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Human-Robot Interaction in Unstructured EnvironmentsProgress ReportMay 13, 2013Kevin DeMarco

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

As Ive been reading through the literature on Hidden Markov Models and pattern recognition, Ive foundthat I needed more background in the topic. Thus, I began making my way through Christopher Bishopsbook, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Im maintaining a LATEXdocument that I use for derivingequations that are not completely described in his book. Ive included my notes for the first chapter in thisprogress report. Im going to be moving through this book in parallel with my other research throughoutthe summer.

MORSE Simulation

Ive managed to import the Turtlebot / Turtlebot 2 3D model into Blender and equip it with a Kinect sensormodel for object detection. Over the next week I will be going through the ROS Navigation Tutorials inorder to become better acquainted with the ROS autonomy module. Figure 1 shows the Turtlebot 2 in the

MORSE simulation.

Figure 1: Turtlebot 2 in MORSE Simulator

The output of the simulated Kinect sensor is sent to ROS where it can be visualized in RVIZ. Figure 2shows the output of the Kinect sensors PointCloud.

In the PointCloud, the chair and desk are the most recognizable objects. I did notice a significant decreasein performance when I enabled the simulated Kinect sensor. My main goal in this simulation is showing thatI can autonomously predict the plan of a human agent based on the humans trajectory and environmentalmarkers (doors, roads, obstacles, etc.). I believe that I will be able to simulate this process without having touse the full Kinect model in order to improve run-time performance. After the basic algorithms are provenin MORSE, I will be able to test the full system on an actual Turtlebot 2.

Other

I also attached a PowerPoint presentation I delivered to DARPA and SAIC last week in order to addressa major issue with testing autonomy modules. The main issue is that since most autonomy modules arecomposed of independent processes that are not synchronized and they communicate through a publish-and-subscribe architecture, the simulator needs to throttle the data input to the autonomy module. If thesimulator floods the autonomy module with data, it will not behave deterministicly due to CPU load. The

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