Although the exact mechanisms of attentive perception are still unknown, recent work on  humans and other biological systems have revealed some integral properties:  Fovea-periphery distinction, saccadic motion, visual  primitives, serial processing and memory. Most research in vision and robotics has considered mechanisms for the first three properties,  however to really have an "attentively seeing robot", we need a system that integrates all  simultaneously. APES is  a robot that incorporates all these properties. The attention mechanism  - unlike  classical machine vision systems – processes  the spatio-temporal data generated as a result of  its continuous saccadic movements. Furthermore, it embodies short-term and long-term memory  as has been widely discussed in the biological vision literature .

AJava based simulation software RboT is now available for the simulation of 2D purely  feedback-based multiple robots.Rbot  is a Java applet that allows users to add new robots to a workspace and observe their behaviour under pure  event-driven and feedback-based strategies.
 

The importance of automated inspection of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has  increased with the requirements of developing electronics manufacturing industry. Bottom-up automation in PCB engineering has speeded up the manufacturing process which in turn results in a huge demand for high-speed, versatile, accurate, and cheap inspection methods. Human visual inspection is  limited in terms of speed, accuracy and uniformity; electrical tests -another commonly  used method- fail to provide versatility. This project has begun to develop a prototype of a XY-robot based automated visual inspection system that meets the industry requirements and that can be used for further development of visual inspection algorithms. Currently our robot is capable of  learning a given pcb as well as components and inspecting in either manual or automated modes.

This project involves developing a camera-based inspection vision system for item classification and inspection capable of examining objects  from very close shooting distance.  This enables the  surface of the object to be scrutinized very closely. We use a commercially available xy-robot along with a color camera mounted on the robot. 

 

The following constraints pertain:

 

1.The items are bigger than the viewable area of the camera and hence several images must be patched together in order to reconstruct the item’s complete image.

2. The camera must be moved appropriately in order to capture these multiple images. Hence appropriate  commands must be sent to the robot holding the camera.

3. A parametric representation that is rotationally and translationally invariant must be generated for each new item.

4. The model of each new item must be learned.

5. A decision-making criteria must be employed in order to inspect about a new item.

In this project, we are developing an internet accessible foveating robot video transmission and control system prototype. The graphical user interface at the client end  allows the user to view the video as well as allowing control of the robot head in real time. For this,  we  have developed a fovea based coding scheme for video streaming through low bandwidth networks that exploits two important aspects of human vision:  fovea-periphery  distinction and saccadic motion. Thus, each frame in the acquired image sequence has  nonuniform  sampling and  consecutive saccadic images have temporal redundancy. Such a coding scheme is suitable for applications  such as video broadcasting from attentive robot or cellular phones with video where the perceiver fixates on objects in a continual manner. Our experimental results indicate that  compared to classical coding,  spatial and  spatio-temporal coding improve the transmission quality.

This project is involved with the design and implementation of a motor drive system capable of feedback control. The system allows the user to specify the number of turns of the motor by a PC interface. The feedback from the motor is taken by an encoder circuit externally connected to the main card. The main card contains two H-Bridges, the microcontroller and serial port connection to the PC. The control algorithm runs on the PC. The resulting voltage value is transmitted to the microcontroller. The forward and reverse drive of the motors is done by H-Bridges and the speed is controlled by pulse width modulation implementation.