Carol Martinez

University of Luxembourg · Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust

In robotic manipulation, end-effector compliance is an essential precondition for performing contact-rich tasks, such as machining, assembly, and human-robot interaction. Most robotic arms are position-controlled stiff systems at a hardware level. Thus, adding compliance becomes essential. Compliance in those systems has been recently achieved usin...

Geological formations, environmental conditions, and soil mechanics frequently generate undesired effects on rovers' mobility, such as slippage or sinkage. Underestimating these undesired effects may compromise the rovers' operation and lead to a premature end of the mission. Minimizing mobility risks becomes a priority for colonising the Moon and...

The paper presents a novel Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) emulation framework of on-orbit interactions using on-ground robotic manipulators. It combines Virtual Forward Dynamic Model (VFDM) for Cartesian motion control of robotic manipulators with an Orbital Dynamics Simulator (ODS) based on the Clohessy Wiltshire (CW) Model. VFDM-based Inverse Kinemat...

Space missions to Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHOs) in the Earth-Moon system are upcoming. A rendezvous technique in the cislunar space is proposed in this investigation, one that leverages coupled orbit and attitude dynamics in the Circular Restricted Three-body Problem (CR3BP). An autonomous Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) technique is...

The use of Deep Learning (DL) algorithms has improved the performance of vision-based space applications in recent years. However, generating large amounts of annotated data for training these DL algorithms has proven challenging. While synthetically generated images can be used, the DL models trained on synthetic data are often susceptible to perf...

Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents and the need for solutions that ensure a safe Human-Robot Collaboration. This paper proposes a safety system...

Extraterrestrial rovers with a general-purpose robotic arm have many potential applications in lunar and planetary exploration. Introducing autonomy into such systems is desirable for increasing the time that rovers can spend gathering scientific data and collecting samples. This work investigates the applicability of deep reinforcement learning fo...

CubeSats are being deployed for a number of activities including Earth observation, telecommunications, scientific experiments, and due to their low cost and flexibility, more often than not, they are even being considered for use in On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) and debris removal missions. This investigation focuses on using the CubeSat technology to...

We share with you a bank of images obtained from microscopic fields of thick blood smears employed in the malaria diagnosis, and also the .csv file that contains the labels for each image. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The images are saved with a unique name that is found in th...

The labeling process related to our article (Fong Amaris, W.M, et al 2022), was done with the online toolbox Labelbox. Labelbox, "Labelbox," Online, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://labelbox.com Labelbox gives you as an output a file in .json or .csv with the name of the images and the labels of each one in different columns. Each image has a uni...

The labeling process related to our article (Fong Amaris, W.M, et al 2022), was done with the online toolbox Labelbox. Labelbox, "Labelbox," Online, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://labelbox.com Labelbox gives you as an output a file in .json or .csv with the name of the images and the labels of each one in different columns. Each image has a uni...

We share with you a bank of images obtained from microscopic fields of thick blood smears employed in the malaria diagnosis, and also the .csv file that contains the labels for each image. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The images are saved with a unique name that is found in th...

Background The World Health Organization (WHO) provides protocols for the diagnosis of malaria. One of them is related to the staining process of blood samples to guarantee the correct parasite visualization. Ensuring the quality of the staining procedure on thick blood smears (TBS) is a difficult task, especially in rural centres, where there are...

Space debris is positioned as a fatal problem for current and future space missions. Many effective space debris removal methods have been proposed in the past decade, and several techniques have been either tested on the ground or in parabolic flight experiments. Nevertheless, no uncooperative debris has been removed from any orbit until this mome...

Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have lead to implementations in different industrial applications such as collaborative robotics, making robots able to perform harder tasks and giving them consciousness of their environment, easing interaction with humans. With the objective of eliminating physical barriers between humans and r...

Deploying Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in safety- and business-critical operations requires demonstrating compliance with applicable regulations and a comprehensive understanding of the residual risk associated with the UAS operation. To support these activities and enable the safe deployment of UAS into civil airspace, the European Union Aviati...

This paper presents a novel application of a Multi-frame Super Resolution (MFSR) method for lunar surface imagery called Lunar HighRes-net (L-HRN) . In this work, we adapted and used NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) image database to train the Deep Learning architecture for image super resolution. Additionally, we also gathered an artifi...

Background and Objective Operating Rooms (ORs) are among the most expensive services in hospitals. A challenge to optimize the OR efficiency is to improve the surgery scheduling task, which requires the estimation of surgical time duration. Surgeons or programming units (based on people's experience) typically do the duration estimation using an ex...

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) provides protocols for the diagnosis of malaria. One of them is related to the staining process of blood samples to guarantee the correct parasite visualization. Ensuring the quality of the staining procedure on thick blood smears (TBS) is a dicult task, especially in rural centers, where there are fa...

Uno de los procesos más importantes en la inspección de líneas de transmisión eléctrica es la detección de fallas en aisladores eléctricos. El defecto más común encontrado en los aisladores eléctricos es el quiebre de discos dentro de la cadena de aisladores. El uso de métodos tradicionales de segmentación por binarización indican una pobre capacid...

This paper presents the design and implementation of a tool for Human-Robot collaborative tasks. Industry 4.0 proposes a new scenario where robots can safely work in direct cooperation with humans, within a defined workspace. These robots are called collaborative robots or COBOTS. In this paper, we propose a tool that can be used by a robot and/or...

Robotics applications such as spot-welding, spray-painting, drilling, and objects handling, require the robot to visit successively multiple targets. The robot travel time among targets is a significant component of the overall execution time. This travel time is in turn greatly affected by the visiting order and by the robot configurations used to...

This paper presents a high-throughput method for Above Ground Estimation of Biomass (AGBE) in rice using multispectral near-infrared (NIR) imagery captured at different scales of the crop. By developing an integrated aerial crop monitoring solution using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), our approach calculates 7 vegetation indices that are combine...

This paper presents the design and implementation of a tool for Human-Robot collaborative tasks. Industry 4.0 proposes a new scenario where robots can safely work in direct cooperation with humans, within a defined workspace. These robots are called collaborative robots or COBOTS. In this article, we propose a tool that can be used for picking plas...

The recycling industry in Colombia needs improvements to keep up with market evolution. Currently, low-income families are the ones in charge of collecting recyclable materials directly from mixed-waste bins and taking them to public collection centers, where they are manually classified. Collection centers become an interesting scenario to introdu...

Currently, many industrial processes in Colombia are still done manually, for instance; the recycling process, particularly the waste separation task. This process is usually done by vulnerable population or low-income families, that are dedicated to collect recyclable materials directly from mixed-waste bins and bring it to a public collection cen...

A large amount of data, provided in the form of video data, is acquired during manned inspections flights of electric power lines. This data is analyzed by expert human inspectors to detect faults in the power lines infrastructure and prepare the inspection reports. This process is extremely time consuming, very expensive and prone to human error....

The ROS-Industrial open source project was intended to expand the applicability of industrial robots by reducing the gap that existed between researchers and manufacturers, in order to start developing state of the art applications for the industry. This is part of the scope of the PIR (Perception for Industrial Robots) project from the Pontificia...

Around 8 to 10 million Ton of rice are required in the following years to be able to supply the demand of the overall population. Analysis and monitoring of rice crops becomes nowadays very important issue for farmers, for ensuring a rice production level to cope this demand. This paper presents simulation results of an algorithm that allows to pla...

Inspection of power line infrastructures must be periodically conducted by electric companies in order to ensure reliable electric power distribution. Research efforts are focused on automating the power line inspection process by looking for strategies that satisfy the different requirements of the inspection: simultaneously detect transmission to...

The vast majority of approaches make use of features to track objects. In this paper, we address the tracking problem with a tracking-by-registration strategy based on direct methods. We propose a hierarchical strategy in terms of image resolution and number of parameters estimated in each resolution, that allows direct methods to be applied in dem...

This paper presents an approach towards autonomous aerial power line inspection. In particular, the presented work focuses on real-time autonomous detection, localization and tracking of electric towers. A strategy which combines classic computer vision and machine learning techniques, is proposed. A generalized detection and localization approach...

Autonomous aerial refueling is a key enabling technology for both manned and unmanned aircraft where extended flight duration or range are required. The results presented within this paper offer one potential vision-based sensing solution, together with a unique test environment. A hierarchical visual tracking algorithm based on direct methods is p...

The goal of the work described in this chapter is to develop a visual line guided system for being used on-board an Autonomous Guided Vehicle (AGV) commercial car, controlling the steering and using just the visual information of a line painted below the car. In order to implement the control of the vehicle, a Fuzzy Logic controller has been implem...

For the purposes of achieving Autonomous Air-to-Air Refuelling (AAAR) in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), this paper presents the use of a visual tracking algorithm based on direct methods and image registration techniques, with the aim of solving the drogue tracking problem in order to obtain vision-based relative position estimations of the aircr...

In this paper, we apply a hierarchical tracking strategy of planar objects (or that can be assumed to be planar) that is based on direct methods for vision-based applications on-board UAVs. The use of this tracking strategy allows to achieve the tasks at real-time frame rates and to overcome problems posed by the challenging conditions of the tasks...

The goal of the work described in this paper is to develop a visual line guided system for being used on-board an Autonomous Guided Vehicle (AGV) commercial car, controlling the steering and using just the visual information of a line painted below the car. In order to implement the control of the vehicle, a Fuzzy Logic controller has been implemen...

In this paper, we seek to expand the use of direct methods in real-time applications by proposing a vision-based strategy for pose estimation of aerial vehicles. The vast majority of approaches make use of features to estimate motion. Conversely, the strategy we propose is based on a MR (Multi-Resolution) implementation of an image registration tec...

This article presents a visual servoing system to follow a 3D moving object by a Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MUAV). The presented control strategy is based only on the visual information given by an adaptive tracking method based on the color information. A visual fuzzy system has been developed for servoing the camera situated on a rotary wing...

This article presents a novel system and a control strategy for visual following of a 3D moving object by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UAV. The presented strategy is based only on the visual information given by an adaptive tracking method based on the color information, which jointly with the dynamics of a camera fixed to a rotary wind UAV are used...

In this paper, two techniques to control UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), based on visual information are presented. The first one is based on the detection and tracking of planar structures from an on-board camera, while the second one is based on the detection and 3D reconstruction of the position of the UAV based on an external camera system. Bo...

A neural behavior initiating agent (BIA) is proposed to integrate relevant compressed image information coming from others cooperating and specialized neural agents. Using this arrangement the problem of tracking and recognizing a moving icon has been solved by partitioning it into three simpler and separated tasks. Neural modules associated to tho...

This paper presents the de�nition of non-symmetric membership function for Fuzzy controllers applied to a pan & tilt vision platform onboard an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. This improvement allows the controllers to have a more adap- tive behavior to the non-linearities presented in an UAV. This implementation allows the UAV to follow objects in the en...

This paper presents an improvement of the cognitive architecture, 4D/RCS, developed by the NIST. This improvement consist of the insertion of Fuzzy Logic cells (FLCs), in different parts and hierarchy levels of the architecture, and the adaptation of this architecture for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This advance provides an improvement in the...

Luis (2010) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs attitude, height, motion estimation and control using visual systems. Autonomous Robots. (In Press) Abstract This paper presents an implementation of an aircraft pose and motion estimator using visual sys-tems as the principal sensor for controlling an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or as a redundant system...

This paper presents an aircraft attitude and heading estimator using catadioptric images as a principal sensor for UAV or as a redundant system for IMU (Inertial Measure Unit) and gyro sensors. First, we explain how the unified theory for central catadioptric cameras is used for attitude and heading estimation, explaining how the skyline is project...

This article presents a real time Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs 3D pose estimation method using planar object tracking, in order to be used on the control system of a UAV. The method explodes the rich information obtained by a projective transformation of planar objects on a calibrated camera. The algorithm obtains the metric and projective compone...

In this chapter, we have presented some of the techniques used for real time visual servoing on UAVs. These techniques includes visual algorithms for features detection and tracking, pose estimation, visual and pose based control systems, and fuzzy controllers, using them to increase the capabilities of UAVs in situations like object tracking, low...

In this paper we introduce a real-time trinocular system to control rotary wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on the 3D information extracted by cameras located on the ground. The algorithm is based on key features onboard the UAV to estimate the vehicle's position and orientation. The algorithm is validated against onboard sensors and known 3D po...

This paper presents an implementation of two Fuzzy Logic controllers working in parallel for a pan-tilt camera platform on an UAV. This implementation uses a basic Lucas-Kanade tracker algorithm, which sends information about the error between the center of the object to track and the center of the image, to the Fuzzy controller. This information i...

This paper presents an implementa- tion of three Fuzzy Logic controllers working in parallel onboard a UAV, two for a pan-tilt camera platform and the third for control the yaw of the helicopter. This implementation uses a Lucas-Kanade tracker algo- rithm with a pyramidal optical ow implementation, which gives infor- mation to follow statics and m...

The aim of the paper is to present, test and discuss the implementation of Visual SLAM techniques to images taken from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) outdoors, in partially structured environments. Every issue of the whole process is discussed in order to obtain more accurate localization and mapping from UAVs flights. Firstly, the issues related...