3,173 research outputs found
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
Towards Visual Ego-motion Learning in Robots
Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the
past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying
motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform
these tasks, in a minimally supervised setting, as they gain more experience.
To this end, we propose a fully trainable solution to visual ego-motion
estimation for varied camera optics. We propose a visual ego-motion learning
architecture that maps observed optical flow vectors to an ego-motion density
estimate via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). By modeling the architecture as a
Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE), our model is able to provide
introspective reasoning and prediction for ego-motion induced scene-flow.
Additionally, our proposed model is especially amenable to bootstrapped
ego-motion learning in robots where the supervision in ego-motion estimation
for a particular camera sensor can be obtained from standard navigation-based
sensor fusion strategies (GPS/INS and wheel-odometry fusion). Through
experiments, we show the utility of our proposed approach in enabling the
concept of self-supervised learning for visual ego-motion estimation in
autonomous robots.Comment: Conference paper; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2017, Vancouver CA; 8 pages, 8 figures,
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