New Generation of Instrumented Ranges: Enabling Automated Performance Analysis

Military training conducted on physical ranges that match a unit’s future operational environment provides an invaluable experience. Today, to conduct a training exercise while ensuring a unit’s performance is closely observed, evaluated, and reported on in an After Action Review, the unit requires a number of instructors to accompany the different elements. Training organized on ranges for urban warfighting brings an additional level of complexity—the high level of occlusion typical for these environments multiplies the number of evaluators needed. While the units have great need for such training opportunities, they may not have the necessary human resources to conduct them successfully. In this paper we report on our US Navy/ONR-sponsored project aimed at a new generation of instrumented ranges, and the early results we have achieved. We suggest a radically different concept: instead of recording multiple video streams that need to be reviewed and evaluated by a number of instructors, our system will focus on capturing dynamic individual warfighter pose data and performing automated performance evaluation. We will use an in situ network of automatically-controlled pan-tilt-zoom video cameras and personal position and orientation sensing devices. Our system will record video, reconstruct dynamic 3D individual poses, analyze, recognize events, evaluate performances, generate reports, provide real-time free exploration of recorded data, and even allow the user to generate ‘what-if’ scenarios that were never recorded. The most direct benefit for an individual unit will be the ability to conduct training with fewer human resources, while having a more quantitative account of their performance (dispersion across the terrain, ‘weapon flagging’ incidents, number of patrols conducted). The instructors will have immediate feedback on some elements of the unit’s performance. Having data sets for multiple units will enable historical trend analysis, thus providing new insights and benefits for the entire service.Office of Naval Researc

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

Proceedings of the 2009 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory

The joint workshop of the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB, Karlsruhe, and the Vision and Fusion Laboratory (Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)), is organized annually since 2005 with the aim to report on the latest research and development findings of the doctoral students of both institutions. This book provides a collection of 16 technical reports on the research results presented on the 2009 workshop

Proceedings of the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory

This book is a collection of 15 reviewed technical reports summarizing the presentations at the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory. The covered topics include image processing, optical signal processing, visual inspection, pattern recognition and classification, human-machine interaction, world and situation modeling, autonomous system localization and mapping, information fusion, and trust propagation in sensor networks