An unmanned ground vehicle named Saturn (Sensing and Autonomous Tactical Urban Reconnaissance Network) has won the UK Ministry of Defense Grand Challenge. The robot was developed by Team Stellar, a collaboration of engineers from Cranfield University (Cranfield, UK; www.cranfield.ac.uk) and several small companies.
The competition was staged over three days at Copehill Down village on Salisbury Plain, built for urban warfare training exercises. The challenge was to remotely and robotically identify snipers, improvised explosive devices, heavy weapons, and enemy patrols before sending in troops. One hour was given to each of the 10 teams to complete the challenge.
Team Stellar used a mini-tank robot mounted with radar and visible-light sensors, and a MIRICLE 110K thermal imaging camera from Thermoteknix Systems (Cambridge, UK; www.thermoteknix.com). The judges presented the winners with the R.J. Mitchell Trophy, named after the designer of the World War II Spitfire fighter plane that earned its legendary status during the Battle of Britain. The MOD will now consider the team’s robots for further development, potentially leading to use in frontline combat situations by the Armed Forces.
Custom camera speeds cotton fiber sorting
Before cotton fiber can be spun, the raw cotton must be sorted to remove any foreign particles and fibers. While foreign particles can be clearly distinguished from the raw cotton by color, contrast, and structure, foreign fibers such as polypropylene or polyethylene films are often light and transparent, making them difficult to detect using conventional foreign particle separators. To detect these particles and separate them safely, the raw cotton is illuminated under polarized light, making the foreign plastic fibers appear colored. In this way, they can be distinguished from the raw cotton and separated.
Although color linescan cameras with trilinear sensors are often used in such machine-vision applications, trilinear sensors scan RGB images in different color planes. This can result in image artifacts when these sensors are used in high-speed imaging applications. For such applications, a trisensor camera system with a color beamsplitter can ensure the highest possible color registration. Consequently, Trützschler (Mönchengladbach, Germany; www.truetzschler.de), a manufacturer of fiber preparation and processing systems for the textile and nonwovens industries, called on Linos (Göttingen, Germany; www.linos.com) to develop a custom prism camera for its SECUROPROP SP-FP foreign particle separator.
To correct for the aberrations of the triple-channel prism used in the camera, Linos developed a specialized lens design. Lateral chromatic aberration was minimized by aligning within less than 2 μm. Another design aspect is color splitting in the triple prism by dielectric color-splitting coatings. To produce high-fidelity color images, two coatings were used in the beamsplitter. While the first coating reflects blue and lets red and green pass, the second reflects red and lets green pass.
Thermal imaging tests turbine blades
Thermosensorik (Erlangen, Germany; www.thermosensorik.de) has begun full-scale production of its ThermoSpectorGTC, a second-generation thermal imaging system for the nondestructive testing of high-temperature turbine blades. A prototype of the system had been delivered to a Siemens gas turbine plant in Berlin in 2002 and two follow-up orders from Siemens companies in the UK and China initiated further development of the ThermoSpectorGTC.
Building on experience with the prototype system, the complete system technology and interfaces to the turbine manufacturer’s control systems were optimized and partially redeveloped. This provides a high degree of automation up to the fully automatic good/bad decision, along with greater operator convenience. The ThermoSpectorGTC can be adapted to the requirements of turbine blades for both stationary gas turbines used in electricity production and for aircraft jet engines.
New facilities have been leased near the Thermosensorik factory and refitted to meet the requirements of production. Thermosensorik managing director Thomas Hierl said, “Without the underlying heat flow thermography, an economical application of modern gas turbines for the production of electricity would be significantly hampered. The turbine blades of the world’s largest gas turbine, with an output of 340 MW, were successfully tested with our prototype test system in Berlin.”
Infrared imaging helps surgeons see diseased tissue
Cancer surgeons today operate “blind” with no clear way of determining in real time whether they have removed all of the diseased tissue, which is the key to successful surgery. Researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA, now report development and early clinical trials of an imaging system that highlights cancerous tissue in the body so that surgeons can more easily see and remove diseased tissue with less damage to normal tissue near the tumor. “This technique is the first time that cancer surgeons can see structures that are otherwise invisible, providing image-guided surgery,” says research John Frangioni. “If we can see cancer, we have a chance of curing it.” The system is called Fluorescence-Assisted Resection and Exploration (FLARE). Under development for the past decade, the portable system consists of a near-infrared (NIR) imaging system, a video monitor, and a computer.
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Digital cameras monitor traffic
To eliminate the drawbacks of traffic loops, Aldis (Oak Ridge, TN, USA; www.aldiscorp.com) has developed GridSmart, a vision-based traffic-monitoring and control system using the Le575 digital camera from Lumenera (Ottawa, ON, Canada; www.lumenera.com). This technology replaces inefficient loop systems and obsolete central control systems with digital camera technology paired with a proprietary and custom-built 160° lens.
One of the major obstacles faced by Aldis in designing this system was ensuring all of the captured images were stable and clear, which is difficult when the camera is mounted above a traffic intersection and subject to movement. Rather than uncompress the prospectively distorted images into real-world coordinates, the image stabilization is performed on an embedded Texas Instruments DaVinci processor in the Le575. This reduces the processing overhead and allows the other valuable functions supported by the camera to be embedded.