3,203 research outputs found
Learning Ground Traversability from Simulations
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which
areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths.
We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we
build a convolutional neural network that, given an image representing the
heightmap of a terrain patch, predicts whether the robot will be able to
traverse such patch from left to right. The classifier is trained for a
specific robot model (wheeled, tracked, legged, snake-like) using simulation
data on procedurally generated training terrains; the trained classifier can be
applied to unseen large heightmaps to yield oriented traversability maps, and
then plan traversable paths. We extensively evaluate the approach in simulation
on six real-world elevation datasets, and run a real-robot validation in one
indoor and one outdoor environment.Comment: Webpage: http://romarcg.xyz/traversability_estimation
InLoc: Indoor Visual Localization with Dense Matching and View Synthesis
We seek to predict the 6 degree-of-freedom (6DoF) pose of a query photograph
with respect to a large indoor 3D map. The contributions of this work are
three-fold. First, we develop a new large-scale visual localization method
targeted for indoor environments. The method proceeds along three steps: (i)
efficient retrieval of candidate poses that ensures scalability to large-scale
environments, (ii) pose estimation using dense matching rather than local
features to deal with textureless indoor scenes, and (iii) pose verification by
virtual view synthesis to cope with significant changes in viewpoint, scene
layout, and occluders. Second, we collect a new dataset with reference 6DoF
poses for large-scale indoor localization. Query photographs are captured by
mobile phones at a different time than the reference 3D map, thus presenting a
realistic indoor localization scenario. Third, we demonstrate that our method
significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art indoor localization
approaches on this new challenging data
Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns
We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic
recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous
technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile
thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep
neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach
works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact
with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the
need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the
performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both
indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies
above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584
images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for
real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
System
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
Depth Prediction Without the Sensors: Leveraging Structure for Unsupervised Learning from Monocular Videos
Learning to predict scene depth from RGB inputs is a challenging task both
for indoor and outdoor robot navigation. In this work we address unsupervised
learning of scene depth and robot ego-motion where supervision is provided by
monocular videos, as cameras are the cheapest, least restrictive and most
ubiquitous sensor for robotics.
Previous work in unsupervised image-to-depth learning has established strong
baselines in the domain. We propose a novel approach which produces higher
quality results, is able to model moving objects and is shown to transfer
across data domains, e.g. from outdoors to indoor scenes. The main idea is to
introduce geometric structure in the learning process, by modeling the scene
and the individual objects; camera ego-motion and object motions are learned
from monocular videos as input. Furthermore an online refinement method is
introduced to adapt learning on the fly to unknown domains.
The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including
those that handle motion e.g. through learned flow. Our results are comparable
in quality to the ones which used stereo as supervision and significantly
improve depth prediction on scenes and datasets which contain a lot of object
motion. The approach is of practical relevance, as it allows transfer across
environments, by transferring models trained on data collected for robot
navigation in urban scenes to indoor navigation settings. The code associated
with this paper can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/struct2depth.Comment: Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19
Compact Modeling Technique for Outdoor Navigation
16 pages, 46 figures.In this paper, a new methodology to build compact local maps in real time for outdoor robot navigation is presented. The environment information is obtained from a 3-D scanner laser. The navigation model, which is called traversable region model, is based on a Voronoi diagram technique, but adapted to large outdoor environments. The model obtained with this methodology allows a definition of safe trajectories that depend on the robot's capabilities and the terrain properties, and it will represent, in a topogeometric way, the environment as local and global maps. The application presented is validated in real outdoor environments with the robot called GOLIAT.This work was supported by the Spanish Government through the MICYT project DPI2003-01170.Publicad
osmAG: Hierarchical Semantic Topometric Area Graph Maps in the OSM Format for Mobile Robotics
Maps are essential to mobile robotics tasks like localization and planning.
We propose the open street map (osm) XML based Area Graph file format to store
hierarchical, topometric semantic multi-floor maps of indoor and outdoor
environments, since currently no such format is popular within the robotics
community. Building on-top of osm we leverage the available open source editing
tools and libraries of osm, while adding the needed mobile robotics aspect with
building-level obstacle representation yet very compact, topometric data that
facilitates planning algorithms. Through the use of common osm keys as well as
custom ones we leverage the power of semantic annotation to enable various
applications. For example, we support planning based on robot capabilities, to
take the locomotion mode and attributes in conjunction with the environment
information into account. The provided C++ library is integrated into ROS. We
evaluate the performance of osmAG using real data in a global path planning
application on a very big osmAG map, demonstrating its convenience and
effectiveness for mobile robots.Comment: 7 page
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