524 research outputs found
Experimental Evaluation of Autonomous Driving Based on Visual Memory and Image Based Visual Servoing
International audienceIn this paper, the performance of a topological metric visual-path-following framework is investigated in different environments. The framework relies on a monocular camera as the only sensing modality. The path is represented as a series of refer- ence images such that each neighboring pair contains a number of common landmarks. Local 3-D geometries are reconstructed between the neighboring reference images to achieve fast feature prediction. This condition allows recovery from tracking failures. During navigation, the robot is controlled using image-based vi- sual servoing. The focus of this paper is on the results from a num- ber of experiments that were conducted in different environments, lighting conditions, and seasons. The experiments with a robot car show that the framework is robust to moving objects and moderate illumination changes. It is also shown that the system is capable of online path learning
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
Learning Pose Estimation for UAV Autonomous Navigation and Landing Using Visual-Inertial Sensor Data
In this work, we propose a robust network-in-the-loop control system for autonomous navigation and landing of an Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle (UAV). To estimate the UAV’s absolute pose, we develop a deep neural network (DNN) architecture for visual-inertial odometry, which provides a robust alternative to traditional methods. We first evaluate the accuracy of the estimation by comparing the prediction of our model to traditional visual-inertial approaches on the publicly available EuRoC MAV dataset. The results indicate a clear improvement in the accuracy of the pose estimation up to 25% over the baseline. Finally, we integrate the data-driven estimator in the closed-loop flight control system of Airsim, a simulator available as a plugin for Unreal Engine, and we provide simulation results for autonomous navigation and landing
Trajectory Servoing: Image-Based Trajectory Tracking Using SLAM
This paper describes an image based visual servoing (IBVS) system for a
nonholonomic robot to achieve good trajectory following without real-time robot
pose information and without a known visual map of the environment. We call it
trajectory servoing. The critical component is a feature-based, indirect SLAM
method to provide a pool of available features with estimated depth, so that
they may be propagated forward in time to generate image feature trajectories
for visual servoing. Short and long distance experiments show the benefits of
trajectory servoing for navigating unknown areas without absolute positioning.
Trajectory servoing is shown to be more accurate than pose-based feedback when
both rely on the same underlying SLAM system
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