2,171 research outputs found
Minimalistic Collective Perception with Imperfect Sensors
Collective perception is a foundational problem in swarm robotics, in which
the swarm must reach consensus on a coherent representation of the environment.
An important variant of collective perception casts it as a best-of-
decision-making process, in which the swarm must identify the most likely
representation out of a set of alternatives. Past work on this variant
primarily focused on characterizing how different algorithms navigate the
speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff in a scenario where the swarm must decide on the
most frequent environmental feature. Crucially, past work on best-of-
decision-making assumes the robot sensors to be perfect (noise- and
fault-less), limiting the real-world applicability of these algorithms. In this
paper, we derive from first principles an optimal, probabilistic framework for
minimalistic swarm robots equipped with flawed sensors. Then, we validate our
approach in a scenario where the swarm collectively decides the frequency of a
certain environmental feature. We study the speed and accuracy of the
decision-making process with respect to several parameters of interest. Our
approach can provide timely and accurate frequency estimates even in presence
of severe sensory noise.Comment: 7 pages, accepted into IROS2023. Current version incorporates minor
updates from reviewer comment
Optimal Byzantine Resilient Convergence in Asynchronous Robot Networks
We propose the first deterministic algorithm that tolerates up to
byzantine faults in -sized networks and performs in the asynchronous
CORDA model. Our solution matches the previously established lower bound for
the semi-synchronous ATOM model on the number of tolerated Byzantine robots.
Our algorithm works under bounded scheduling assumptions for oblivious robots
moving in a uni-dimensional space
A Drift-Resilient and Degeneracy-Aware Loop Closure Detection Method for Localization and Mapping In Perceptually-Degraded Environments
Enabling fully autonomous robots capable of navigating and exploring unknown and complex environments has been at the core of robotics research for several decades. Mobile robots rely on a model of the environment for functions like manipulation, collision avoidance and path planning. In GPS-denied and unknown environments where a prior map of the environment is not available, robots need to rely on the onboard sensing to obtain locally accurate maps to operate in their local environment. A global map of an unknown environment can be constructed from fusion of local maps of temporally or spatially distributed mobile robots in the environment.
Loop closure detection, the ability to assert that a robot has returned to a previously visited location, is crucial for consistent mapping as it reduces the drift caused by error accumulation in the estimated robot trajectory. Moreover, in multi-robot systems, loop closure detection enables finding the correspondences between the local maps obtained by individual robots and merging them into a consistent global map of the environment. In ambiguous and perceptually-degraded environments, robust detection of intra- and inter-robot loop closures is especially challenging. This is due to poor illumination or lack-thereof, self-similarity, and sparsity of distinctive perceptual landmarks and features sufficient for establishing global position. Overcoming these challenges enables a wide range of terrestrial and planetary applications, ranging from search and rescue, and disaster relief in hostile environments, to robotic exploration of lunar and Martian surfaces, caves and lava tubes that are of particular interest as they can provide potential habitats for future manned space missions.
In this dissertation, methods and metrics are developed for resolving location ambiguities to significantly improve loop closures in perceptually-degraded environments with sparse or undifferentiated features. The first contribution of this dissertation is development of a degeneracy-aware SLAM front-end capable of determining the level of geometric degeneracy in an unknown environment based on computing the Hessian associated with the computed optimal transformation from lidar scan matching. Using this crucial capability, featureless areas that could lead to data association ambiguity and spurious loop closures are determined and excluded from the search for loop closures. This significantly improves the quality and accuracy of localization and mapping, because the search space for loop closures can be expanded as needed to account for drift while decreasing rather than increasing the probability of false loop closure detections.
The second contribution of this dissertation is development of a drift-resilient loop closure detection method that relies on the 2D semantic and 3D geometric features extracted from lidar point cloud data to enable detection of loop closures with increased robustness and accuracy as compared to traditional geometric methods. The proposed method achieves higher performance by exploiting the spatial configuration of the local scenes embedded in 2D occupancy grid maps commonly used in robot navigation, to search for putative loop closures in a pre-matching step before using a geometric verification. The third contribution of this dissertation is an extensive evaluation and analysis of performance and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods in simulation and in real-world, including six challenging underground mines across the United States
Extrinsic Parameter Calibration for Line Scanning Cameras on Ground Vehicles with Navigation Systems Using a Calibration Pattern
Line scanning cameras, which capture only a single line of pixels, have been
increasingly used in ground based mobile or robotic platforms. In applications
where it is advantageous to directly georeference the camera data to world
coordinates, an accurate estimate of the camera's 6D pose is required. This
paper focuses on the common case where a mobile platform is equipped with a
rigidly mounted line scanning camera, whose pose is unknown, and a navigation
system providing vehicle body pose estimates. We propose a novel method that
estimates the camera's pose relative to the navigation system. The approach
involves imaging and manually labelling a calibration pattern with distinctly
identifiable points, triangulating these points from camera and navigation
system data and reprojecting them in order to compute a likelihood, which is
maximised to estimate the 6D camera pose. Additionally, a Markov Chain Monte
Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is used to estimate the uncertainty of the offset.
Tested on two different platforms, the method was able to estimate the pose to
within 0.06 m / 1.05 and 0.18 m / 2.39. We also propose
several approaches to displaying and interpreting the 6D results in a human
readable way.Comment: Published in MDPI Sensors, 30 October 201
Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images
We propose a real-time RGB-based pipeline for object detection and 6D pose
estimation. Our novel 3D orientation estimation is based on a variant of the
Denoising Autoencoder that is trained on simulated views of a 3D model using
Domain Randomization. This so-called Augmented Autoencoder has several
advantages over existing methods: It does not require real, pose-annotated
training data, generalizes to various test sensors and inherently handles
object and view symmetries. Instead of learning an explicit mapping from input
images to object poses, it provides an implicit representation of object
orientations defined by samples in a latent space. Our pipeline achieves
state-of-the-art performance on the T-LESS dataset both in the RGB and RGB-D
domain. We also evaluate on the LineMOD dataset where we can compete with other
synthetically trained approaches. We further increase performance by correcting
3D orientation estimates to account for perspective errors when the object
deviates from the image center and show extended results.Comment: Code available at: https://github.com/DLR-RM/AugmentedAutoencode
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