Inkyu Sa

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering

The application of autonomous robots in agriculture is gaining increasing popularity thanks to the high impact it may have on food security, sustainability, resource-use efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, and optimization of human effort and yield. With this vision, the Flourish research project aimed to develop an adaptable robotic solu...

Velocity estimation plays a central role in driverless vehicles, but standard, and affordable methods struggle to cope with extreme scenarios like aggressive maneuvers due to the presence of high sideslip. To solve this, autonomous race cars are usually equipped with expensive external velocity sensors. In this letter, we present an end-to-end recu...

This paper presents the algorithms and system architecture of an autonomous racecar. The introduced vehicle is powered by a software stack designed for robustness, reliability, and extensibility. To autonomously race around a previously unknown track, the proposed solution combines state of the art techniques from different fields of robotics. Spec...

Using robots to harvest sweet peppers in protected cropping environments has remained unsolved despite considerable effort by the research community over several decades. In this paper, we present the robotic harvester, Harvey, designed for sweet peppers in protected cropping environments that achieved a 76.5% success rate on 68 fruit (within a mod...

Velocity estimation plays a central role in driverless vehicles, but standard and affordable methods struggle to cope with extreme scenarios like aggressive maneuvers due to the presence of high sideslip. To solve this, autonomous race cars are usually equipped with expensive external velocity sensors. In this paper, we present an end-to-end recurr...

This is the third special issue on agricultural robots in the Journal of Field Robotics. The importance of this area has grown substantially since the first special issue in 2009 as it has become increasingly clear that robotics and automation will play a key role in humanity meeting its future food demands and reduce impacts on the ecosystem. This...

The application of autonomous robots in agriculture is gaining more and more popularity thanks to the high impact it may have on food security, sustainability, resource use efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, minimization of the human effort and maximization of yield. The Flourish research project faced this challenge by developing an ada...

This paper presents the algorithms and system architecture of an autonomous racecar. The introduced vehicle is powered by a software stack designed for robustness, reliability, and extensibility. In order to autonomously race around a previously unknown track, the proposed solution combines state of the art techniques from different fields of robot...

Using robots to harvest sweet peppers in protected cropping environments has remained unsolved despite considerable effort by the research community over several decades. In this paper, we present the robotic harvester, Harvey, designed for sweet peppers in protected cropping environments that achieved a 76.5% success rate (within a modified scenar...

Growth in world population, increasing urbanization and changing consumption habits mean demand for food production is predicted to increase dramatically over the coming decades. This increased demand for food production must be achieved despite challenges such as climate change, a limited supply of new arable land and difficulties in sourcing skil...

In autonomous racing, vehicles operate close to the limits of handling and a sensor failure can have critical consequences. To limit the impact of such failures, this paper presents the redundant perception and state estimation approaches developed for an autonomous race car. Redundancy in perception is achieved by estimating the color and position...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in a wide range of monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex environments. To address this issue, this article introduces a general informative path planning (IPP) framework for monit...

The ability to automatically monitor agricultural fields is an important capability in precision farming, enabling steps towards more sustainable agriculture. Precise, high-resolution monitoring is a key prerequisite for targeted intervention and the selective application of agro-chemicals. The main goal of this paper is developing a novel crop/wee...

We present a novel weed segmentation and mapping framework that processes multispectral images obtained from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using a deep neural network (DNN). Most studies on crop/weed semantic segmentation only consider single images for processing and classification. Images taken by UAVs often cover only a few hundred square met...

Identifying regions of interest in an image has long been of great importance in a wide range of tasks, including place recognition. In this letter, we propose a novel attention mechanism with flexible context, which can be incorporated into existing feedforward network architecture to learn image representations for long-term place recognition. In...

Horticultural enterprises are becoming more sophisticated as the range of the crops they target expands. Requirements for enhanced efficiency and productivity have driven the demand for automating on-field operations. However, various problems remain yet to be solved for their reliable, safe deployment in real-world scenarios. This paper examines m...

This paper describes a system for autonomous spray painting using a UAV, suitable for industrial applications. The work is motivated by the potential for such a system to achieve accurate and fast painting results. The PaintCopter is a quadrotor that has been custom fitted with an arm plus a spray gun on a pan-tilt mechanism. To enable long deploym...

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, arXiv

This paper introduces fl\"uela driverless: the first autonomous racecar to win a Formula Student Driverless competition. In this competition, among other challenges, an autonomous racecar is tasked to complete 10 laps of a previously unknown racetrack as fast as possible and using only onboard sensing and computing. The key components of fl\"uela's...

In many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, flexible trajectory generation algorithms are required to enable high levels of autonomy for critical mission phases, such as take-off, area coverage, and landing. In this paper, we present a guidance approach which uses the improved intrinsic tau guidance theory to create spatio-temporal 4-D traj...

In many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, flexible trajectory generation algorithms are required to enable high levels of autonomy for critical mission phases, such as take-off, area coverage, and landing. In this paper, we present a guidance approach which uses the improved intrinsic tau guidance theory to create spatio-temporal 4-D traj...

Selective weed treatment is a critical step in autonomous crop management as related to crop health and yield. However, a key challenge is reliable, and accurate weed detection to minimize damage to surrounding plants. In this paper, we present an approach for dense semantic weed classification with multispectral images collected by a micro aerial...

This paper describes an approach to building a cost-effective and research grade visual-inertial odometry aided vertical taking-off and landing (VTOL) platform. We utilize an off-the-shelf visual-inertial sensor, an onboard computer, and a quadrotor platform that are factory-calibrated and mass-produced, thereby sharing similar hardware and sensor...

In this paper, we present a method to control a quadrotor with a neural network trained using reinforcement learning techniques. With reinforcement learning, a common network can be trained to directly map state to actuator command making any predefined control structure obsolete for training. Moreover, we present a new learning algorithm which dif...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can offer timely and cost-effective delivery of high-quality sensing data. How- ever, deciding when and where to take measurements in complex environments remains an open challenge. To address this issue, we introduce a new multiresolution mapping approach for informative path planning in terrain monitoring using UAV...

This paper describes dynamic system identification, and full control of a cost-effective vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) multi-rotor micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) --- DJI Matrice 100. The dynamics of the vehicle and autopilot controllers are identified using only a built-in IMU and utilized to design a subsequent model predictive controller (MPC)...

Abstract—This paper presents a 3D visual detection method for the challenging task of detecting peduncles of sweet peppers (Capsicum annuum) in the field. Cutting the peduncle cleanly is one of the most difficult stages of the harvesting process, where the peduncle is the part of the crop that attaches it to the main stem of the plant. Accurate ped...

In this paper, we introduce an informative path planning (IPP) framework for active classification using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Our algorithm uses a combination of global viewpoint selection and evolutionary optimization to refine the planned trajectory in continuous 3D space while satisfying dynamic constraints. Our approach is evaluated...

This paper presents a novel approach to fruit detection using deep convolutional neural networks. The aim is to build an accurate, fast and reliable fruit detection system, which is a vital element of an autonomous agricultural robotic platform; it is a key element for fruit yield estimation and automated harvesting. Recent work in deep neural netw...

We have developed a playmate robot system for playing the rock-paper-scissors game with humans. The playmate robot recognizes the hand motions of a human using image processing without attaching any additional units to the human. The playmate robot system consists of three parts: a game management part, a hand motion recognition part, and a robot h...

This paper introduces a high-speed, 100Hz, vision-based state estimator that is suitable for quadrotor control in close quarters manoeuvring applications. We describe the hardware and algorithms for estimating the state of the quadrotor. Experimental results for position, velocity and yaw angle estimators are presented and compared with motion capt...

This paper describes an intelligent service robot system for managing a store in an unmanned environment. The robot can be a good replacement for humans because it is possible to work all day and to remember lots of information. We design a system architecture for configuring many intelligent functions of intelligent service robot system which cons...

We have proposed the HAuPIRS architecture for organizing a more efficient and convenient home automation system which overcomes the limitations of conventional systems by using an intelligent service robot system. Intelligent service robot systems for the home environment should be designed to be human-friendly and should not draw unwelcome attenti...

This paper proposes a home automation system using a PDA(Personal Digital Assistants)-based intelligent robot system architecture which consists of three layers; a user layer, a manager layer, and an action layer. In the user layer, users manage and control the robot, and get visual information via the remote monitoring system. In the case of showi...

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of PDA based mobile robot for home automation systems. There are several key concepts required for realizing a robot based home automation. First, it should be able to move freely around in home or office environment, manage home appliances through the wireless network, and detect color patches through...

This paper presents the design and implementation of a reconfigurable heterogeneous modular architecture for service robots. The proposed architecture has five key concepts which are different from conventional reconfigurable modular service robots; (1) easy and multiple assembly according to requirements of users, (2) hardware resource sharing sys...

Part Timer is unmanned store service robot and it has lots of intelligent functions; navigation, grabbing objects, gesture, communication with humans, recognizing face, object and character, surfing the internet, receiving calls, etc. It has a modular system architecture which uses intelligent macro core module for easy composition of whole robot....

In this paper, we propose a Smart Adapted Service which can manage a schedule automatically. Smart Adapted Service gives a notice beforehand regarding information associated with the schedule, by searching the Internet. If the user has written down the name of goods or food which he wants to buy, Smart Adapted Service finds the most suitable store...

This paper introduces a more efficient remote user interface using an intelligent mobile robot and a 3D remote home viewer than that of conventional home automation system. The proposed system gives 3D environment map for virtual reality and real image together, which make more comfortable and easier user interface than conventional system which ju...

Even if there are lots of researches on localization using 2D range finder in static environment, very few researches have been reported for robust real-time localization of mobile robot in uncertain and dynamic environment. In this paper, we present a new localization method based on ICP(Iterative Closest Point) algorithm for navigation of mobile...