324 research outputs found
Distributed monocular visual SLAM as a basis for a collaborative augmented reality framework
Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been used for markerless tracking in augmented reality applications. Distributed SLAM helps multiple agents to collaboratively explore and build a global map of the environment while estimating their locations in it. One of the main challenges in distributed SLAM is to identify local map overlaps of these agents, especially when their initial relative positions are not known. We developed a collaborative AR framework with freely moving agents having no knowledge of their initial relative positions. Each agent in our framework uses a camera as the only input device for its SLAM process. Furthermore, the framework identifies map overlaps of agents using an appearance-based method. We also proposed a quality measure to determine the best keypoint detector/descriptor combination for our framework
AFFECTIVE COMPUTING AND AUGMENTED REALITY FOR CAR DRIVING SIMULATORS
Car simulators are essential for training and for analyzing the behavior, the responses and the performance of the driver. Augmented Reality (AR) is the technology that enables virtual images to be overlaid on views of the real world. Affective Computing (AC) is the technology that helps reading emotions by means of computer systems, by analyzing body gestures, facial expressions, speech and physiological signals. The key aspect of the research relies on investigating novel interfaces that help building situational awareness and emotional awareness, to enable affect-driven remote collaboration in AR for car driving simulators. The problem addressed relates to the question about how to build situational awareness (using AR technology) and emotional awareness (by AC technology), and how to integrate these two distinct technologies [4], into a unique affective framework for training, in a car driving simulator
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
Visual vs auditory augmented reality for indoor guidance
Indoor navigation systems are not widely used due to the lack of effective indoor tracking technology. Augmented Reality (AR) is a natural medium for presenting information in indoor navigation tools. However, augmenting the environment with visual stimuli may not always be the most appropriate method to guide users, e.g., when they are performing some other visual task or they suffer from visual impairments. This paper presents an AR app to support visual and auditory stimuli that we have developed for indoor guidance. A study (N=20) confirms that the participants reached the target when using two types of stimuli, visual and auditory. The AR visual stimuli outperformed the auditory stimuli in terms of time and overall distance travelled. However, the auditory stimuli forced the participants to pay more attention, and this resulted in better memorization of the route. These performance outcomes were independent of gender and age. Therefore, in addition to being easy to use, auditory stimuli promote route retention and show potential in situations in which vision cannot be used as the primary sensory channel or when spatial memory retention is important. We also found that perceived physical and mental efforts affect the subjective perception about the AR guidance app
Augmented Reality Based on SLAM to Assess Spatial Short-Term Memory
Spatial short-term memory is defined as the limited ability of people to retain and remember the location of elements for short periods of time. In this paper, we present the first AR app based on SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) to assess spatial short-term memory. A total of 55 participants were involved in a study for remembering the real place where four virtual objects were located in the real environment. The participants were divided into two groups: the ARGroup (the participants learned the location of the virtual objects in the real environment in an adaptation phase using AR) and the NoARGroup (the participants learned the location of the objects by looking at photographs). The results indicated that the performance outcomes in remembering objects and their location for the participants in the ARGroup were statistically significantly greater than those obtained by the participants in the NoARGroup. From this result and our observations, we can conclude that touring the augmented environment helped the participants to better remember the location of virtual objects added to the real scene compared to looking at photographs of the environment. Furthermore, statistically significant differences were not found in relation to gender or age. Finally, our app has several advantages: 1) Our app works in any environment and does not require adding real elements to the environment; 2) the evaluators can select any real environment and place the virtual elements where they want and even change them between sessions; and 3) our app could work similar to the way spatial memory does in everyday life
Dense Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping in Collaborative and Outdoor Scenarios
Dense visual simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems can produce 3D
reconstructions that are digital facsimiles of the physical space they describe. Systems that
can produce dense maps with this level of fidelity in real time provide foundational spatial
reasoning capabilities for many downstream tasks in autonomous robotics. Over the past
15 years, mapping small scale, indoor environments, such as desks and buildings, with a
single slow moving, hand-held sensor has been one of the central focuses of dense visual
SLAM research.
However, most dense visual SLAM systems exhibit a number of limitations which
mean they cannot be directly applied in collaborative or outdoors settings. The contribution
of this thesis is to address these limitations with the development of new systems and
algorithms for collaborative dense mapping, efficient dense alternation and outdoors
operation with fast camera motion and wide field of view (FOV) cameras. We use
ElasticFusion, a state-of-the-art dense SLAM system, as our starting point where each of
these contributions is implemented as a novel extension to the system.
We first present a collaborative dense SLAM system that allows a number of
cameras starting with unknown initial relative positions to maintain local maps with the
original ElasticFusion algorithm. Visual place recognition across local maps results in
constraints that allow maps to be aligned into a common global reference frame, facilitating
collaborative mapping and tracking of multiple cameras within a shared map.
Within dense alternation based SLAM systems, the standard approach is to fuse
every frame into the dense model without considering whether the information contained
within the frame is already captured by the dense map and therefore redundant. As the
number of cameras or the scale of the map increases, this approach becomes inefficient. In
our second contribution, we address this inefficiency by introducing a novel information
theoretic approach to keyframe selection that allows the system to avoid processing
redundant information. We implement the procedure within ElasticFusion, demonstrating
a marked reduction in the number of frames required by the system to estimate an accurate,
denoised surface reconstruction.
Before dense SLAM techniques can be applied in outdoor scenarios we must
first address their reliance on active depth cameras, and their lack of suitability to fast
camera motion. In our third contribution we present an outdoor dense SLAM system. The system overcomes the need for an active sensor by employing neural network-based depth
inference to predict the geometry of the scene as it appears in each image. To address the
issue of camera tracking during fast motion we employ a hybrid architecture, combining
elements of both dense and sparse SLAM systems to perform camera tracking and to
achieve globally consistent dense mapping.
Automotive applications present a particularly important setting for dense visual
SLAM systems. Such applications are characterised by their use of wide FOV cameras and
are therefore not accurately modelled by the standard pinhole camera model. The fourth
contribution of this thesis is to extend the above hybrid sparse-dense monocular SLAM
system to cater for large FOV fisheye imagery. This is achieved by reformulating the
mapping pipeline in terms of the Kannala-Brandt fisheye camera model. To estimate depth,
we introduce a new version of the PackNet depth estimation neural network (Guizilini et
al., 2020) adapted for fisheye inputs.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our contributions, we present experimental
results, computed by processing the synthetic ICL-NUIM dataset of Handa et al. (2014) as
well as the real-world TUM-RGBD dataset of Sturm et al. (2012). For outdoor SLAM we
show the results of our system processing the autonomous driving KITTI and KITTI-360
datasets of Geiger et al. (2012a) and Liao et al. (2021) respectively
Loosely Coupled Odometry, UWB Ranging, and Cooperative Spatial Detection for Relative Monte-Carlo Multi-Robot Localization
As mobile robots become more ubiquitous, their deployments grow across use
cases where GNSS positioning is either unavailable or unreliable. This has led
to increased interest in multi-modal relative localization methods.
Complementing onboard odometry, ranging allows for relative state estimation,
with ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging having gained widespread recognition due to
its low cost and centimeter-level out-of-box accuracy. Infrastructure-free
localization methods allow for more dynamic, ad-hoc, and flexible deployments,
yet they have received less attention from the research community. In this
work, we propose a cooperative relative multi-robot localization where we
leverage inter-robot ranging and simultaneous spatial detections of objects in
the environment. To achieve this, we equip robots with a single UWB transceiver
and a stereo camera. We propose a novel Monte-Carlo approach to estimate
relative states by either employing only UWB ranges or dynamically integrating
simultaneous spatial detections from the stereo cameras. We also address the
challenges for UWB ranging error mitigation, especially in non-line-of-sight,
with a study on different LSTM networks to estimate the ranging error. The
proposed approach has multiple benefits. First, we show that a single range is
enough to estimate the accurate relative states of two robots when fusing
odometry measurements. Second, our experiments also demonstrate that our
approach surpasses traditional methods such as multilateration in terms of
accuracy. Third, to increase accuracy even further, we allow for the
integration of cooperative spatial detections. Finally, we show how ROS 2 and
Zenoh can be integrated to build a scalable wireless communication solution for
multi-robot systems. The experimental validation includes real-time deployment
and autonomous navigation based on the relative positioning method
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