1,498 research outputs found
Pose-graph SLAM sparsification using factor descent
Since state of the art simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms are not constant time, it is often necessary to reduce the problem size while keeping as much of the original graph’s information content. In graph SLAM, the problem is reduced by removing nodes and rearranging factors. This is normally faced locally: after selecting a node to be removed, its Markov blanket sub-graph is isolated, the node is marginalized and its dense result is sparsified. The aim of sparsification is to compute an approximation of the dense and non-relinearizable result of node marginalization with a new set of factors. Sparsification consists on two processes: building the topology of new factors, and finding the optimal parameters that best approximate the original dense distribution. This best approximation can be obtained through minimization of the Kullback-Liebler divergence between the two distributions. Using simple topologies such as Chow-Liu trees, there is a closed form for the optimal solution. However, a tree is oftentimes too sparse and produces bad distribution approximations. On the contrary, more populated topologies require nonlinear iterative optimization. In the present paper, the particularities of pose-graph SLAM are exploited for designing new informative topologies and for applying the novel factor descent iterative optimization method for sparsification. Several experiments are provided comparing the proposed topology methods and factor descent optimization with state-of-the-art methods in synthetic and real datasets with regards to approximation accuracy and computational cost.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Complexity Analysis and Efficient Measurement Selection Primitives for High-Rate Graph SLAM
Sparsity has been widely recognized as crucial for efficient optimization in
graph-based SLAM. Because the sparsity and structure of the SLAM graph reflect
the set of incorporated measurements, many methods for sparsification have been
proposed in hopes of reducing computation. These methods often focus narrowly
on reducing edge count without regard for structure at a global level. Such
structurally-naive techniques can fail to produce significant computational
savings, even after aggressive pruning. In contrast, simple heuristics such as
measurement decimation and keyframing are known empirically to produce
significant computation reductions. To demonstrate why, we propose a
quantitative metric called elimination complexity (EC) that bridges the
existing analytic gap between graph structure and computation. EC quantifies
the complexity of the primary computational bottleneck: the factorization step
of a Gauss-Newton iteration. Using this metric, we show rigorously that
decimation and keyframing impose favorable global structures and therefore
achieve computation reductions on the order of and , respectively,
where is the pruning rate. We additionally present numerical results
showing EC provides a good approximation of computation in both batch and
incremental (iSAM2) optimization and demonstrate that pruning methods promoting
globally-efficient structure outperform those that do not.Comment: Pre-print accepted to ICRA 201
Gradient descent for sparse rank-one matrix completion for crowd-sourced aggregation of sparsely interacting workers
We consider worker skill estimation for the singlecoin
Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In
practice skill-estimation is challenging because
worker assignments are sparse and irregular due
to the arbitrary, and uncontrolled availability of
workers. We formulate skill estimation as a
rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem,
where the observed components correspond to
observed label correlation between workers. We
show that the correlation matrix can be successfully
recovered and skills identifiable if and only
if the sampling matrix (observed components) is
irreducible and aperiodic. We then propose an
efficient gradient descent scheme and show that
skill estimates converges to the desired global optima
for such sampling matrices. Our proof is
original and the results are surprising in light of
the fact that even the weighted rank-one matrix
factorization problem is NP hard in general. Next
we derive sample complexity bounds for the noisy
case in terms of spectral properties of the signless
Laplacian of the sampling matrix. Our proposed
scheme achieves state-of-art performance on a
number of real-world datasets.Published versio
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