87,721 research outputs found
A practical multirobot localization system
We present a fast and precise vision-based software intended for multiple robot localization. The core component of the software is a novel and efficient algorithm for black and white pattern detection. The method is robust to variable lighting conditions, achieves sub-pixel precision and its computational complexity is independent of the processed image size. With off-the-shelf computational equipment and low-cost cameras, the core algorithm is able to process hundreds of images per second while tracking hundreds of objects with a millimeter precision. In addition, we present the method's mathematical model, which allows to estimate the expected localization precision, area of coverage, and processing speed from the camera's intrinsic parameters and hardware's processing capacity. The correctness of the presented model and performance of the algorithm in real-world conditions is verified in several experiments. Apart from the method description, we also make its source code public at \emph{http://purl.org/robotics/whycon}; so, it can be used as an enabling technology for various mobile robotic problems
Real-time on-board obstacle avoidance for UAVs based on embedded stereo vision
In order to improve usability and safety, modern unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) are equipped with sensors to monitor the environment, such as
laser-scanners and cameras. One important aspect in this monitoring process is
to detect obstacles in the flight path in order to avoid collisions. Since a
large number of consumer UAVs suffer from tight weight and power constraints,
our work focuses on obstacle avoidance based on a lightweight stereo camera
setup. We use disparity maps, which are computed from the camera images, to
locate obstacles and to automatically steer the UAV around them. For disparity
map computation we optimize the well-known semi-global matching (SGM) approach
for the deployment on an embedded FPGA. The disparity maps are then converted
into simpler representations, the so called U-/V-Maps, which are used for
obstacle detection. Obstacle avoidance is based on a reactive approach which
finds the shortest path around the obstacles as soon as they have a critical
distance to the UAV. One of the fundamental goals of our work was the reduction
of development costs by closing the gap between application development and
hardware optimization. Hence, we aimed at using high-level synthesis (HLS) for
porting our algorithms, which are written in C/C++, to the embedded FPGA. We
evaluated our implementation of the disparity estimation on the KITTI Stereo
2015 benchmark. The integrity of the overall realtime reactive obstacle
avoidance algorithm has been evaluated by using Hardware-in-the-Loop testing in
conjunction with two flight simulators.Comment: Accepted in the International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote
Sensing and Spatial Information Scienc
Efficient transfer entropy analysis of non-stationary neural time series
Information theory allows us to investigate information processing in neural
systems in terms of information transfer, storage and modification. Especially
the measure of information transfer, transfer entropy, has seen a dramatic
surge of interest in neuroscience. Estimating transfer entropy from two
processes requires the observation of multiple realizations of these processes
to estimate associated probability density functions. To obtain these
observations, available estimators assume stationarity of processes to allow
pooling of observations over time. This assumption however, is a major obstacle
to the application of these estimators in neuroscience as observed processes
are often non-stationary. As a solution, Gomez-Herrero and colleagues
theoretically showed that the stationarity assumption may be avoided by
estimating transfer entropy from an ensemble of realizations. Such an ensemble
is often readily available in neuroscience experiments in the form of
experimental trials. Thus, in this work we combine the ensemble method with a
recently proposed transfer entropy estimator to make transfer entropy
estimation applicable to non-stationary time series. We present an efficient
implementation of the approach that deals with the increased computational
demand of the ensemble method's practical application. In particular, we use a
massively parallel implementation for a graphics processing unit to handle the
computationally most heavy aspects of the ensemble method. We test the
performance and robustness of our implementation on data from simulated
stochastic processes and demonstrate the method's applicability to
magnetoencephalographic data. While we mainly evaluate the proposed method for
neuroscientific data, we expect it to be applicable in a variety of fields that
are concerned with the analysis of information transfer in complex biological,
social, and artificial systems.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PLOS ON
Leveraging Deep Visual Descriptors for Hierarchical Efficient Localization
Many robotics applications require precise pose estimates despite operating
in large and changing environments. This can be addressed by visual
localization, using a pre-computed 3D model of the surroundings. The pose
estimation then amounts to finding correspondences between 2D keypoints in a
query image and 3D points in the model using local descriptors. However,
computational power is often limited on robotic platforms, making this task
challenging in large-scale environments. Binary feature descriptors
significantly speed up this 2D-3D matching, and have become popular in the
robotics community, but also strongly impair the robustness to perceptual
aliasing and changes in viewpoint, illumination and scene structure. In this
work, we propose to leverage recent advances in deep learning to perform an
efficient hierarchical localization. We first localize at the map level using
learned image-wide global descriptors, and subsequently estimate a precise pose
from 2D-3D matches computed in the candidate places only. This restricts the
local search and thus allows to efficiently exploit powerful non-binary
descriptors usually dismissed on resource-constrained devices. Our approach
results in state-of-the-art localization performance while running in real-time
on a popular mobile platform, enabling new prospects for robotics research.Comment: CoRL 2018 Camera-ready (fix typos and update citations
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
Stellar clusters in the inner Galaxy and their correlation with cold dust emission
Stars are born within dense clumps of giant molecular clouds, constituting
young stellar agglomerates known as embedded clusters, which only evolve into
bound open clusters under special conditions. We statistically study all
embedded clusters (ECs) and open clusters (OCs) known so far in the inner
Galaxy, investigating particularly their interaction with the surrounding
molecular environment and the differences in their evolution. We first compiled
a merged list of 3904 clusters from optical and infrared clusters catalogs in
the literature, including 75 new (mostly embedded) clusters discovered by us in
the GLIMPSE survey. From this list, 695 clusters are within the Galactic range
|l| < 60 deg and |b| < 1.5 deg covered by the ATLASGAL survey, which was used
to search for correlations with submm dust continuum emission tracing dense
molecular gas. We defined an evolutionary sequence of five morphological types:
deeply embedded cluster (EC1), partially embedded cluster (EC2), emerging open
cluster (OC0), OC still associated with a submm clump in the vicinity (OC1),
and OC without correlation with ATLASGAL emission (OC2). Together with this
process, we performed a thorough literature survey of these 695 clusters,
compiling a considerable number of physical and observational properties in a
catalog that is publicly available. We found that an OC defined observationally
as OC0, OC1, or OC2 and confirmed as a real cluster is equivalent to the
physical concept of OC (a bound exposed cluster) for ages in excess of ~16 Myr.
Some observed OCs younger than this limit can actually be unbound associations.
We found that our OC and EC samples are roughly complete up to ~1 kpc and ~1.8
kpc from the Sun, respectively, beyond which the completeness decays
exponentially. Using available age estimates for a few ECs, we derived an upper
limit of 3 Myr for the duration of the embedded phase... (Abridged)Comment: 39 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A on Sept 16,
2013. The catalog will be available at the CDS after official publication of
the articl
- …