PMK-A Knowledge Processing Framework for Autonomous Robotics Perception and Manipulation.

Autonomous indoor service robots are supposed to accomplish tasks, like , which involve manipulation actions. Particularly, for complex manipulation tasks which are subject to geometric constraints, spatial information and a rich semantic knowledge about objects, types, and functionality are required, together with the way in which these objects can be manipulated. In this line, this paper presents an ontological-based reasoning framework called Perception and Manipulation Knowledge (PMK) that includes: (1) the modeling of the environment in a standardized way to provide common vocabularies for information exchange in human-robot or robot-robot collaboration, (2) a sensory module to perceive the objects in the environment and assert the ontological knowledge, (3) an evaluation-based analysis of the situation of the objects in the environment, in order to enhance the planning of manipulation tasks.

A three-stage method for the 3D reconstruction of the tracheobronchial tree from CT scans.

This paper proposes a method for segmenting the airways from CT scans of the chest to obtain a 3D model that can be used in the virtual bronchoscopy for the exploration and the planning of paths to the lesions. The method is composed of 3 stages: a gross segmentation that reconstructs the main airway tree using adaptive region growing, a finer segmentation that identifies any potential airway region based on a 2D process that enhances bronchi walls using local information, and a final process to connect any isolated bronchus to the main airways using a morphologic reconstruction process and a path planning technique. The paper includes two examples for the evaluation and discussion of the proposal.