Jacky Baltes

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Jacky Baltes received his Ph. D. from the University of Calgary in 1996.Since 2016, Prof. Baltes is the Director of the Educational Robotics Center at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan.Prof. Baltes is the President of the Federation of International Robosports Association (FIRA), a yearly robot competition that attracts teams from all over the world competing in the youth, sports, challenge, and air categories.

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Efficient Image Processing for Increased Resolution and Color Correctness of CMOS Image Sensors

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

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Practical Camera and Colour Calibration for Large Rooms

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

This paper describes a practical method for calibrating the geometry and colour information for c... more This paper describes a practical method for calibrating the geometry and colour information for cameras surveying large rooms. To calibrate the geometry, we use a semi-automatic system to assign real world to pixel coordinates. This information is the input to the Tsai camera calibration method. Our system uses a two stage process in which easily recognizable objects (squares) are used to sort the individual data points and to find missing objects. Fine object features (corners) are used in a second step to determine the object's real world coordinates. An empirical evaluation of the system shows that the average and maximum errors are sufficiently small for our domain. Objects are recognized through coloured spots. The colour calibration uses six thresholds (Three colour ranges (Red, Green, and Blue) and three colour differences (Red -Green, Red -Blue, Green -Blue)). This paper describes a fast threshold comparison routine.

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Yue-Fei: Object Orientation and Id without Additional Markers

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

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Camera Calibration Using Rectangular Textures

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

This paper describes a practical method for the camera calibration given a single image of a regu... more This paper describes a practical method for the camera calibration given a single image of a regular texture. This paper uses the calibration of images of skyscrapers as an example. The paper introduces two algorithms for the assignment of realworld coordinates to feature points. The first algorithm selects five closely connected feature points and determines the orientation of the rectangular pattern. The second algorithm iteratively sorts the feature points and assigns real world coordinates to them. Lastly, the Tsai camera calibration algorithm is used to compute the camera parameters.

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RoboCup-99: A Student’s Perspective

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

One of the reasons for organizing robotic games is that they allow researchers to evaluate their ... more One of the reasons for organizing robotic games is that they allow researchers to evaluate their systems and approaches on a level playing field. This evaluation is important in a quickly developing field such as robotics with few real world applications. This paper investigates through a case-study how much participating at the RoboCup-99 competition has benefited a MSc. student at the University of Auckland. Although the participation was certainly stimulating, its influence on the research was indirect. The paper makes a number of suggestions that will make it easier to quantitatively evaluate research at these competitions and thus influence research more directly.

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Design of Walking Gaits for Tao-Pie-Pie , a Small Humanoid Robot

Robocup, 2003

This paper describes the methodology that we used to design and implement balancing and walking g... more This paper describes the methodology that we used to design and implement balancing and walking gaits for TAO-PIE-PIE, a small 30cm tall humanoid robot. TAO-PIE-PIE is a fully autonomous robot with all power, sensing, and processing done on-board. It is also a minimalistic design with only six degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, its performance is comparable to that of other more complex designs. The paper describes three patterns: (a) a straight walk, (b) a turn on the spot, and (c) a kicking pattern. Sensor feedback is provided by two gyroscopes that provide angular velocity in the left-right and forward-backward plane and a CMOS camera providing vision information. The feedback from the gyroscopes is not used to directly control the walking gait, because the signal is noisy and it would be computationally too expensive for the current processor hardware. Instead, coarse feedback from the gyroscopes is used to monitor the transition from one phase of the pattern to the next. This feedback is used to: (a) determine when a phase has completed successfully, and (b) when to change the endpoints of certain phases. TAO-PIE-PIE proved to be a successful design winning a number of honors at international competitions.

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COMP7950 (L??) Humanoid Robotics Winter 2007

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COMP4060 Intelligent Mobile Robotics Fall 2008

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COMP4180 Intelligent Mobile Robotics Fall 2009

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An Integrated Planning Representation using Macros, Abstractions, and Cases

Planning will be an essential part of future autonomous robots and integrated intelligent systems... more Planning will be an essential part of future autonomous robots and integrated intelligent systems. This paper focuses on learning problem solving knowledge in planning systems. The system is based on a common representation for macros, abstractions, and cases. Therefore, it is able to exploit both classical and case{based techniques. The general operators in a successful plan derivation would be assessed for their potential usefulness, and some stored. The feasibility of this approach w as studied through the implementation of a learning system for abstraction. New macros are motivated by trying to improve the operator{ set. One heuristic used to improve the operator{ set is generating operators with more general pre{ conditions than existing ones. This heuristic leads naturally to abstraction hierarchies. This investigation showed promising results on the towers of Hanoi problem. The paper concludes by describing methods for learning other problem solving knowledge. This knowledge can be represented by allowing operators at dierent levels of abstraction in a renement.

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Adaptive Path Planner for Highly Dynamic Environments

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

This paper describes adaptive path planning, a novel approach to path planning for car-like mobil... more This paper describes adaptive path planning, a novel approach to path planning for car-like mobile robots. Instead of creating a new plan from scratch, whenever changes in the environment invalidate the current plan, the adaptive path planner attempts to adapt the old plan to the new situation. The paper proposes an efficient representation for path that is easily amendable to adaptation. Associated with the path planner is a set of repair strategies. These repair strategies are local methods to fix a plan to compensate for object movement in the domain. The repair strategies are specific and have a high probability of being able to fix a plan. An empirical evaluation shows that adaptive path planning is suitable to highly dynamic domains, such as RoboCup. Adaptive path planning reduces the cumulative planning time by a factor of 2.7 compared to Bicchi's planner. At the same time, the quality of the plans generated by the adaptive path planner were similar to those generated by Bicchi's planner.

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A benchmark suite for mobile robots

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Casebased Meta Learning: Sustained Learning supported by a Dynamically Biased Version Space

It is well{recognized that in practical inductive learning systems the search for a concept must ... more It is well{recognized that in practical inductive learning systems the search for a concept must be heavily biased. In addition the bias must be dynamic, adapting to the current learning problem. Another important requirement is sustained learning, allowing transfer from known tasks to new ones. Previous work on dynamic bias has not explicitly addressed learning transfer, while previous case{based learning research suers from a variety of problems. This paper presents a method of Case{Based Meta Learning (CBML), in which the cases are concepts, rather than instances, and retrieved similar concepts are used as a skeletal version space to speed up learning. CBML is independent of the concept representation language. The CBML{Clerk system, which learns repetitive operating system tasks, is presented as a demonstration.

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Adaptive Path Planner for Highly Dynamic

ABSTRACT

4 Stooges

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

The 4 Stooges are a small sized RoboCupteam, which grew out of the All Botz, a team which compete... more The 4 Stooges are a small sized RoboCupteam, which grew out of the All Botz, a team which competed previously at RoboCup-99 and RoboCup-00. One of the main differences is that the 4 Stooges are a team of fully autonomous robots. All sensors, actuators, and power supply (CMOS camera, and battery) as well as all processing is housed on the robot itself.

FERRET: An Intelligent Assistant for Internet Searching

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

ABSTRACT

Strategy selection, goal generation, and role assignment in a robotic soccer team

7th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, 2002. ICARCV 2002., 2002

ABSTRACT

Planning strategy representation in DoLittle

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998

This paper describes multi-strategy planning and its implementation in the DOLITTLE system, which... more This paper describes multi-strategy planning and its implementation in the DOLITTLE system, which can combine many different planning strategies, including means-ends analysis, macro-based planning, abstraction-based planning (reduced and relaxed), and case-based planning on a single problem. Planning strategies are defined as methods to reduce the search space by exploiting some assumptions (socalled planning biases) about the problem domain. General operators are a generalization of standard STRIPS operators that conveniently represent many different planning strategies. The focus of this work is to develop a representation weak enough to represent a wide variety of different strategies, but still strong enough to emulate them. The search control method applies different general operators based on a strongest first principle; planning biases that are expected to lead to small search spaces are tried first. An empirical evaluation in three domains showed that multi-strategy planning performed significantly better than the best single strategy planners in some domains.

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An Intuitive and Flexible Architecture for Intelligent Mobile Robots

The goal of this research is to develop an intuitive, adaptive, and flexible architecture for int... more The goal of this research is to develop an intuitive, adaptive, and flexible architecture for intelligent mobile robots. We propose a hybrid architecture that uses behaviour trees and finite state machines. A task manager selects behaviours based on approximations of their applicability and the expected reward of a behaviour. One major feature of this architecture is that important information of

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Jacky Baltes

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