The mobile robots that are present today are struggling to deal with challenges related to localization, power supply, mobility in the real world with all sorts of obstacles and other issues. At the same time, the demand for service robots for domestic applications has been growing and predictions show that the demand will continue to grow in the future. To meet the demands and to fulfill the expectations, those challenges need to be addressed. This thesis presents the development of a ceiling mounted robot known as Ceilbot. It is a type of mobile service robot except that it works on a track attached to the ceiling. This implies that the robot operates in a structured environment with continuous power supply simplifying some of the issues mentioned above. The development of the Ceilbot includes a simplified DC motor controller development, object recognition development and an easy-to-use graphical user interface design. The developed motor controller provides flexibility for the user to change the control parameters and produces deterministic output with high repeatability when compared to a regular proportional and integral (PI) controller. The designed user interface simplifies the interaction between the user and the Ceilbot by allowing the user to send commands to the Ceilbot and displaying some status parameters for monitoring. In order to have a complete robot system for demonstration purposes, a simple manipulator using two servomotors is also developed. / <p>Validerat; 20140825 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

Modern day intelligent transportation system (ITS) relies on reliable and accurate estimated traffic parameters. Travel speed, traffic flow, and traffic state classification are the main traffic parameters of interest. These parameters can be estimated through efficient vision-based algorithms and appropriate camera sensor technology. With the advances in camera technologies and increasing computing power, use of monocular vision, stereo vision, and camera sensor fusion technologies have been an active research area in the field of ITS. In this thesis, we investigated stationary monocular and stereo camera technology for traffic parameters estimation. Stationary camera sensors provide large spatial-temporal information of the road section with relatively low installation costs. Two novel scientific contributions for vehicle detection and recognition are proposed. The first one is the use stationary stereo camera technology, and the second contribution is the fusion of monocular and stereo camera technologies. A vision-based ITS consists of several hardware and software components. The overall performance of such a system does not only depend on these single modules but also on their interaction. Therefore, a systematic approach considering all essential modules was chosen instead of focusing on one element of the complete system chain. This leads to detailed investigations of several core algorithms, e.g. background subtraction, histogram based fingerprints, and data fusion methods. From experimental results on standard datasets, we concluded that proposed fusion-based approach, consisting of monocular and stereo camera technologies performs better than each particular technology for vehicle detection and vehicle recognition. Moreover, this research work has a potential to provide a low-cost vision-based solution for online traffic monitoring systems in urban and rural environments.

Les réseaux de capteurs sans fil d'images sont utilisés aujourd'hui dans de nombreuses applications qui diffèrent par leurs objectifs et leurs contraintes individuelles. Toutefois, le dénominateur commun de toutes les applications de réseaux de capteurs reste la vulnérabilité des noeuds-capteurs en raison de leurs ressources matérielles limitées dont la plus contraignante est l'énergie. En effet, les technologies sans fil disponibles dans ce type de réseaux sont généralement à faible portée, et les ressources matérielles (CPU, batterie) sont également de faible puissance. Il faut donc répondre à un double objectif : l'efficacité d'une solution tout en offrant une bonne qualité d'image à la réception. La contribution de cette thèse porte principalement sur l'étude des méthodes de traitement et de compression d'images au noeud-caméra, nous avons proposé une nouvelle méthode de compression d'images qui permet d'améliorer l'efficacité énergétique des réseaux de capteurs sans fil. Des expérimentations sur une plate-forme réelle de réseau de capteurs d'images ont été réalisées afin de démontrer la validité de nos propositions, en mesurant des aspects telles que la quantité de mémoire requise pour l'implantation logicielle de nos algorithmes, leur consommation d'énergie et leur temps d'exécution. Nous présentons aussi, les résultats de synthèse de la chaine de compression proposée sur des systèmes à puce FPGA et ASIC / The increasing development of Wireless Camera Sensor Networks today allows a wide variety of applications with different objectives and constraints. However, the common problem of all the applications of sensor networks remains the vulnerability of sensors nodes because of their limitation in material resources, the most restricting being energy. Indeed, the available wireless technologies in this type of networks are usually a low-power, short-range wireless technology and low power hardware resources (CPU, battery). So we should meet a twofold objective: an efficient solution while delivering outstanding image quality on reception. This thesis concentrates mainly on the study and evaluation of compression methods dedicated to transmission over wireless camera sensor networks. We have suggested a new image compression method which decreases the energy consumption of sensors and thus maintains a long network lifetime. We evaluate its hardware implementation using experiments on real camera sensor platforms in order to show the validity of our propositions, by measuring aspects such as the quantity of memory required for the implantation program of our algorithms, the energy consumption and the execution time. We then focus on the study of the hardware features of our proposed method of synthesis of the compression circuit when implemented on a FPGA and ASIC chip prototype

This master's thesis deals with questions about contactless camera detection of presence and right direction of assembled parts in the industry process. The main aim of this work is design and realization of graphical user interface and algorithm for automated camera measurement system in the industrial process.