189,696 research outputs found
Efficient Constellation-Based Map-Merging for Semantic SLAM
Data association in SLAM is fundamentally challenging, and handling ambiguity
well is crucial to achieve robust operation in real-world environments. When
ambiguous measurements arise, conservatism often mandates that the measurement
is discarded or a new landmark is initialized rather than risking an incorrect
association. To address the inevitable `duplicate' landmarks that arise, we
present an efficient map-merging framework to detect duplicate constellations
of landmarks, providing a high-confidence loop-closure mechanism well-suited
for object-level SLAM. This approach uses an incrementally-computable
approximation of landmark uncertainty that only depends on local information in
the SLAM graph, avoiding expensive recovery of the full system covariance
matrix. This enables a search based on geometric consistency (GC) (rather than
full joint compatibility (JC)) that inexpensively reduces the search space to a
handful of `best' hypotheses. Furthermore, we reformulate the commonly-used
interpretation tree to allow for more efficient integration of clique-based
pairwise compatibility, accelerating the branch-and-bound max-cardinality
search. Our method is demonstrated to match the performance of full JC methods
at significantly-reduced computational cost, facilitating robust object-based
loop-closure over large SLAM problems.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 201
WISER: A Semantic Approach for Expert Finding in Academia based on Entity Linking
We present WISER, a new semantic search engine for expert finding in
academia. Our system is unsupervised and it jointly combines classical language
modeling techniques, based on text evidences, with the Wikipedia Knowledge
Graph, via entity linking.
WISER indexes each academic author through a novel profiling technique which
models her expertise with a small, labeled and weighted graph drawn from
Wikipedia. Nodes in this graph are the Wikipedia entities mentioned in the
author's publications, whereas the weighted edges express the semantic
relatedness among these entities computed via textual and graph-based
relatedness functions. Every node is also labeled with a relevance score which
models the pertinence of the corresponding entity to author's expertise, and is
computed by means of a proper random-walk calculation over that graph; and with
a latent vector representation which is learned via entity and other kinds of
structural embeddings derived from Wikipedia.
At query time, experts are retrieved by combining classic document-centric
approaches, which exploit the occurrences of query terms in the author's
documents, with a novel set of profile-centric scoring strategies, which
compute the semantic relatedness between the author's expertise and the query
topic via the above graph-based profiles.
The effectiveness of our system is established over a large-scale
experimental test on a standard dataset for this task. We show that WISER
achieves better performance than all the other competitors, thus proving the
effectiveness of modelling author's profile via our "semantic" graph of
entities. Finally, we comment on the use of WISER for indexing and profiling
the whole research community within the University of Pisa, and its application
to technology transfer in our University
Combining Subgoal Graphs with Reinforcement Learning to Build a Rational Pathfinder
In this paper, we present a hierarchical path planning framework called SG-RL
(subgoal graphs-reinforcement learning), to plan rational paths for agents
maneuvering in continuous and uncertain environments. By "rational", we mean
(1) efficient path planning to eliminate first-move lags; (2) collision-free
and smooth for agents with kinematic constraints satisfied. SG-RL works in a
two-level manner. At the first level, SG-RL uses a geometric path-planning
method, i.e., Simple Subgoal Graphs (SSG), to efficiently find optimal abstract
paths, also called subgoal sequences. At the second level, SG-RL uses an RL
method, i.e., Least-Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI), to learn near-optimal
motion-planning policies which can generate kinematically feasible and
collision-free trajectories between adjacent subgoals. The first advantage of
the proposed method is that SSG can solve the limitations of sparse reward and
local minima trap for RL agents; thus, LSPI can be used to generate paths in
complex environments. The second advantage is that, when the environment
changes slightly (i.e., unexpected obstacles appearing), SG-RL does not need to
reconstruct subgoal graphs and replan subgoal sequences using SSG, since LSPI
can deal with uncertainties by exploiting its generalization ability to handle
changes in environments. Simulation experiments in representative scenarios
demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, SG-RL can work well on
large-scale maps with relatively low action-switching frequencies and shorter
path lengths, and SG-RL can deal with small changes in environments. We further
demonstrate that the design of reward functions and the types of training
environments are important factors for learning feasible policies.Comment: 20 page
Efficient 2D-3D Matching for Multi-Camera Visual Localization
Visual localization, i.e., determining the position and orientation of a
vehicle with respect to a map, is a key problem in autonomous driving. We
present a multicamera visual inertial localization algorithm for large scale
environments. To efficiently and effectively match features against a pre-built
global 3D map, we propose a prioritized feature matching scheme for
multi-camera systems. In contrast to existing works, designed for monocular
cameras, we (1) tailor the prioritization function to the multi-camera setup
and (2) run feature matching and pose estimation in parallel. This
significantly accelerates the matching and pose estimation stages and allows us
to dynamically adapt the matching efforts based on the surrounding environment.
In addition, we show how pose priors can be integrated into the localization
system to increase efficiency and robustness. Finally, we extend our algorithm
by fusing the absolute pose estimates with motion estimates from a multi-camera
visual inertial odometry pipeline (VIO). This results in a system that provides
reliable and drift-less pose estimation. Extensive experiments show that our
localization runs fast and robust under varying conditions, and that our
extended algorithm enables reliable real-time pose estimation.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
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