Deep Network Uncertainty Maps for Indoor Navigation

Most mobile robots for indoor use rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping and navigation. These sensors, however, cannot detect transparent surfaces or measure the full occupancy of complex objects such as tables. Deep Neural Networks have recently been proposed to overcome this limitation by learning to estimate object occupancy. These estimates are nevertheless subject to uncertainty, making the evaluation of their confidence an important issue for these measures to be useful for autonomous navigation and mapping. In this work we approach the problem from two sides. First we discuss uncertainty estimation in deep models, proposing a solution based on a fully convolutional neural network. The proposed architecture is not restricted by the assumption that the uncertainty follows a Gaussian model, as in the case of many popular solutions for deep model uncertainty estimation, such as Monte-Carlo Dropout. We present results showing that uncertainty over obstacle distances is actually better modeled with a Laplace distribution. Then, we propose a novel approach to build maps based on Deep Neural Network uncertainty models. In particular, we present an algorithm to build a map that includes information over obstacle distance estimates while taking into account the level of uncertainty in each estimate. We show how the constructed map can be used to increase global navigation safety by planning trajectories which avoid areas of high uncertainty, enabling higher autonomy for mobile robots in indoor settings.Comment: Accepted for publication in "2019 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)

LocPoseNet: Robust Location Prior for Unseen Object Pose Estimation

Object location priors have been shown to be critical for the standard 6D object pose estimation setting, where the training and testing objects are the same. Specifically, they can be used to initialize the 3D object translation and facilitate 3D object rotation estimation. Unfortunately, the object detectors that are used for this purpose do not generalize to unseen objects, i.e., objects from new categories at test time. Therefore, existing 6D pose estimation methods for previously-unseen objects either assume the ground-truth object location to be known, or yield inaccurate results when it is unavailable. In this paper, we address this problem by developing a method, LocPoseNet, able to robustly learn location prior for unseen objects. Our method builds upon a template matching strategy, where we propose to distribute the reference kernels and convolve them with a query to efficiently compute multi-scale correlations. We then introduce a novel translation estimator, which decouples scale-aware and scale-robust features to predict different object location parameters. Our method outperforms existing works by a large margin on LINEMOD and GenMOP. We further construct a challenging synthetic dataset, which allows us to highlight the better robustness of our method to various noise sources