Web ROC-SIANI

Workshop on Marine Sensors and Manipulators

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2015-01-22T09:20:00Z

Next February 11^th, 12^th and 13^th 2015 will be held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, within the Eurocast 2015, the Workshop on Marine Sensors and Manipulators organized by our Division colleague Darío Sosa.

The aim of this event is to bring together sensor developers and researchers (including robotic arms and manipulators) related to the Marine Robotics field, together with projects, institutions and companies working with, and promoting marine robotics. In addition to presentations, there will be also tutorials and robotic demostrations open to the general public.

Further information in relation to the whorshop is available through the following link: www.marinerobotics.es.

Welcome

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2012-11-26T18:21:42Z

This is the web site of the Division of Robotics and Computational Oceanography (ROC) at the Instituto Universitario de Sistemas Inteligentes y Aplicaciones Numéricas en Ingeniería (SIANI) at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), Spain.

Using Data Mining to Improve the Public Transport in Gran Canaria Island

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2015-05-21T12:02:11Z

TouCAN: Mejora y Ampliación de Funcionalidades

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2015-04-15T13:25:00Z

The CoolBOT Project

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2012-11-29T20:29:39Z

The CoolBOT Project

Description: CoolBOT is a C++ component oriented distributed programming framework for robotics based on the Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) paradigm. Around this framework Division ROC-SIANI has built an open source software innitiative called The CoolBOT Project.

Project's website: www.coolbotproject.org

Success in the World Robotic Sailing Championship 2013

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2013-09-11T13:25:00Z

Between September 2nd and 6th 2013, the sixth edition of the World Robotic Sailing Championship (WRSC) 2013 was celebrated in the french city of Brest where a team of our division, ROC-SIANI, has participated. This event has been developed in parallel with the International Robotic Sailing Conference (IRSC) 2013.

Division ROC-SIANI's team was integrated by our colleague Jorge Cabrera Gámez, and our Master SIANI student and Computer Science engineer, Ángel Ramos de Miguel. The team presented the paper “An Embedded Low-Power Control System for Autonomous Sailboats” at the IRSC'2013 conference, and participated on WRSC'2013 competitions, in the category of microsail for one-meter length sailboats, with A-TIRMA, a small autonomous low-consumption sailboat developed at division ROC-SIANI.

Several teams participated in the competition in different categories, and coming from different countries. Concretely, eleven teams participated coming from Germany, Finland, France, Wales, Portugal and Spain (our team). For several days in varied weather conditions, the teams had to face different navigation tests in Brest's surrounding waters. The stellar test this year, organized by the French Navy's Ecole Navale at Brest, was a navigation test carried out in the waters of the bay of Brest, where boats had to traverse a distance of four miles in a completely autonomous way.

In the end, our team got two first prizes, one of them, winning the endurance test in the Microsail category (the Ecole Navale Endurance Special Award), and the other one, managing to rank on the first place in the general classification in the same category (the Best Autonomous Microsailboat Award). Here we congrats the team for this great achievement!.

A-TIRMA is a project developed in our division which has been possible thanks to the conjoint work of several members of Division ROC-SIANI with naval engineers external to our university, and to the generous and disinterested collaboration of the Real Club Náutico de Gran Canaria.

Success history applied to expert system for underwater glider path planning using differential evolution

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2019-12-20T18:28:19Z

This paper presents an application of a recently well performing evolutionary algorithm for continuous numerical optimization, Success-History Based Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm (SHADE) including Linear population size reduction (L-SHADE), to an expert system for underwater glider path planning (UGPP). The proposed algorithm is compared to other similar algorithms and also to results from literature. The motivation of this work is to provide an alternative to the current glider mission control systems, that are based mostly on multidisciplinary human-expert teams from robotic and oceanographic areas. Initially configured as a decision-support expert system, the natural evolution of the tool is targeting higher autonomy levels. To assess the performance of the applied optimizers, the test functions for UGPP are utilized as defined in literature, which simulate real-life oceanic mission scenarios. Based on these test functions, in this paper, the performance of the proposed application of L-SHADE to UGPP is aggregated using statistical analyis. The depicted fitness convergence graphs, final obtained fitness plots, trajectories drawn, and per-scenario analysis show that the new proposed algorithm yields stable and competitive output trajectories. Over the set of benchmark missions, the newly obtained results with a configured L-SHADE outperforms existing literature results in UGPP and ranks best over the compared algorithms. Moreover, some additional previously applied algorithms have been reconfigured to yield improved performance. Thereby, this new application of evolutionary algorithms to UGPP contributes significantly to the capacity of the decision-makers, when they use the improved UGPP expert system yielding better trajectories.

Stripe based Clothes Segmentation

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2015-05-21T12:00:00Z

South Atlantic crossing mission completed!

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2014-05-23T09:55:00Z

We would like to echo here the news of a new long distance navigation mission completed with success by a glider autonomous robot, baptized as RU-29 Challenger. In this mission our colleague and member of Division ROC-SIANI, Antonio González Ramos has participated actively. Congratulations, Antonio, for this new achievement!. We include a link with further informations about the event:

http://www.ulpgc.es/index.php?pagina=noticia&ver=glider_22052014

SMACC: A System for Microplastics Automatic Counting and Classification

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2020-02-17T16:12:03Z

The management of plastic debris is a serious issue due to its durability. Unfortunately, million tons of plastic end up in the sea becoming one of the biggest current environmental problems. One way to monitor the amount of plastic in beaches is to collect samples and visually count and sort the plastic particles present in them. This is a very time-consuming task. In this work, we present a Computer Vision-based system which is able to automatically count and classify microplastic particles (1-5 mm) into five different visual classes. After cleaning a collected sample in the lab, the proposed system makes use of a pair of its images with different characteristics. The procedure includes a segmentation step, which is based on the Sauvola thresholding method, followed by a feature extraction and classification step. Different features and classifiers are evaluated as well as a deep learning approach. The system is tested on 12 different beach samples with a total of 2507 microplastic particles. The particles of each sample were manually counted and sorted by an expert. This data represents the ground truth, which is compared later with the results of the automatic processing proposals to evaluate their accuracy. The difference in the number of particles is 34 (1.4%) and the error in their classification is less than 4% for all types except for the line shapes particles. These results are obtained in less than half of the time needed by the human expert doing the same task manually. This implies that it is possible to process more than twice as many samples using the same time, allowing the biologists to monitor wider areas and more frequently than doing the process manually.

Secondary school IES José Arencibia Gil's visit - January 2013

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2013-01-29T13:05:00Z

Last 25th January 2013 we have received at Division ROC-SIANI a visit of a group of students from the secondary school IES José Arencibia Gil from Telde. You can have a look about how the visit was in our channel ROCSIANI in youtube. We include now a couple of "time lapse" videos recorded during the visit.

ROC-SIANI's Web

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2012-10-29T19:45:31Z

Blah, blah, blah ...

ROC-SIANI researchers in the media

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2014-05-26T12:40:00Z

Last week, two colleagues of our division, Modesto Castrillón y Javier Lorenzo, received the attention from the media in relation to their work in human machine interaction, and their collaboration with colleagues at Universidad del Pais Vasco. Here we include links to those media:

"La Provincia" newspaper: here.
The radio magazine "El Espejo Canario": here.
Canarias Radio: here.

We congrat our fellow division members, Modesto and Javier, for the diffusion of their work in the media.

Publications

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2012-11-26T18:30:00Z

Division ROC-SIANI's publications and documents: journal and conference papers (google scholar), Phd theses, master theses, degrees projects, research reports, ... (more)

Publications

Antonio C. Domínguez Brito — 2014-05-09T12:05:00Z

ROC-SIANI Publications