1,922 research outputs found
Topomap: Topological Mapping and Navigation Based on Visual SLAM Maps
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments
deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning
algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many
state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining
a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the
complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with
uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics
applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies
the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path
planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a
visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a
three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract
occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we
create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the
topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of
global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm.
Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar
performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage
requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to
prove its advantages.Comment: 8 page
AgriColMap: Aerial-Ground Collaborative 3D Mapping for Precision Farming
The combination of aerial survey capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
with targeted intervention abilities of agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles
can significantly improve the effectiveness of robotic systems applied to
precision agriculture. In this context, building and updating a common map of
the field is an essential but challenging task. The maps built using robots of
different types show differences in size, resolution and scale, the associated
geolocation data may be inaccurate and biased, while the repetitiveness of both
visual appearance and geometric structures found within agricultural contexts
render classical map merging techniques ineffective. In this paper we propose
AgriColMap, a novel map registration pipeline that leverages a grid-based
multimodal environment representation which includes a vegetation index map and
a Digital Surface Model. We cast the data association problem between maps
built from UAVs and UGVs as a multimodal, large displacement dense optical flow
estimation. The dominant, coherent flows, selected using a voting scheme, are
used as point-to-point correspondences to infer a preliminary non-rigid
alignment between the maps. A final refinement is then performed, by exploiting
only meaningful parts of the registered maps. We evaluate our system using real
world data for 3 fields with different crop species. The results show that our
method outperforms several state of the art map registration and matching
techniques by a large margin, and has a higher tolerance to large initial
misalignments. We release an implementation of the proposed approach along with
the acquired datasets with this paper.Comment: Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 201
A Decentralized Mobile Computing Network for Multi-Robot Systems Operations
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized
operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns
in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a
unique source of inspiration for the development of fault-tolerant and
self-healing multi-robot systems capable of operating in dynamic environments.
Specifically, swarm robotics emerged and is significantly growing on these
premises. However, to date, most swarm robotics systems reported in the
literature involve basic computational tasks---averages and other algebraic
operations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Collective computing framework
based on the swarming paradigm, which exhibits the key innate features of
swarms: robustness, scalability and flexibility. Unlike Edge computing, the
proposed Collective computing framework is truly decentralized and does not
require user intervention or additional servers to sustain its operations. This
Collective computing framework is applied to the complex task of collective
mapping, in which multiple robots aim at cooperatively map a large area. Our
results confirm the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, its robustness
to the loss of multiple units, as well as its scalability. Furthermore, the
topology of the interconnecting network is found to greatly influence the
performance of the collective action.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Proc. 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous
Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conferenc
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