PUBLICATIONS & PREPRINTS
Aug 2024- Sep 2024
This paper presents L-VITeX, a lightweight visual intuition system for terrain exploration designed for resource-constrained robots and swarms. L-VITeX aims to provide a hint of Regions of Interest (RoIs) without computationally expensive processing. By utilizing the Faster Objects, More Objects (FOMO) tinyML architecture, the system achieves high accuracy (>99%) in RoI detection while operating on minimal hardware resources (Peak RAM usage < 50 KB) with near real-time inference (<200 ms). The paper evaluates L-VITeX's performance across various terrains, including mountainous areas, underwater shipwreck debris regions, and Martian rocky surfaces. Additionally, it demonstrates the system's application in 3D mapping using a small mobile robot run by ESP32-Cam and Gaussian Splats (GS), showcasing its potential to enhance exploration efficiency and decision-making.
Robotic prostheses and exoskeletons can do wonders compared to their non-robotic counterpart. However, in a cost-soaring world where 1 in every 10 patients has access to normal medical prostheses, access to advanced ones is, unfortunately, extremely limited especially due to their high cost, a significant portion of which is contributed to by the diagnosis and controlling units. However, affordability is often not a major concern for developing such devices as with cost reduction, performance is also found to be deducted due to the cost vs. performance trade-off. Considering the gravity of such circumstances, the goal of this research was to propose an affordable wearable real-time gait diagnosis unit (GDU) aimed at robotic prostheses and exoskeletons. As a proof of concept, it has also developed the GDU prototype which leveraged TinyML to run two parallel quantized int8 models into an ESP32 NodeMCU development board (7.30 USD) to effectively classify five gait scenarios (idle, walk, run, hopping, and skip) and generate an anomaly score based on acceleration data received from two attached IMUs. The developed wearable gait diagnosis stand-alone unit could be fitted to any prosthesis or exoskeleton and could effectively classify the gait scenarios with an overall accuracy of 92% and provide anomaly scores within 95-96 ms with only 3 seconds of gait data in real-time.
Jan 2023- Nov 2023
Nov 2021- Jan 2022
Habitation in mars is one of the most ambitious goals of the 21st century as our permanent habitat, the earth is slowly losing its habitation qualities due to different disasters, pollution and rise of temperature. But there include several major challenges before we can make mars a habitable planet. Radiation, dusty storms, meteorites etc. makes the Martian surface one of the difficult places to live. The caves in the mars can be a viable solution to this problem as they can give protection against these threats. Lava caves are of particular interest in these case as these caves is similar to the lava caves found on earth. This research presents the design and performance evaluation of an autonomous secondary explorer rover in lava tubes of Mars. 3D & 2D mapping was done in a simulated environment and the performance of various path planning algorithms was evaluated in the lava cave. The experiment results show global path planners, especially A* can perform well if the entrance and exit are well defined while local path planners need human interventions several times even though they can avoid sudden dangers or landscape change inside the cave.