Session 4: Mini and Micro Robots

Abstract

This Session covered three papers focusing on very diverse fields and technologies. However, all of them are addressing challenges and constraints that result form the small size of the systems themselves and/or the object to be handled.

The first paper, Visual Tracking for Teams of Miniature Robots, by Hyeun Jeong Min, Andrew Drenner, Nikos Papanikolopoulos from the University Minnesota, is on visual tracking for the control and collaboration in team of miniature robots. The main challenge addressed here is to track a moving target from a moving robot under strongly constrained calculation power and usage of low quality cameras. The proposed and experimentally evaluated approach builds on the Temporal Differences method combined with color blob tracking and uses a probability mass function for target matching. A qualitative and quantitative analysis using the well know eROSI mini-robots demonstrates the feasibility and quality of the proposed approach on small robots. The work is a nice continuation of previous research of the group with mobile mini-robots for exploration and surveillance.