6 research outputs found
Image features for visual teach-and-repeat navigation in changing environments
We present an evaluation of standard image features in the context of long-term visual teach-and-repeat navigation of mobile robots, where the environment exhibits significant changes in appearance caused by seasonal weather variations and daily illumination changes. We argue that for long-term autonomous navigation, the viewpoint-, scale- and rotation- invariance of the standard feature extractors is less important than their robustness to the mid- and long-term environment appearance changes. Therefore, we focus our evaluation on the robustness of image registration to variable lighting and naturally-occurring seasonal changes. We combine detection and description components of different image extractors and evaluate their performance on five datasets collected by mobile vehicles in three different outdoor environments over the course of one year. Moreover, we propose a trainable feature descriptor based on a combination of evolutionary algorithms and Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features, which we call GRIEF (Generated BRIEF). In terms of robustness to seasonal changes, the most promising results were achieved by the SpG/CNN and the STAR/GRIEF feature, which was slightly less robust, but faster to calculate
Navigation without localisation: reliable teach and repeat based on the convergence theorem
We present a novel concept for teach-and-repeat visual navigation. The
proposed concept is based on a mathematical model, which indicates that in
teach-and-repeat navigation scenarios, mobile robots do not need to perform
explicit localisation. Rather than that, a mobile robot which repeats a
previously taught path can simply `replay' the learned velocities, while using
its camera information only to correct its heading relative to the intended
path. To support our claim, we establish a position error model of a robot,
which traverses a taught path by only correcting its heading. Then, we outline
a mathematical proof which shows that this position error does not diverge over
time. Based on the insights from the model, we present a simple monocular
teach-and-repeat navigation method. The method is computationally efficient, it
does not require camera calibration, and it can learn and autonomously traverse
arbitrarily-shaped paths. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the
method can reliably guide mobile robots in realistic indoor and outdoor
conditions, and can cope with imperfect odometry, landmark deficiency,
illumination variations and naturally-occurring environment changes.
Furthermore, we provide the navigation system and the datasets gathered at
http://www.github.com/gestom/stroll_bearnav.Comment: The paper will be presented at IROS 2018 in Madri
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
DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning
In the current monocular depth research, the dominant approach is to employ
unsupervised training on large datasets, driven by warped photometric
consistency. Such approaches lack robustness and are unable to generalize to
challenging domains such as nighttime scenes or adverse weather conditions
where assumptions about photometric consistency break down.
We propose DeFeat-Net (Depth & Feature network), an approach to
simultaneously learn a cross-domain dense feature representation, alongside a
robust depth-estimation framework based on warped feature consistency. The
resulting feature representation is learned in an unsupervised manner with no
explicit ground-truth correspondences required.
We show that within a single domain, our technique is comparable to both the
current state of the art in monocular depth estimation and supervised feature
representation learning. However, by simultaneously learning features, depth
and motion, our technique is able to generalize to challenging domains,
allowing DeFeat-Net to outperform the current state-of-the-art with around 10%
reduction in all error measures on more challenging sequences such as nighttime
driving