3,739 research outputs found
Topomap: Topological Mapping and Navigation Based on Visual SLAM Maps
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments
deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning
algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many
state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining
a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the
complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with
uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics
applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies
the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path
planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a
visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a
three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract
occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we
create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the
topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of
global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm.
Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar
performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage
requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to
prove its advantages.Comment: 8 page
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
MOMA: Visual Mobile Marker Odometry
In this paper, we present a cooperative odometry scheme based on the
detection of mobile markers in line with the idea of cooperative positioning
for multiple robots [1]. To this end, we introduce a simple optimization scheme
that realizes visual mobile marker odometry via accurate fixed marker-based
camera positioning and analyse the characteristics of errors inherent to the
method compared to classical fixed marker-based navigation and visual odometry.
In addition, we provide a specific UAV-UGV configuration that allows for
continuous movements of the UAV without doing stops and a minimal
caterpillar-like configuration that works with one UGV alone. Finally, we
present a real-world implementation and evaluation for the proposed UAV-UGV
configuration
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
Robust Legged Robot State Estimation Using Factor Graph Optimization
Legged robots, specifically quadrupeds, are becoming increasingly attractive
for industrial applications such as inspection. However, to leave the
laboratory and to become useful to an end user requires reliability in harsh
conditions. From the perspective of state estimation, it is essential to be
able to accurately estimate the robot's state despite challenges such as uneven
or slippery terrain, textureless and reflective scenes, as well as dynamic
camera occlusions. We are motivated to reduce the dependency on foot contact
classifications, which fail when slipping, and to reduce position drift during
dynamic motions such as trotting. To this end, we present a factor graph
optimization method for state estimation which tightly fuses and smooths
inertial navigation, leg odometry and visual odometry. The effectiveness of the
approach is demonstrated using the ANYmal quadruped robot navigating in a
realistic outdoor industrial environment. This experiment included trotting,
walking, crossing obstacles and ascending a staircase. The proposed approach
decreased the relative position error by up to 55% and absolute position error
by 76% compared to kinematic-inertial odometry.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures. Accepted to RA-L + IROS 2019, July 201
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