19,082 research outputs found
Robust Environmental Mapping by Mobile Sensor Networks
Constructing a spatial map of environmental parameters is a crucial step to
preventing hazardous chemical leakages, forest fires, or while estimating a
spatially distributed physical quantities such as terrain elevation. Although
prior methods can do such mapping tasks efficiently via dispatching a group of
autonomous agents, they are unable to ensure satisfactory convergence to the
underlying ground truth distribution in a decentralized manner when any of the
agents fail. Since the types of agents utilized to perform such mapping are
typically inexpensive and prone to failure, this results in poor overall
mapping performance in real-world applications, which can in certain cases
endanger human safety. This paper presents a Bayesian approach for robust
spatial mapping of environmental parameters by deploying a group of mobile
robots capable of ad-hoc communication equipped with short-range sensors in the
presence of hardware failures. Our approach first utilizes a variant of the
Voronoi diagram to partition the region to be mapped into disjoint regions that
are each associated with at least one robot. These robots are then deployed in
a decentralized manner to maximize the likelihood that at least one robot
detects every target in their associated region despite a non-zero probability
of failure. A suite of simulation results is presented to demonstrate the
effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method when compared to existing
techniques.Comment: accepted to icra 201
An Effective Multi-Cue Positioning System for Agricultural Robotics
The self-localization capability is a crucial component for Unmanned Ground
Vehicles (UGV) in farming applications. Approaches based solely on visual cues
or on low-cost GPS are easily prone to fail in such scenarios. In this paper,
we present a robust and accurate 3D global pose estimation framework, designed
to take full advantage of heterogeneous sensory data. By modeling the pose
estimation problem as a pose graph optimization, our approach simultaneously
mitigates the cumulative drift introduced by motion estimation systems (wheel
odometry, visual odometry, ...), and the noise introduced by raw GPS readings.
Along with a suitable motion model, our system also integrates two additional
types of constraints: (i) a Digital Elevation Model and (ii) a Markov Random
Field assumption. We demonstrate how using these additional cues substantially
reduces the error along the altitude axis and, moreover, how this benefit
spreads to the other components of the state. We report exhaustive experiments
combining several sensor setups, showing accuracy improvements ranging from 37%
to 76% with respect to the exclusive use of a GPS sensor. We show that our
approach provides accurate results even if the GPS unexpectedly changes
positioning mode. The code of our system along with the acquired datasets are
released with this paper.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
201
Surface Reconstruction from Scattered Point via RBF Interpolation on GPU
In this paper we describe a parallel implicit method based on radial basis
functions (RBF) for surface reconstruction. The applicability of RBF methods is
hindered by its computational demand, that requires the solution of linear
systems of size equal to the number of data points. Our reconstruction
implementation relies on parallel scientific libraries and is supported for
massively multi-core architectures, namely Graphic Processor Units (GPUs). The
performance of the proposed method in terms of accuracy of the reconstruction
and computing time shows that the RBF interpolant can be very effective for
such problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0909.5413 by other author
Surface temperatures in New York City: Geospatial data enables the accurate prediction of radiative heat transfer
Three decades into the research seeking to derive the urban energy budget,
the dynamics of the thermal exchange between the densely built infrastructure
and the environment are still not well understood. We present a novel hybrid
experimental-numerical approach for the analysis of the radiative heat transfer
in New York City. The aim of this work is to contribute to the calculation of
the urban energy budget, in particular the stored energy. Improved
understanding of urban thermodynamics incorporating the interaction of the
various bodies will have implications on energy conservation at the building
scale, as well as human health and comfort at the urban scale. The platform
presented is based on longwave hyperspectral imaging of nearly 100 blocks of
Manhattan, and a geospatial radiosity model that describes the collective
radiative heat exchange between multiple buildings. The close comparison of
temperature values derived from measurements and the computed surface
temperatures (including streets and roads) implies that this geospatial,
thermodynamic numerical model applied to urban structures, is promising for
accurate and high resolution analysis of urban surface temperatures.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
Positional estimation techniques for an autonomous mobile robot
Techniques for positional estimation of a mobile robot navigation in an indoor environment are described. A comprehensive review of the various positional estimation techniques studied in the literature is first presented. The techniques are divided into four different types and each of them is discussed briefly. Two different kinds of environments are considered for positional estimation; mountainous natural terrain and an urban, man-made environment with polyhedral buildings. In both cases, the robot is assumed to be equipped with single visual camera that can be panned and tilted and also a 3-D description (world model) of the environment is given. Such a description could be obtained from a stereo pair of aerial images or from the architectural plans of the buildings. Techniques for positional estimation using the camera input and the world model are presented
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