Group-In: Group Inference from Wireless Traces of Mobile Devices

This paper proposes Group-In, a wireless scanning system to detect static or mobile people groups in indoor or outdoor environments. Group-In collects only wireless traces from the Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices for group inference. The key problem addressed in this work is to detect not only static groups but also moving groups with a multi-phased approach based only noisy wireless Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSIs) observed by multiple wireless scanners without localization support. We propose new centralized and decentralized schemes to process the sparse and noisy wireless data, and leverage graph-based clustering techniques for group detection from short-term and long-term aspects. Group-In provides two outcomes: 1) group detection in short time intervals such as two minutes and 2) long-term linkages such as a month. To verify the performance, we conduct two experimental studies. One consists of 27 controlled scenarios in the lab environments. The other is a real-world scenario where we place Bluetooth scanners in an office environment, and employees carry beacons for more than one month. Both the controlled and real-world experiments result in high accuracy group detection in short time intervals and sampling liberties in terms of the Jaccard index and pairwise similarity coefficient.Comment: This work has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT and No.871249 LOCUS projects. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the EU. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors. Proc. of ACM/IEEE IPSN'20, 202

Decentralized Sensor Fusion for Ubiquitous Networking Robotics in Urban Areas

In this article we explain the architecture for the environment and sensors that has been built for the European project URUS (Ubiquitous Networking Robotics in Urban Sites), a project whose objective is to develop an adaptable network robot architecture for cooperation between network robots and human beings and/or the environment in urban areas. The project goal is to deploy a team of robots in an urban area to give a set of services to a user community. This paper addresses the sensor architecture devised for URUS and the type of robots and sensors used, including environment sensors and sensors onboard the robots. Furthermore, we also explain how sensor fusion takes place to achieve urban outdoor execution of robotic services. Finally some results of the project related to the sensor network are highlighted

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

An improved "flies" method for stereo vision: application to pedestrian detection

In the vast research field of intelligent transportation systems, the problem of detection (and recognition) of environment objects, for example pedestrians and vehicles, is indispensable but challenging. The research work presented in this paper is devoted to stereo-vision based method with pedestrian detection as its application (a sub-part of the French national project “LOVe”: Logiciels d'Observation des Vulnerables). With a prospect of benefiting from an innovative method i.e. the genetic evolutionary “flies” method proposed by former researchers on continuous data updating and asynchronous data reading, we have carried on the “flies” method through the task of pedestrian detection affiliated with the “LOVe” project. Compared with former work of the “flies” method, two main contributions have been incorporated into the architecture of the “flies” method: first, an improved fitness function has been proposed instead of the original one; second, a technique coined “concentrating” has been integrated into the evolution procedure. The improved “flies” method is used to offer range information of possible objects in the detection field. The integrate scheme of pedestrian detection is presented as well. Some experimental results are given for validating the performance improvements brought by the improved “flies” method and for validating the pedestrian detection method based on the improved “flies” method