Carlos Torre-Ferrero

Ultrasonic Sensors in Urban Traffic Driving-Aid Systems

Currently, vehicles are often equipped with active safety systems to reduce the risk of accidents, most of which occur in urban environments. The most prominent include Antilock Braking Systems (ABS), Traction Control and Stability Control. All these systems use different kinds of sensors to constantly monitor the conditions of the vehicle, and act in an emergency. In this paper the use of ultrasonic sensors in active safety systems for urban traffic is proposed, and the advantages and disadvantages when compared to other sensors are discussed. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) for urban traffic based on ultrasounds is presented as an application example. The proposed system has been implemented in a fully-automated prototype vehicle and has been tested under real traffic conditions. The results confirm the good performance of ultrasonic sensors in these systems.

A similarity measure for 3D rigid registration of point clouds using image-based descriptors with low overlap

This paper introduces a novel similarity measure for 3D rigid registration algorithms that use comparison between image-based descriptors in order to find correspondences between two partial 3D point clouds belonging to the same object. Unlike the similarity measures based on correlation coefficient, joint entropy, mutual information or others that have been used by the most popular 3D registration algorithms this similarity measure is based on distance between pixels and takes into account the problems of clutter and occlusion that can appear in real situations that need 3D registration or object recognition.

Accurate Estimation of Airborne Ultrasonic Time-of-Flight for Overlapping Echoes

In this work, an analysis of the transmission of ultrasonic signals generated by piezoelectric sensors for air applications is presented. Based on this analysis, an ultrasonic response model is obtained for its application to the recognition of objects and structured environments for navigation by autonomous mobile robots. This model enables the analysis of the ultrasonic response that is generated using a pair of sensors in transmitter-receiver configuration using the pulse-echo technique. This is very interesting for recognizing surfaces that simultaneously generate a multiple echo response. This model takes into account the effect of the radiation pattern, the resonant frequency of the sensor, the number of cycles of the excitation pulse, the dynamics of the sensor and the attenuation with distance in the medium. This model has been developed, programmed and verified through a battery of experimental tests. Using this model a new procedure for obtaining accurate time of flight is proposed. This new method is compared with traditional ones, such as threshold or correlation, to highlight its advantages and drawbacks. Finally the advantages of this method are demonstrated for calculating multiple times of flight when the echo is formed by several overlapping echoes.

Working Together: A Review on Safe Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Environments

After many years of rigid conventional procedures of production, industrial manufacturing is going through a process of change toward flexible and intelligent manufacturing, the so-called Industry 4.0. In this paper, human–robot collaboration has an important role in smart factories since it contributes to the achievement of higher productivity and greater efficiency. However, this evolution means breaking with the established safety procedures as the separation of workspaces between robot and human is removed. These changes are reflected in safety standards related to industrial robotics since the last decade, and have led to the development of a wide field of research focusing on the prevention of human–robot impacts and/or the minimization of related risks or their consequences. This paper presents a review of the main safety systems that have been proposed and applied in industrial robotic environments that contribute to the achievement of safe collaborative human–robot work. Additionally, a review is provided of the current regulations along with new concepts that have been introduced in them. The discussion presented in this paper includes multi-disciplinary approaches, such as techniques for estimation and the evaluation of injuries in human–robot collisions, mechanical and software devices designed to minimize the consequences of human–robot impact, impact detection systems, and strategies to prevent collisions or minimize their consequences when they occur.

An Approach for detecting and tracking oil slicks on satellite images

This paper describes the combination of several image processing techniques to achieve an approach to the detection and tracking of oil slick using satellite images taken after some accidents over the sea, as tanker accidents or oil rig explosions. This work attempts to be a contribution to such task. To get information about the shape and located of the oil spill, once it has been segmented and localized in the image, an active contour is generated around the oil slick and fitted to it. The use of active contours can provide an estimation of the deformation and the displacement that oil slicks experience over the time. This information could help to estimate the evolution of these residues dumped into the sea and to allow their tracking. Several ENVISAT-ASAR images obtained over several regions in which a tanker accident occurred, such as it happened over the Spanish, Philippine, Portugal, and Korean coasts, or accidents like the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, have been used as testing images of this process.

Visual sensor fusion for active security in robotic industrial environments

This work presents a method of information fusion involving data captured by both a standard charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and a time-of-flight (ToF) camera to be used in the detection of the proximity between a manipulator robot and a human. Both cameras are assumed to be located above the work area of an industrial robot. The fusion of colour images and time-of-flight information makes it possible to know the 3D localization of objects with respect to a world coordinate system. At the same time, this allows to know their colour information. Considering that ToF information given by the range camera contains innacuracies including distance error, border error, and pixel saturation, some corrections over the ToF information are proposed and developed to improve the results. The proposed fusion method uses the calibration parameters of both cameras to reproject 3D ToF points, expressed in a common coordinate system for both cameras and a robot arm, in 2D colour images. In addition to this, using the 3D information, the motion detection in a robot industrial environment is achieved, and the fusion of information is applied to the foreground objects previously detected. This combination of information results in a matrix that links colour and 3D information, giving the possibility of characterising the object by its colour in addition to its 3D localisation. Further development of these methods will make it possible to identify objects and their position in the real world and to use this information to prevent possible collisions between the robot and such objects.

CIRCON: An Alternative 3D Shape Representation for Surface Matching

This paper introduces an alternative 3D Shape Representation: CIRCON (cylindrical image of radial contours), that both enables the compression of the 3D data, making them more manageable, and facilitates the tasks related to surface matching, such as 3D registration and object recognition, by making use of its inherent properties. A 3D vision system has been designed in order to facilitate the generation of this kind of 3D shape representation while the objects are being sensed

A METHOD FOR ASSESSING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS BY ENGINEERING STUDENTS

In this paper experiences about the implementation of creative activities in industrial engineering degrees are related. These activities were used in engineering courses to improve the creative skills of the students. Thus, the main goal was to make them capable to design innovative products using ideation methods and working in groups. Although there are some works in the literature about the implementation of creative methods in engineering degrees none of them have established well defined approaches which are able to assess the creativity and innovation level of products in an effective way. Indeed, one of the main problems that have been found by instructors during the classes is how students can evaluate their own creative solutions and the degree of innovation of the designed products. There are no many works in the literature focusing in this topic and all of them have been developed to be applied by engineers with long experience in design. These methods measure the innovation of products by the quantification of a number of factors. However, these factors present some difficulties for students who are not used to work with them. In fact, one of the main problems found by instructors in implementing creativity procedures at university level is that students do not have enough experience about the assessment of engineering products and their degree of innovation. This paper describes a new procedure for the measurement of the level of creativity that new ideas provide. It can be also used for the measurement of the innovation of products. A case study is presented to illustrate the method and evaluate its effectiveness. In this activity an engineering design problem is proposed to the students and they have to find the best solution. Brainstorming is used as idea generation method and they have to measure their creativity using the proposed approach. The main advantage of the method is that it can be easily used by students and instructors. In this way the students can evaluate their own ideas in order to sort them and select the most creative ones. The method works with a three dimensional scale which are level, scope and goals. The comparison of the proposed method with other existing approaches allows highlighting the easier understanding of the factors to be evaluated.