2,918 research outputs found
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
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
FLAT2D: Fast localization from approximate transformation into 2D
Many autonomous vehicles require precise localization into a prior map in order to support planning and to leverage semantic information within those maps (e.g. that the right lane is a turn-only lane.) A popular approach in automotive systems is to use infrared intensity maps of the ground surface to localize, making them susceptible to failures when the surface is obscured by snow or when the road is repainted. An emerging alternative is to localize based on the 3D structure around the vehicle; these methods are robust to these types of changes, but the maps are costly both in terms of storage and the computational cost of matching. In this paper, we propose a fast method for localizing based on 3D structure around the vehicle using a 2D representation. This representation retains many of the advantages of "full" matching in 3D, but comes with dramatically lower space and computational requirements. We also introduce a variation of Graph-SLAM tailored to support localization, allowing us to make use of graph-based error-recovery techniques in our localization estimate. Finally, we present real-world localization results for both an indoor mobile robotic platform and an autonomous golf cart, demonstrating that autonomous vehicles do not need full 3D matching to accurately localize in the environment
Don't Look Back: Robustifying Place Categorization for Viewpoint- and Condition-Invariant Place Recognition
When a human drives a car along a road for the first time, they later
recognize where they are on the return journey typically without needing to
look in their rear-view mirror or turn around to look back, despite significant
viewpoint and appearance change. Such navigation capabilities are typically
attributed to our semantic visual understanding of the environment [1] beyond
geometry to recognizing the types of places we are passing through such as
"passing a shop on the left" or "moving through a forested area". Humans are in
effect using place categorization [2] to perform specific place recognition
even when the viewpoint is 180 degrees reversed. Recent advances in deep neural
networks have enabled high-performance semantic understanding of visual places
and scenes, opening up the possibility of emulating what humans do. In this
work, we develop a novel methodology for using the semantics-aware higher-order
layers of deep neural networks for recognizing specific places from within a
reference database. To further improve the robustness to appearance change, we
develop a descriptor normalization scheme that builds on the success of
normalization schemes for pure appearance-based techniques such as SeqSLAM [3].
Using two different datasets - one road-based, one pedestrian-based, we
evaluate the performance of the system in performing place recognition on
reverse traversals of a route with a limited field of view camera and no
turn-back-and-look behaviours, and compare to existing state-of-the-art
techniques and vanilla off-the-shelf features. The results demonstrate
significant improvements over the existing state of the art, especially for
extreme perceptual challenges that involve both great viewpoint change and
environmental appearance change. We also provide experimental analyses of the
contributions of the various system components.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, ICRA 201
Visual 3-D SLAM from UAVs
The aim of the paper is to present, test and discuss the implementation of Visual SLAM techniques to images taken from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) outdoors, in partially structured environments. Every issue of the whole process is discussed in order to obtain more accurate localization and mapping from UAVs flights. Firstly, the issues related to the visual features of objects in the scene, their distance to the UAV, and the related image acquisition system and their calibration are evaluated for improving the whole process. Other important, considered issues are related to the image processing techniques, such as interest point detection, the matching procedure and the scaling factor. The whole system has been tested using the COLIBRI mini UAV in partially structured environments. The results that have been obtained for localization, tested against the GPS information of the flights, show that Visual SLAM delivers reliable localization and mapping that makes it suitable for some outdoors applications when flying UAVs
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
An Effective Multi-Cue Positioning System for Agricultural Robotics
The self-localization capability is a crucial component for Unmanned Ground
Vehicles (UGV) in farming applications. Approaches based solely on visual cues
or on low-cost GPS are easily prone to fail in such scenarios. In this paper,
we present a robust and accurate 3D global pose estimation framework, designed
to take full advantage of heterogeneous sensory data. By modeling the pose
estimation problem as a pose graph optimization, our approach simultaneously
mitigates the cumulative drift introduced by motion estimation systems (wheel
odometry, visual odometry, ...), and the noise introduced by raw GPS readings.
Along with a suitable motion model, our system also integrates two additional
types of constraints: (i) a Digital Elevation Model and (ii) a Markov Random
Field assumption. We demonstrate how using these additional cues substantially
reduces the error along the altitude axis and, moreover, how this benefit
spreads to the other components of the state. We report exhaustive experiments
combining several sensor setups, showing accuracy improvements ranging from 37%
to 76% with respect to the exclusive use of a GPS sensor. We show that our
approach provides accurate results even if the GPS unexpectedly changes
positioning mode. The code of our system along with the acquired datasets are
released with this paper.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
201
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