18,082 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
Efficient exploration of unknown indoor environments using a team of mobile robots
Whenever multiple robots have to solve a common task, they need to coordinate their actions to carry out the task efficiently and to avoid interferences between individual robots. This is especially the case when considering the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots. To achieve efficient terrain coverage with the sensors of the robots, one first needs to identify unknown areas in the environment. Second, one has to assign target locations to the individual robots so that they gather new and relevant information about the environment with their sensors. This assignment should lead to a distribution of the robots over the environment in a way that they avoid redundant work and do not interfere with each other by, for example, blocking their paths. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently coordinating a large team of mobile robots. To better distribute the robots over the environment and to avoid redundant work, we take into account the type of place a potential target is located in (e.g., a corridor or a room). This knowledge allows us to improve the distribution of robots over the environment compared to approaches lacking this capability. To autonomously determine the type of a place, we apply a classifier learned using the AdaBoost algorithm. The resulting classifier takes laser range data as input and is able to classify the current location with high accuracy. We additionally use a hidden Markov model to consider the spatial dependencies between nearby locations. Our approach to incorporate the information about the type of places in the assignment process has been implemented and tested in different environments. The experiments illustrate that our system effectively distributes the robots over the environment and allows them to accomplish their mission faster compared to approaches that ignore the place labels
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
Home alone: autonomous extension and correction of spatial representations
In this paper we present an account
of the problems faced by a mobile robot given
an incomplete tour of an unknown environment,
and introduce a collection of techniques which can
generate successful behaviour even in the presence
of such problems. Underlying our approach is the
principle that an autonomous system must be motivated
to act to gather new knowledge, and to validate
and correct existing knowledge. This principle is
embodied in Dora, a mobile robot which features
the aforementioned techniques: shared representations,
non-monotonic reasoning, and goal generation
and management. To demonstrate how well this
collection of techniques work in real-world situations
we present a comprehensive analysis of the Dora
system’s performance over multiple tours in an indoor
environment. In this analysis Dora successfully
completed 18 of 21 attempted runs, with all but
3 of these successes requiring one or more of the
integrated techniques to recover from problems
Multimodal Hierarchical Dirichlet Process-based Active Perception
In this paper, we propose an active perception method for recognizing object
categories based on the multimodal hierarchical Dirichlet process (MHDP). The
MHDP enables a robot to form object categories using multimodal information,
e.g., visual, auditory, and haptic information, which can be observed by
performing actions on an object. However, performing many actions on a target
object requires a long time. In a real-time scenario, i.e., when the time is
limited, the robot has to determine the set of actions that is most effective
for recognizing a target object. We propose an MHDP-based active perception
method that uses the information gain (IG) maximization criterion and lazy
greedy algorithm. We show that the IG maximization criterion is optimal in the
sense that the criterion is equivalent to a minimization of the expected
Kullback--Leibler divergence between a final recognition state and the
recognition state after the next set of actions. However, a straightforward
calculation of IG is practically impossible. Therefore, we derive an efficient
Monte Carlo approximation method for IG by making use of a property of the
MHDP. We also show that the IG has submodular and non-decreasing properties as
a set function because of the structure of the graphical model of the MHDP.
Therefore, the IG maximization problem is reduced to a submodular maximization
problem. This means that greedy and lazy greedy algorithms are effective and
have a theoretical justification for their performance. We conducted an
experiment using an upper-torso humanoid robot and a second one using synthetic
data. The experimental results show that the method enables the robot to select
a set of actions that allow it to recognize target objects quickly and
accurately. The results support our theoretical outcomes.Comment: submitte
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