1,213 research outputs found
Graph-based Global Robot Localization Informing Situational Graphs with Architectural Graphs
peer reviewedIn this paper, we propose a solution for legged robot localization using
architectural plans. Our specific contributions towards this goal are several.
Firstly, we develop a method for converting the plan of a building into what we
denote as an architectural graph (A-Graph). When the robot starts moving in an
environment, we assume it has no knowledge about it, and it estimates an online
situational graph representation (S-Graph) of its surroundings. We develop a
novel graph-to-graph matching method, in order to relate the S-Graph estimated
online from the robot sensors and the A-Graph extracted from the building
plans. Note the challenge in this, as the S-Graph may show a partial view of
the full A-Graph, their nodes are heterogeneous and their reference frames are
different. After the matching, both graphs are aligned and merged, resulting in
what we denote as an informed Situational Graph (iS-Graph), with which we
achieve global robot localization and exploitation of prior knowledge from the
building plans. Our experiments show that our pipeline shows a higher
robustness and a significantly lower pose error than several LiDAR localization
baselines.Robotic Situational Awareness By Understanding And Reasonin
Doctor of Philosophy
dissertationWe propose to examine a representation which features combined action and perception signals, i.e., instead of having a purely geometric representation of the perceptual data, we include the motor actions, e.g., aiming a camera at an object, which are al
Indoor Mapping and Reconstruction with Mobile Augmented Reality Sensor Systems
Augmented Reality (AR) ermöglicht es, virtuelle, dreidimensionale Inhalte direkt
innerhalb der realen Umgebung darzustellen. Anstatt jedoch beliebige virtuelle
Objekte an einem willkĂŒrlichen Ort anzuzeigen, kann AR Technologie auch genutzt
werden, um Geodaten in situ an jenem Ort darzustellen, auf den sich die Daten
beziehen. Damit eröffnet AR die Möglichkeit, die reale Welt durch virtuelle, ortbezogene
Informationen anzureichern. Im Rahmen der vorliegenen Arbeit wird diese
Spielart von AR als "Fused Reality" definiert und eingehend diskutiert.
Der praktische Mehrwert, den dieses Konzept der Fused Reality bietet, lÀsst sich
gut am Beispiel seiner Anwendung im Zusammenhang mit digitalen GebÀudemodellen
demonstrieren, wo sich gebÀudespezifische Informationen - beispielsweise der
Verlauf von Leitungen und Kabeln innerhalb der WĂ€nde - lagegerecht am realen
Objekt darstellen lassen. Um das skizzierte Konzept einer Indoor Fused Reality
Anwendung realisieren zu können, mĂŒssen einige grundlegende Bedingungen erfĂŒllt
sein. So kann ein bestimmtes GebÀude nur dann mit ortsbezogenen Informationen
augmentiert werden, wenn von diesem GebĂ€ude ein digitales Modell verfĂŒgbar ist.
Zwar werden gröĂere Bauprojekt heutzutage oft unter Zuhilfename von Building
Information Modelling (BIM) geplant und durchgefĂŒhrt, sodass ein digitales Modell
direkt zusammen mit dem realen GebÀude ensteht, jedoch sind im Falle Àlterer
BestandsgebĂ€ude digitale Modelle meist nicht verfĂŒgbar. Ein digitales Modell eines
bestehenden GebĂ€udes manuell zu erstellen, ist zwar möglich, jedoch mit groĂem
Aufwand verbunden. Ist ein passendes GebÀudemodell vorhanden, muss ein AR
GerĂ€t auĂerdem in der Lage sein, die eigene Position und Orientierung im GebĂ€ude
relativ zu diesem Modell bestimmen zu können, um Augmentierungen lagegerecht
anzeigen zu können.
Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden diverse Aspekte der angesprochenen Problematik
untersucht und diskutiert. Dabei werden zunÀchst verschiedene Möglichkeiten
diskutiert, Indoor-GebĂ€udegeometrie mittels Sensorsystemen zu erfassen. AnschlieĂend
wird eine Untersuchung prÀsentiert, inwiefern moderne AR GerÀte, die
in der Regel ebenfalls ĂŒber eine Vielzahl an Sensoren verfĂŒgen, ebenfalls geeignet
sind, als Indoor-Mapping-Systeme eingesetzt zu werden. Die resultierenden Indoor
Mapping DatensÀtze können daraufhin genutzt werden, um automatisiert
GebÀudemodelle zu rekonstruieren. Zu diesem Zweck wird ein automatisiertes,
voxel-basiertes Indoor-Rekonstruktionsverfahren vorgestellt. Dieses wird auĂerdem
auf der Grundlage vierer zu diesem Zweck erfasster DatensÀtze mit zugehörigen
Referenzdaten quantitativ evaluiert. Desweiteren werden verschiedene
Möglichkeiten diskutiert, mobile AR GerÀte innerhalb eines GebÀudes und des zugehörigen
GebĂ€udemodells zu lokalisieren. In diesem Kontext wird auĂerdem auch
die Evaluierung einer Marker-basierten Indoor-Lokalisierungsmethode prÀsentiert.
AbschlieĂend wird zudem ein neuer Ansatz, Indoor-Mapping DatensĂ€tze an den
Achsen des Koordinatensystems auszurichten, vorgestellt
System Development of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle and Implementation of an Autonomous Navigation Module in a Mine Environment
There are numerous benefits to the insights gained from the exploration and exploitation of underground mines. There are also great risks and challenges involved, such as accidents that have claimed many lives. To avoid these accidents, inspections of the large mines were carried out by the miners, which is not always economically feasible and puts the safety of the inspectors at risk. Despite the progress in the development of robotic systems, autonomous navigation, localization and mapping algorithms, these environments remain particularly demanding for these systems. The successful implementation of the autonomous unmanned system will allow mine workers to autonomously determine the structural integrity of the roof and pillars through the generation of high-fidelity 3D maps. The generation of the maps will allow the miners to rapidly respond to any increasing hazards with proactive measures such as: sending workers to build/rebuild support structure to prevent accidents. The objective of this research is the development, implementation and testing of a robust unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that will operate in mine environments for extended periods of time. To achieve this, a custom skid-steer four-wheeled UGV is designed to operate in these challenging underground mine environments. To autonomously navigate these environments, the UGV employs the use of a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and tactical grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) for the localization and mapping through a tightly-coupled LiDAR Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping framework (LIO-SAM). The autonomous navigation module was implemented based upon the Fast likelihood-based collision avoidance with an extension to human-guided navigation and a terrain traversability analysis framework. In order to successfully operate and generate high-fidelity 3D maps, the system was rigorously tested in different environments and terrain to verify its robustness. To assess the capabilities, several localization, mapping and autonomous navigation missions were carried out in a coal mine environment. These tests allowed for the verification and tuning of the system to be able to successfully autonomously navigate and generate high-fidelity maps
Kimera: from SLAM to Spatial Perception with 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs
Humans are able to form a complex mental model of the environment they move
in. This mental model captures geometric and semantic aspects of the scene,
describes the environment at multiple levels of abstractions (e.g., objects,
rooms, buildings), includes static and dynamic entities and their relations
(e.g., a person is in a room at a given time). In contrast, current robots'
internal representations still provide a partial and fragmented understanding
of the environment, either in the form of a sparse or dense set of geometric
primitives (e.g., points, lines, planes, voxels) or as a collection of objects.
This paper attempts to reduce the gap between robot and human perception by
introducing a novel representation, a 3D Dynamic Scene Graph(DSG), that
seamlessly captures metric and semantic aspects of a dynamic environment. A DSG
is a layered graph where nodes represent spatial concepts at different levels
of abstraction, and edges represent spatio-temporal relations among nodes. Our
second contribution is Kimera, the first fully automatic method to build a DSG
from visual-inertial data. Kimera includes state-of-the-art techniques for
visual-inertial SLAM, metric-semantic 3D reconstruction, object localization,
human pose and shape estimation, and scene parsing. Our third contribution is a
comprehensive evaluation of Kimera in real-life datasets and photo-realistic
simulations, including a newly released dataset, uHumans2, which simulates a
collection of crowded indoor and outdoor scenes. Our evaluation shows that
Kimera achieves state-of-the-art performance in visual-inertial SLAM, estimates
an accurate 3D metric-semantic mesh model in real-time, and builds a DSG of a
complex indoor environment with tens of objects and humans in minutes. Our
final contribution shows how to use a DSG for real-time hierarchical semantic
path-planning. The core modules in Kimera are open-source.Comment: 34 pages, 25 figures, 9 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:2002.0628
Map-Based Localization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) require precise pose estimation when navigating in indoor and GNSS-denied / GNSS-degraded outdoor environments. The possibility of crashing in these environments is high, as spaces are confined, with many moving obstacles. There are many solutions for localization in GNSS-denied environments, and many different technologies are used. Common solutions involve setting up or using existing infrastructure, such as beacons, Wi-Fi, or surveyed targets. These solutions were avoided because the cost should be proportional to the number of users, not the coverage area. Heavy and expensive sensors, for example a high-end IMU, were also avoided. Given these requirements, a camera-based localization solution was selected for the sensor pose estimation. Several camera-based localization approaches were investigated. Map-based localization methods were shown to be the most efficient because they close loops using a pre-existing map, thus the amount of data and the amount of time spent collecting data are reduced as there is no need to re-observe the same areas multiple times. This dissertation proposes a solution to address the task of fully localizing a monocular camera onboard a UAV with respect to a known environment (i.e., it is assumed that a 3D model of the environment is available) for the purpose of navigation for UAVs in structured environments.
Incremental map-based localization involves tracking a map through an image sequence. When the map is a 3D model, this task is referred to as model-based tracking. A by-product of the tracker is the relative 3D pose (position and orientation) between the camera and the object being tracked. State-of-the-art solutions advocate that tracking geometry is more robust than tracking image texture because edges are more invariant to changes in object appearance and lighting. However, model-based trackers have been limited to tracking small simple objects in small environments. An assessment was performed in tracking larger, more complex building models, in larger environments. A state-of-the art model-based tracker called ViSP (Visual Servoing Platform) was applied in tracking outdoor and indoor buildings using a UAVs low-cost camera. The assessment revealed weaknesses at large scales. Specifically, ViSP failed when tracking was lost, and needed to be manually re-initialized. Failure occurred when there was a lack of model features in the cameras field of view, and because of rapid camera motion. Experiments revealed that ViSP achieved positional accuracies similar to single point positioning solutions obtained from single-frequency (L1) GPS observations standard deviations around 10 metres. These errors were considered to be large, considering the geometric accuracy of the 3D model used in the experiments was 10 to 40 cm. The first contribution of this dissertation proposes to increase the performance of the localization system by combining ViSP with map-building incremental localization, also referred to as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Experimental results in both indoor and outdoor environments show sub-metre positional accuracies were achieved, while reducing the number of tracking losses throughout the image sequence. It is shown that by integrating model-based tracking with SLAM, not only does SLAM improve model tracking performance, but the model-based tracker alleviates the computational expense of SLAMs loop closing procedure to improve runtime performance. Experiments also revealed that ViSP was unable to handle occlusions when a complete 3D building model was used, resulting in large errors in its pose estimates. The second contribution of this dissertation is a novel map-based incremental localization algorithm that improves tracking performance, and increases pose estimation accuracies from ViSP. The novelty of this algorithm is the implementation of an efficient matching process that identifies corresponding linear features from the UAVs RGB image data and a large, complex, and untextured 3D model. The proposed model-based tracker improved positional accuracies from 10 m (obtained with ViSP) to 46 cm in outdoor environments, and improved from an unattainable result using VISP to 2 cm positional accuracies in large indoor environments.
The main disadvantage of any incremental algorithm is that it requires the camera pose of the first frame. Initialization is often a manual process. The third contribution of this dissertation is a map-based absolute localization algorithm that automatically estimates the camera pose when no prior pose information is available. The method benefits from vertical line matching to accomplish a registration procedure of the reference model views with a set of initial input images via geometric hashing. Results demonstrate that sub-metre positional accuracies were achieved and a proposed enhancement of conventional geometric hashing produced more correct matches - 75% of the correct matches were identified, compared to 11%. Further the number of incorrect matches was reduced by 80%
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