1,689 research outputs found
A Robust Localization System for Inspection Robots in Sewer Networks â€
Sewers represent a very important infrastructure of cities whose state should be monitored
periodically. However, the length of such infrastructure prevents sensor networks from being
applicable. In this paper, we present a mobile platform (SIAR) designed to inspect the sewer network.
It is capable of sensing gas concentrations and detecting failures in the network such as cracks and
holes in the floor and walls or zones were the water is not flowing. These alarms should be precisely
geo-localized to allow the operators performing the required correcting measures. To this end, this
paper presents a robust localization system for global pose estimation on sewers. It makes use of prior
information of the sewer network, including its topology, the different cross sections traversed and
the position of some elements such as manholes. The system is based on a Monte Carlo Localization
system that fuses wheel and RGB-D odometry for the prediction stage. The update step takes into
account the sewer network topology for discarding wrong hypotheses. Additionally, the localization
is further refined with novel updating steps proposed in this paper which are activated whenever
a discrete element in the sewer network is detected or the relative orientation of the robot over the
sewer gallery could be estimated. Each part of the system has been validated with real data obtained
from the sewers of Barcelona. The whole system is able to obtain median localization errors in the
order of one meter in all cases. Finally, the paper also includes comparisons with state-of-the-art
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems that demonstrate the convenience of the
approach.Unión Europea ECHORD ++ 601116Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España RTI2018-100847-B-C2
Encoderless position estimation and error correction techniques for miniature mobile robots
This paper presents an encoderless position estimation technique for miniature-sized mobile robots. Odometry techniques, which are based on the hardware components, are commonly used for calculating the geometric location of mobile robots. Therefore, the robot must be equipped with an appropriate sensor to measure the motion. However, due to the hardware limitations of some robots, employing extra hardware is impossible. On the other hand, in swarm robotic research, which uses a large number of mobile robots, equipping the robots with motion sensors might be costly. In this study, the trajectory of the robot is divided into several small displacements over short spans of time. Therefore, the position of the robot is calculated within a short period, using the speed equations of the robot's wheel. In addition, an error correction function is proposed that estimates the errors of the motion using a current monitoring technique. The experiments illustrate the feasibility of the proposed position estimation and error correction techniques to be used in miniature-sized mobile robots without requiring an additional sensor
Unsupervised Odometry and Depth Learning for Endoscopic Capsule Robots
In the last decade, many medical companies and research groups have tried to
convert passive capsule endoscopes as an emerging and minimally invasive
diagnostic technology into actively steerable endoscopic capsule robots which
will provide more intuitive disease detection, targeted drug delivery and
biopsy-like operations in the gastrointestinal(GI) tract. In this study, we
introduce a fully unsupervised, real-time odometry and depth learner for
monocular endoscopic capsule robots. We establish the supervision by warping
view sequences and assigning the re-projection minimization to the loss
function, which we adopt in multi-view pose estimation and single-view depth
estimation network. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the
proposed framework performed on non-rigidly deformable ex-vivo porcine stomach
datasets proves the effectiveness of the method in terms of motion estimation
and depth recovery.Comment: submitted to IROS 201
Neural Sensor Fusion for Spatial Visualization on a Mobile Robot
An ARTMAP neural network is used to integrate visual information and ultrasonic sensory information on a B 14 mobile robot. Training samples for the neural network are acquired without human intervention. Sensory snapshots are retrospectively associated with the distance to the wall, provided by on~ board odomctry as the robot travels in a straight line. The goal is to produce a more accurate measure of distance than is provided by the raw sensors. The neural network effectively combines sensory sources both within and between modalities. The improved distance percept is used to produce occupancy grid visualizations of the robot's environment. The maps produced point to specific problems of raw sensory information processing and demonstrate the benefits of using a neural network system for sensor fusion.Office of Naval Research and Naval Research Laboratory (00014-96-1-0772, 00014-95-1-0409, 00014-95-0657
Appearance-based localization for mobile robots using digital zoom and visual compass
This paper describes a localization system for mobile robots moving in dynamic indoor environments, which uses probabilistic integration of visual appearance and odometry information. The approach is based on a novel image matching algorithm for appearance-based place recognition that integrates digital zooming, to extend the area of application, and a visual compass. Ambiguous information used for recognizing places is resolved with multiple hypothesis tracking and a selection procedure inspired by Markov localization. This enables the system to deal with perceptual aliasing or absence of reliable sensor data. It has been implemented on a robot operating in an office scenario and the robustness of the approach demonstrated experimentally
Learning Motion Predictors for Smart Wheelchair using Autoregressive Sparse Gaussian Process
Constructing a smart wheelchair on a commercially available powered
wheelchair (PWC) platform avoids a host of seating, mechanical design and
reliability issues but requires methods of predicting and controlling the
motion of a device never intended for robotics. Analog joystick inputs are
subject to black-box transformations which may produce intuitive and adaptable
motion control for human operators, but complicate robotic control approaches;
furthermore, installation of standard axle mounted odometers on a commercial
PWC is difficult. In this work, we present an integrated hardware and software
system for predicting the motion of a commercial PWC platform that does not
require any physical or electronic modification of the chair beyond plugging
into an industry standard auxiliary input port. This system uses an RGB-D
camera and an Arduino interface board to capture motion data, including visual
odometry and joystick signals, via ROS communication. Future motion is
predicted using an autoregressive sparse Gaussian process model. We evaluate
the proposed system on real-world short-term path prediction experiments.
Experimental results demonstrate the system's efficacy when compared to a
baseline neural network model.Comment: The paper has been accepted to the International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA2018
DeepTIO: a deep thermal-inertial odometry with visual hallucination
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordVisual odometry shows excellent performance in a wide range of environments. However, in visually-denied scenarios (e.g. heavy smoke or darkness), pose estimates degrade or even fail. Thermal cameras are commonly used for perception and inspection when the environment has low visibility. However, their use in odometry estimation is hampered by the lack of robust visual features. In part, this is as a result of the sensor measuring the ambient temperature profile rather than scene appearance and geometry. To overcome this issue, we propose a Deep Neural Network model for thermal-inertial odometry (DeepTIO) by incorporating a visual hallucination network to provide the thermal network with complementary information. The hallucination network is taught to predict fake visual features from thermal images by using Huber loss. We also employ selective fusion to attentively fuse the features from three different modalities, i.e thermal, hallucination, and inertial features. Extensive experiments are performed in hand-held and mobile robot data in benign and smoke-filled environments, showing the efficacy of the proposed model
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