2,610 research outputs found
Benchmarking Particle Filter Algorithms for Efficient Velodyne-Based Vehicle Localization
Keeping a vehicle well-localized within a prebuilt-map is at the core of any autonomous vehicle navigation system. In this work, we show that both standard SIR sampling and rejection-based optimal sampling are suitable for efficient (10 to 20 ms) real-time pose tracking without feature detection that is using raw point clouds from a 3D LiDAR. Motivated by the large amount of information captured by these sensors, we perform a systematic statistical analysis of how many points are actually required to reach an optimal ratio between efficiency and positioning accuracy. Furthermore, initialization from adverse conditions, e.g., poor GPS signal in urban canyons, we also identify the optimal particle filter settings required to ensure convergence. Our findings include that a decimation factor between 100 and 200 on incoming point clouds provides a large savings in computational cost with a negligible loss in localization accuracy for a VLP-16 scanner. Furthermore, an initial density of ∼2 particles/m 2 is required to achieve 100% convergence success for large-scale (∼100,000 m 2 ), outdoor global localization without any additional hint from GPS or magnetic field sensors. All implementations have been released as open-source software
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
Incrementally Learned Mixture Models for GNSS Localization
GNSS localization is an important part of today's autonomous systems,
although it suffers from non-Gaussian errors caused by non-line-of-sight
effects. Recent methods are able to mitigate these effects by including the
corresponding distributions in the sensor fusion algorithm. However, these
approaches require prior knowledge about the sensor's distribution, which is
often not available. We introduce a novel sensor fusion algorithm based on
variational Bayesian inference, that is able to approximate the true
distribution with a Gaussian mixture model and to learn its parametrization
online. The proposed Incremental Variational Mixture algorithm automatically
adapts the number of mixture components to the complexity of the measurement's
error distribution. We compare the proposed algorithm against current
state-of-the-art approaches using a collection of open access real world
datasets and demonstrate its superior localization accuracy.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, published in proceedings of IEEE Intelligent
Vehicles Symposium (IV) 201
Scalable Estimation of Precision Maps in a MapReduce Framework
This paper presents a large-scale strip adjustment method for LiDAR mobile
mapping data, yielding highly precise maps. It uses several concepts to achieve
scalability. First, an efficient graph-based pre-segmentation is used, which
directly operates on LiDAR scan strip data, rather than on point clouds.
Second, observation equations are obtained from a dense matching, which is
formulated in terms of an estimation of a latent map. As a result of this
formulation, the number of observation equations is not quadratic, but rather
linear in the number of scan strips. Third, the dynamic Bayes network, which
results from all observation and condition equations, is partitioned into two
sub-networks. Consequently, the estimation matrices for all position and
orientation corrections are linear instead of quadratic in the number of
unknowns and can be solved very efficiently using an alternating least squares
approach. It is shown how this approach can be mapped to a standard key/value
MapReduce implementation, where each of the processing nodes operates
independently on small chunks of data, leading to essentially linear
scalability. Results are demonstrated for a dataset of one billion measured
LiDAR points and 278,000 unknowns, leading to maps with a precision of a few
millimeters.Comment: ACM SIGSPATIAL'16, October 31-November 03, 2016, Burlingame, CA, US
Probabilistic RGB-D Odometry based on Points, Lines and Planes Under Depth Uncertainty
This work proposes a robust visual odometry method for structured
environments that combines point features with line and plane segments,
extracted through an RGB-D camera. Noisy depth maps are processed by a
probabilistic depth fusion framework based on Mixtures of Gaussians to denoise
and derive the depth uncertainty, which is then propagated throughout the
visual odometry pipeline. Probabilistic 3D plane and line fitting solutions are
used to model the uncertainties of the feature parameters and pose is estimated
by combining the three types of primitives based on their uncertainties.
Performance evaluation on RGB-D sequences collected in this work and two public
RGB-D datasets: TUM and ICL-NUIM show the benefit of using the proposed depth
fusion framework and combining the three feature-types, particularly in scenes
with low-textured surfaces, dynamic objects and missing depth measurements.Comment: Major update: more results, depth filter released as opensource, 34
page
Simultaneous Parameter Calibration, Localization, and Mapping
The calibration parameters of a mobile robot play a substantial role in navigation tasks. Often these parameters are subject to variations that depend either on changes in the environment or on the load of the robot. In this paper, we propose an approach to simultaneously estimate a map of the environment, the position of the on-board sensors of the robot, and its kinematic parameters. Our method requires no prior knowledge about the environment and relies only on a rough initial guess of the parameters of the platform. The proposed approach estimates the parameters online and it is able to adapt to non-stationary changes of the configuration. We tested our approach in simulated environments and on a wide range of real-world data using different types of robotic platforms. (C) 2012 Taylor & Francis and The Robotics Society of Japa
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