Due to economic and environmental issues, bicycles have been regaining their significance as a transportation vehicle in urban scenarios. To further drive this desirable trend, policy makers must have the tools to access current bicycle infrastructures and road safety concerns. Fundamental for this assessment is a deeper understanding of how cyclists use current infrastructures, if the cycling experience results in stressful events, and the conditions of the current infrastructure. We here introduce a new platform, SMARTcycling, that, by taking advantage of the mobile power available to a smartphone, captures and stores data from several sensors, namely an action camera, a cardio signal acquisition belt, and smartphone's Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates. The data is further processed and, through visual cues, we access the cyclist driving events and road condition cues. SMARTcycling also detects the cyclist stress using the electrocardiograms (ECG) from the belt. We further contribute by making available a dataset containing the sensors data from 10 paths over two cities in Portugal. On this dataset, we show our initial promising results on event detection, road condition identification and stress assessment.

Global localization is a widely studied problem, and in essence corresponds to the online robot pose estimation based on a given map with landmarks, an odometry model, and real robot sensory observations and motion. In most approaches, the map provides the position of visible objects, which are then recognized to provide the robot pose estimation. Such object recognition with noisy sensory data is challenging. In this paper, we present an effective global localization technique using soft 3D object recognition to estimate the pose with respect to the landmarks in the given map. A depth sensor acquires a partial view for each observed object, from which our algorithm extracts the robot pose relative to the objects, based on a library of 3D Partial View Heat Kernel descriptors. Our approach departs from methods that require classification and registration against complete 3D models, which are prone to errors due to noisy sensory data and object misclassifications in the recognition stage. We experimentally validate our method in different robot paths with different common 3D environment objects. We also show the improvement of our method compared to when the partial view information is not used.

The current paper addresses the problem of object identification from multiple3D partial views, collected from different view angles with the objective of disambiguating between similar objects. We assume a mobile robot equipped with a depth sensor that autonomously collects observations from an object from different positions, with no previous known pattern. The challenge is to efficiently combine the set of observations into a single classification. We approach the problem with a multiple hypothesis filter that allows to combine information from a sequence of observations given the robot movement. We further innovate by off-line learning neighborhoods between possible hypothesis based on the similarity of observations. Such neighborhoods translate directly the ambiguity between objects, and allow to transfer the knowledge of one object to the other. In this paper we introduce our algorithm, Multiple Hypothesis for Object Class Disambiguation from Multiple Observations, and evaluate its accuracy and efficiency.

We introduce the Partial View Heat Kernel (PVHK) descriptor, for the purpose of 3D object representation and recognition from partial views, assumed to be partial object surfaces under self occlusion. PVHK describes partial views in a geometrically meaningful way, i.e., by establishing a unique relation between the shape of the view and the descriptor. PVHK is also stable with respect to sensor noise and therefore adequate for sensors, such as the current active 3D cameras. Furthermore, PVHK takes full advantage of the dual 3D/RGB nature of current sensors and seamlessly incorporates appearance information onto the 3D information. We formally define the PVHK descriptor, discuss related work, provide evidence of the PVHK properties and validate them in three purposefully diverse datasets, and demonstrate its potential for recognition tasks.

In this video we briefly illustrate the progress and contributions made with our mobile, indoor, service robots CoBots (Collaborative Robots), since their creation in 2009. Many researchers, present authors included, aim for autonomous mobile robots that robustly perform service tasks for humans in our indoor environments. The efforts towards this goal have been numerous and successful, and we build upon them. However, there are clearly many research challenges remaining until we can experience intelligent mobile robots that are fully functional and capable in our human environments.