (Advanced step in Innovative Mobility)

A humanoid robot created by Honda in 2000. Honda's goal is to develop robots that will coexist with and be useful to people. In 2011, the latest version was introduced with world's first autonomous behavior control technology.

iCub

A humanoid robot developed at IIT with 53 motors that move the head, arms and hands, waist, and legs. It can see and hear, it has the sense of proprioception (body configuration) and movement (using accelerometers and gyroscopes). They are currently working to improve on this in order to give it the sense of touch and to grade how much force it exerts on the environment.

Robot

A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, being able to think for itself to some extent. Example: A roomba

Pulse-width modulation

A method of reducing the average power delivered by an electrical signal by effectively chopping it up into discrete parts. Electricity will pulse from a specific voltage to no voltage. A 50% duty cycle describes an electrical signal being on half the period, and off the other half. Used in things such as computer monitors and RC cars.

Gazebo

A robot simulator which makes it possible to rapidly test algorithms, design robots, perform regression testing, and train AI systems using realistic scenarios. It offers the ability to accurately and efficiently simulate populations of robots in complex indoor and outdoor environments. It includes a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and convenient programmatic and graphical interfaces.

da Vinci Surgical System

A robotic surgical system made by the American company Intuitive Surgical. It is designed to facilitate complex surgery using a minimally invasive approach, and is controlled by a surgeon from a console.

ClearPath Robotics

A robotics company founded in 2009 by a group of four University of Waterloo graduates. Their goal was to streamline field robotics research for universities and private corporations. Since their founding, the company has expended and is now also manufacturing and selling the OTTO line of self-driving vehicles for industrial environments.

Rethink Robotics

A robotics company offering smarter collaborative robots for industrial automation. Its aim was to create low-cost robots. Their robots use a fully integrated robotic solution driven by the revolutionary Intera software platform, making their robots easy to train and fast to deploy.

Boston Dynamics

A robotics company which began as a spin-off from MIT, where they developed the first robots that ran and maneuvered like animals. Now they are combining the principles of dynamic control and balance with sophisticated mechanical designs, cutting-edge electronics, and software for perception, navigation, and intelligence.

Willow Garage

A robotics company which develops hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. They see personal robots as the next paradigm-shifting personal productivity tool. By investing in open source and open platform adoption models, they aim to lay the groundwork for the use of personal robotics applications in everyday life. They are a team of experts in robot design, control, perception, and machine learning. The team has both a strong theoretical background and a demonstrated drive to produce practical systems.

Servo

A rotary actuator that allows for precise control of angular position, velocity and acceleration. They consist of a suitable motor coupled to a sensor for position feedback. They use a closed-loop servomechanism that uses position feedback to control its motion and final position. The input to its control is a signal representing the position commanded for the output shaft. Used in things such as RC cars, airplanes, and DVD players (to extend or retract the disc trays).

Point cloud

A set of data points in space. Generally produced by 3D scanners, which measure a large number of points on the external surfaces of objects around them. Used for many purposes, including to create 3D CAD modules for manufactured parts.

Raspberry Pi

A single-board, low-cost, high-performance computer first developed in the UK. Its the size of a credit card and can run full operating systems.

SPI

A synchronous serial communication interface specification used for short-distance communication, primarily in embedded systems. Devices using this communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture with a single master. Specifies four logic signals: - SCLK: Serial clock (from master) - MOSI: Master out, slave in - MISO: Master in, slave out - SS: Slave select

I2C (Inter-integrated circuit)

A synchronous, multi-master, multi-slave, packet switched, single-ended, serial computer bus. Widely used for attaching lower-speed peripheral ICs to processors and microcontrollers in short-distance, intra-board communication. Appropriate for peripherals where simplicity and low manufacturing cost are more important than speed. Used for reading sensors, accessing LCDs, transmitting and controlling user-directed actions, etc.

Aldebaran (SoftBank Robotics)

A world-wide leader in robotics solutions with more than 500 employees working around the world. They are constantly exploring and commercializing all robotics solutions that help make peoples' lives easier, safer, more connected, and more extraordinary. Their robots and services offer innovative applications relevant for the fields of retail, tourism, healthcare, finance, and education. Creator of Pepper - the world's first humanoid with an emotion engine. Pepper has been optimized for engaging with people through conversation and the touch screen. Pepper is an assistant capable of recognizing faces and basic human emotions to welcome, inform, and entertain people in an innovative way.

Baud rate

Also known as symbol rate, is the number of symbol changes, waveform changes, or signaling events, across the transmission medium per time unit using a digitally modulated signal or a line code. Measured in baud (Bd) or symbols per second. Each symbol can represent or convey one or several bits of data.

Kalman filter

An algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, containing statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimates of unknown variables that tend to be more accurate than those based on a single measurement alone, by estimating a joint probability distribution over the variables for each timeframe. It has numerous applications in technology. A common application is for guidance, navigation, and control of vehicles, particularly aircraft and spacecraft. Furthermore, it is a widely applied concept in time series analysis used in fields such as signal processing and econometrics. They are also one of the main topics in the field of robotic motion planning and control, and they are sometimes included in trajectory optimization. It also works for modeling the central nervous system's control of movement. The algorithm works in a two-step process. In the prediction step, the Kalman filter produces estimates of the current state variables, along with their uncertainties. Once the outcome of the next measurement is observed, these estimates are updated using a weighted average, with more weight being given to estimates with higher certainty. The algorithm is recursive. It can run in real time, use only the present input measurements, and the previously calculated state and its uncertainty matrix; no additional past information is required.

Behaviour control

An approach in robotics that focuses on robots that are able to exhibit complex-appearing behaviours despite little internal variable state to model its immediate environment, mostly gradually correcting its actions via sensory-motor links. Behavior-based robotics sets itself apart from traditional AI by using biological systems as a model. Rather than use preset calculations to tackle a situation, behaviour-based robotics relies on adaptability. Most behaviour-based robots are programmed with a basic set of features to start them off. They are given a behavioral repertoire to work with dictating what behaviours to use and when, obstacle avoidance and battery charging can provide a foundation to help the robots learn and succeed. Rather than build world models, behaviour-based robots simply react to their environment and problems within that environment. They draw upon internal knowledge learned from their past experiences combined with their basic behaviours to resolve problems.

Aliasing

An effect that causes different signals to become indistinguishable when sampled. It also refers to the distortion or artifact that results when the signal reconstructed from samples is different from the original continuous signal. The effect occurs when a system is measured at an insufficient sampling rate. Example: Video of a moving car's wheels appearing to move backwards.

Motor encoder

An electro-mechanical device that converts the angular position or motion of a shaft or axle to output signals. There are two main types: absolute and incremental. The output of an absolute type indicates the current shaft position. The output of an incremental encoder provides information about the motion of the shaft, which typically is processed elsewhere into information such as position, speed, and distance. Used in things such as photographic lenses and optical mice.

Inertial measurement unit

An electronic device that measures and reports a body's specific force, angular rate, and sometimes the magnetic field surrounding the body, using a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes, sometimes also magnetometers. Works by detecting linear acceleration using one or more accelerometers and rotational rate using one or more gyroscopes. Typically used to maneuver aircrafts (including UAVs) and spacecrafts (including satellites and landers).

ROS (Robot operating system)

An open-source, meta-operating system for a robot. It provides services for hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. Its goal is to support code reuse in robotics research and development. It enables executables to be individually designed and loosely coupled at runtime. Other goals include: - Thin - Agnostic libraries using clean, functional interfaces - Language independence - Easy testing - Scaling

GPIO (General-purpose input/output)

An uncommitted digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit board whose behavior is controllable by the user at run time. They have no predefined purpose and are unused by default. If used, the purpose and behavior is defined and implemented by the designer of higher assembly-level circuitry. Used in a diverse variety of applications, limited only by the electrical and timing specifications and the ability of software to interact with GPIOs in a sufficiently timely manner.

4Front Robotics

An unmanned vehicle systems firm specializing in the development, deployment, and custom service provider of autonomous ground and aerial vehicles for civil applications. They provide solutions to real complex problems in challenging environments. At the moment, the company focuses on highly maneuverable aerial and ground vehicles capable of performing missions in highly complex/confined environments/spaces.

Cognitive robotics

Concerned with endowing a robot with intelligent behaviour by providing it with a processing architecture that will allow it to learn and reason about how to behave in response to complex goals in a complex world. Animal cognition is viewed as a starting point for the development of robotic information processing, as opposed to more traditional AI techniques. Target robotic cognitive capabilities include perception processing, attention allocation, anticipation, planning, complex motor coordination, reasoning about other agents, and perhaps even about their own mental states. Robotic cognition embodies the behaviour of intelligent agents in the physical world.

Nyquist frequency

Half of the sampling rate of a discrete signal processing system. A property of a discrete-time system.

Closed-loop control

The control action from the controller is dependent on the process output. They have a feedback loop which ensures the controller exerts a control action to give a process output the same as the "reference input" or "set point." Defined by the British Standard Institution, it is "a control system processing monitoring feedback, the deviation signal formed as a result of this feedback being used to control the action of a final control element in such a way as to tend to reduce the deviation to zero." Example: a house furnace which is controlled by a thermostat. The house's air temperature is the feedback which dictates whether the furnace should be on or off.

Open-loop control

The control action from the controller is independent of the "process output," which is the process variable that is being controlled. It does not use feedback to determine if its output has achieved the desired goal of the input command or process "set point." Examples include on/off switching of values, machinery, lights, motors or heaters, where the control result is known to be approximately sufficient under normal conditions without the need for feedback. The advantage of using such a system in these cases is the reduction in component count and complexity. However, such a system cannot correct any errors that it makes or correct for outside disturbances, and cannot engage in ML.

Egocentric

The inability to differentiate between self and other. It is the inability to untangle subjective schemas from objective reality and an inability to understand or assume any perspective other than one's own. These kind of people believe they are the centre of attention, but do not receive gratification by one's own admiration.

Bit-depth/quantization

The number of bits of information in each sample, and it directly corresponds to the resolution of each sample. Variations in this affect the noise level from quantization error. Quantization is the process of mapping input values from a large set (often continuous) to output values in a (countable) smaller set, often with a finite number of elements. Rounding and truncation are typical examples of quantization processes.

Sampling rate

The rate at which samples of an analog signal are taken in order to be converted into digital form.

Nyquist rate

Twice the bandwidth of a bandlimited function or a bandlimited channel. This term means two different things under two different circumstances: 1. As a lower bound for the sample rate for alias-free signal sampling. 2. As an upper bound for the symbol rate across a bandwidth-limited baseband channel such as a telegraph line or passband channel such as a limited radio frequency band or a frequency division multiplex channel. A property of a continuous-time signal.