Efficient exploration of unknown indoor environments using a team of mobile robots

Whenever multiple robots have to solve a common task, they need to coordinate their actions to carry out the task efficiently and to avoid interferences between individual robots. This is especially the case when considering the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots. To achieve efficient terrain coverage with the sensors of the robots, one first needs to identify unknown areas in the environment. Second, one has to assign target locations to the individual robots so that they gather new and relevant information about the environment with their sensors. This assignment should lead to a distribution of the robots over the environment in a way that they avoid redundant work and do not interfere with each other by, for example, blocking their paths. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently coordinating a large team of mobile robots. To better distribute the robots over the environment and to avoid redundant work, we take into account the type of place a potential target is located in (e.g., a corridor or a room). This knowledge allows us to improve the distribution of robots over the environment compared to approaches lacking this capability. To autonomously determine the type of a place, we apply a classifier learned using the AdaBoost algorithm. The resulting classifier takes laser range data as input and is able to classify the current location with high accuracy. We additionally use a hidden Markov model to consider the spatial dependencies between nearby locations. Our approach to incorporate the information about the type of places in the assignment process has been implemented and tested in different environments. The experiments illustrate that our system effectively distributes the robots over the environment and allows them to accomplish their mission faster compared to approaches that ignore the place labels

Multimodal User Interface Based on Web Services to Control an Active Endoscope

Ce projet s’inscrit dans le cadre du projet européen de neurochirurgie PICO (Paraendoscopic Intuitive Computer assisted Operating system) auquel participe le groupe VRAI du LSRO. Le but de ce projet est de proposer une interface multimodale (voix + mouvement des outils utilisés, à la demande, comme pointeur 3D) pour assurer le position d'un outil (endoscope, aiguille de biopsie, etc.) monté sur un dispositif actif permettant de contrôler sa position dans l'espace. Il s'agira de déterminer l'efficacité de l'approche multimodale basée "web service" développée au sein du VRAI group pour résoudre le problème d'interface stérile contraint propre à la chirurgie endoscopique

Création d'une interface multimodale basée sur des web services

Ce travail a pour but de concevoir, implémenter et évaluer le prototype d'une interface utilisateur multimodale permettant à un chirurgien de communiquer avec divers éléments d'une salle d'opération