14 research outputs found
Algorithmic Performance-Accuracy Trade-off in 3D Vision Applications Using HyperMapper
In this paper we investigate an emerging application, 3D scene understanding,
likely to be significant in the mobile space in the near future. The goal of
this exploration is to reduce execution time while meeting our quality of
result objectives. In previous work we showed for the first time that it is
possible to map this application to power constrained embedded systems,
highlighting that decision choices made at the algorithmic design-level have
the most impact.
As the algorithmic design space is too large to be exhaustively evaluated, we
use a previously introduced multi-objective Random Forest Active Learning
prediction framework dubbed HyperMapper, to find good algorithmic designs. We
show that HyperMapper generalizes on a recent cutting edge 3D scene
understanding algorithm and on a modern GPU-based computer architecture.
HyperMapper is able to beat an expert human hand-tuning the algorithmic
parameters of the class of Computer Vision applications taken under
consideration in this paper automatically. In addition, we use crowd-sourcing
using a 3D scene understanding Android app to show that the Pareto front
obtained on an embedded system can be used to accelerate the same application
on all the 83 smart-phones and tablets crowd-sourced with speedups ranging from
2 to over 12.Comment: 10 pages, Keywords: design space exploration, machine learning,
computer vision, SLAM, embedded systems, GPU, crowd-sourcin
Navigating the Landscape for Real-time Localisation and Mapping for Robotics, Virtual and Augmented Reality
Visual understanding of 3D environments in real-time, at low power, is a huge
computational challenge. Often referred to as SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation
and Mapping), it is central to applications spanning domestic and industrial
robotics, autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality. This paper
describes the results of a major research effort to assemble the algorithms,
architectures, tools, and systems software needed to enable delivery of SLAM,
by supporting applications specialists in selecting and configuring the
appropriate algorithm and the appropriate hardware, and compilation pathway, to
meet their performance, accuracy, and energy consumption goals. The major
contributions we present are (1) tools and methodology for systematic
quantitative evaluation of SLAM algorithms, (2) automated,
machine-learning-guided exploration of the algorithmic and implementation
design space with respect to multiple objectives, (3) end-to-end simulation
tools to enable optimisation of heterogeneous, accelerated architectures for
the specific algorithmic requirements of the various SLAM algorithmic
approaches, and (4) tools for delivering, where appropriate, accelerated,
adaptive SLAM solutions in a managed, JIT-compiled, adaptive runtime context.Comment: Proceedings of the IEEE 201
SLAMBench2: Multi-Objective Head-to-Head Benchmarking for Visual SLAM
SLAM is becoming a key component of robotics and augmented reality (AR)
systems. While a large number of SLAM algorithms have been presented, there has
been little effort to unify the interface of such algorithms, or to perform a
holistic comparison of their capabilities. This is a problem since different
SLAM applications can have different functional and non-functional
requirements. For example, a mobile phonebased AR application has a tight
energy budget, while a UAV navigation system usually requires high accuracy.
SLAMBench2 is a benchmarking framework to evaluate existing and future SLAM
systems, both open and close source, over an extensible list of datasets, while
using a comparable and clearly specified list of performance metrics. A wide
variety of existing SLAM algorithms and datasets is supported, e.g.
ElasticFusion, InfiniTAM, ORB-SLAM2, OKVIS, and integrating new ones is
straightforward and clearly specified by the framework. SLAMBench2 is a
publicly-available software framework which represents a starting point for
quantitative, comparable and validatable experimental research to investigate
trade-offs across SLAM systems
Learning Skill-based Industrial Robot Tasks with User Priors
Robot skills systems are meant to reduce robot setup time for new
manufacturing tasks. Yet, for dexterous, contact-rich tasks, it is often
difficult to find the right skill parameters. One strategy is to learn these
parameters by allowing the robot system to learn directly on the task. For a
learning problem, a robot operator can typically specify the type and range of
values of the parameters. Nevertheless, given their prior experience, robot
operators should be able to help the learning process further by providing
educated guesses about where in the parameter space potential optimal solutions
could be found. Interestingly, such prior knowledge is not exploited in current
robot learning frameworks. We introduce an approach that combines user priors
and Bayesian optimization to allow fast optimization of robot industrial tasks
at robot deployment time. We evaluate our method on three tasks that are
learned in simulation as well as on two tasks that are learned directly on a
real robot system. Additionally, we transfer knowledge from the corresponding
simulation tasks by automatically constructing priors from well-performing
configurations for learning on the real system. To handle potentially
contradicting task objectives, the tasks are modeled as multi-objective
problems. Our results show that operator priors, both user-specified and
transferred, vastly accelerate the discovery of rich Pareto fronts, and
typically produce final performance far superior to proposed baselines.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted at 2022 IEEE International Conference on
Automation Science and Engineering (CASE
Sparse octree algorithms for scalable dense volumetric tracking and mapping
This thesis is concerned with the problem of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), the task of localising an agent within an unknown environment and at the same time building a representation of it. In particular, we tackle the fundamental scalability limitations of dense volumetric SLAM systems. We do so by proposing a highly efficient hierarchical data-structure based on octrees together with a set of algorithms to support the most compute-intensive operations in typical volumetric reconstruction pipelines.
We employ our hierarchical representation in a novel dense pipeline based on occupancy probabilities. Crucially, the complete space representation encoded by the octree enables to demonstrate a fully integrated system in which tracking, mapping and occupancy queries can be performed seamlessly on a single coherent representation. While achieving accuracy either at par or better than the current state-of-the-art, we demonstrate run-time performance of at least an order of magnitude better than currently available hierarchical data-structures.
Finally, we introduce a novel multi-scale reconstruction system that exploits our octree hierarchy. By adaptively selecting the appropriate scale to match the effective sensor resolution in both integration and rendering, we demonstrate better reconstruction results and tracking accuracy compared to single-resolution grids. Furthermore, we achieve much higher computational performance by propagating information up and down the tree in a lazy fashion, which allow us to reduce the computational load when updating distant surfaces.
We have released our software as an open-source library, named supereight, which is freely available for the benefit of the wider community. One of the main advantages of our library is its flexibility. By carefully providing a set of algorithmic abstractions, supereight enables SLAM practitioners to freely experiment with different map representations with no intervention on the back-end library code and crucially, preserving performance. Our work has been adopted by robotics researchers in both academia and industry.Open Acces