Browsing by Author "Thomas, Antony"

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    Estimate the Unknown Environment with Biosonar Echoes—A Simulation Study
    Tanveer, Muhammad Hassan; Thomas, Antony; Ahmed, Waqar; Zhu, Hongxiao (MDPI, 2021-06-18)
    Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great potential in various applications such as surveillance, search and rescue. To perform safe and efficient navigation, it is vitally important for a UAV to evaluate the environment accurately and promptly. In this work, we present a simulation study for the estimation of foliage distribution as a UAV equipped with biosonar navigates through a forest. Based on a simulated forest environment, foliage echoes are generated by using a bat-inspired bisonar simulator. These biosonar echoes are then used to estimate the spatial distribution of both sparsely and densely distributed tree leaves. While a simple batch processing method is able to estimate sparsely distributed leaf locations well, a wavelet scattering technique coupled with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is shown to be effective to estimate densely distributed leaves. Our approach is validated by using multiple setups of leaf distributions in the simulated forest environment. Ninety-seven percent accuracy is obtained while estimating thickly distributed foliage.
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    A simulation framework for bio-inspired sonar sensing with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
    Tanveer, M. Hassan; Wu, Xiaowei; Thomas, Antony; Ming, Chen; Müller, Rolf; Tokekar, Pratap; Zhu, Hongxiao (2020-11-03)
    We introduce a unified simulation framework that generates natural sensing environments and produces biosonar echoes under various sensing scenarios. This framework produces rich sensory data with environmental information completely known, thus can be used for the training of robotic algorithms for biosonar-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The simulated environment consists of random trees with full geometry of the tree foliage. To simulate a single tree, we adopt the Lindenmayer system to generate the initial branching pattern and integrate that with the available measurements of the 3D computer-aided design object files to create natural-looking branches, sub-branches, and leaves. A forest is formed by simulating trees at random locations generated by using an inhomogeneous Poisson process. While our simulated environments can be generally used for testing other sensors and training robotic algorithms, in this study we focus on testing bat-inspired Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that recreate bat's flying behavior through biosonar sensors. To this end, we also introduce an foliage echo simulator that produces biosonar echoes while mimicking bat's biosonar system. We demonstrate the application of the proposed simulation framework by generating real-world scenarios with multiple trees and computing the resulting impulse responses under static or dynamic motions of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.