TY - JOUR A1 - Verdú Monedero, Rafael AU - Berenguer Vidal, Rafael AU - Morales Sánchez, Juan AU - Vázquez, G. AU - Otero, T.F. AU - Weruaga Prieto, Luis T1 - 3D mechanical characterization of artificial muscles with stereoscopic computer vision and active contours Y1 - 2003 SN - 1522-4880 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10317/889 AB - Artificial muscles are formed by attaching a conducting polymeric film to a non-conducting one. Applying an electrical current on the muscle. a macroscopic bending movement appears on it. Study of curvature variations and related parameters, such as speed of motion or energy of curvature, is necessary for improving the efficiency of these devices. In a previous work. a one-cam computer vision system was developed to estimate motion parameters in 2D with precise results. In this paper, a two-cam stereo vision system is proposed to process the image sequence and track the muscle in 3D. Active contours models are employed in motion detection and mechanical parameters estimation. Results prove the validity of this approach, allowing automatic testing on the research into artificial muscles. KW - Teoría de la Señal y las Comunicaciones KW - Músculos artificiales KW - Procesamiento de imágenes estéreo KW - Secuencia de imágenes KW - Procesamiento de señales multidimensionales KW - Caracterización mecánica 3D KW - Realización de películas poliméricas LA - eng PB - IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Processing Society ER -