48,297 research outputs found
FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation
FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven
robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First,
FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using
graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the ability
to combine (i) synthetic exteroceptive measurements generated in silico in real
time and (ii) vehicle dynamics and proprioceptive measurements generated in
motio by vehicle(s) in a motion-capture facility. FlightGoggles is capable of
simulating a virtual-reality environment around autonomous vehicle(s). While a
vehicle is in flight in the FlightGoggles virtual reality environment,
exteroceptive sensors are rendered synthetically in real time while all complex
extrinsic dynamics are generated organically through the natural interactions
of the vehicle. The FlightGoggles framework allows for researchers to
accelerate development by circumventing the need to estimate complex and
hard-to-model interactions such as aerodynamics, motor mechanics, battery
electrochemistry, and behavior of other agents. The ability to perform
vehicle-in-the-loop experiments with photorealistic exteroceptive sensor
simulation facilitates novel research directions involving, e.g., fast and
agile autonomous flight in obstacle-rich environments, safe human interaction,
and flexible sensor selection. FlightGoggles has been utilized as the main test
for selecting nine teams that will advance in the AlphaPilot autonomous drone
racing challenge. We survey approaches and results from the top AlphaPilot
teams, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Initial version appeared at IROS 2019. Supplementary material can be
found at https://flightgoggles.mit.edu. Revision includes description of new
FlightGoggles features, such as a photogrammetric model of the MIT Stata
Center, new rendering settings, and a Python AP
DS-SLAM: A Semantic Visual SLAM towards Dynamic Environments
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered to be a
fundamental capability for intelligent mobile robots. Over the past decades,
many impressed SLAM systems have been developed and achieved good performance
under certain circumstances. However, some problems are still not well solved,
for example, how to tackle the moving objects in the dynamic environments, how
to make the robots truly understand the surroundings and accomplish advanced
tasks. In this paper, a robust semantic visual SLAM towards dynamic
environments named DS-SLAM is proposed. Five threads run in parallel in
DS-SLAM: tracking, semantic segmentation, local mapping, loop closing, and
dense semantic map creation. DS-SLAM combines semantic segmentation network
with moving consistency check method to reduce the impact of dynamic objects,
and thus the localization accuracy is highly improved in dynamic environments.
Meanwhile, a dense semantic octo-tree map is produced, which could be employed
for high-level tasks. We conduct experiments both on TUM RGB-D dataset and in
the real-world environment. The results demonstrate the absolute trajectory
accuracy in DS-SLAM can be improved by one order of magnitude compared with
ORB-SLAM2. It is one of the state-of-the-art SLAM systems in high-dynamic
environments. Now the code is available at our github:
https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/DS-SLAMComment: 7 pages, accepted at the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018). Now the code is available at our
github: https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/DS-SLA
TZC: Efficient Inter-Process Communication for Robotics Middleware with Partial Serialization
Inter-process communication (IPC) is one of the core functions of modern
robotics middleware. We propose an efficient IPC technique called TZC (Towards
Zero-Copy). As a core component of TZC, we design a novel algorithm called
partial serialization. Our formulation can generate messages that can be
divided into two parts. During message transmission, one part is transmitted
through a socket and the other part uses shared memory. The part within shared
memory is never copied or serialized during its lifetime. We have integrated
TZC with ROS and ROS2 and find that TZC can be easily combined with current
open-source platforms. By using TZC, the overhead of IPC remains constant when
the message size grows. In particular, when the message size is 4MB (less than
the size of a full HD image), TZC can reduce the overhead of ROS IPC from tens
of milliseconds to hundreds of microseconds and can reduce the overhead of ROS2
IPC from hundreds of milliseconds to less than 1 millisecond. We also
demonstrate the benefits of TZC by integrating with TurtleBot2 that are used in
autonomous driving scenarios. We show that by using TZC, the braking distance
can be shortened by 16% than ROS
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