3,036 research outputs found
Towards Visual Ego-motion Learning in Robots
Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the
past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying
motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform
these tasks, in a minimally supervised setting, as they gain more experience.
To this end, we propose a fully trainable solution to visual ego-motion
estimation for varied camera optics. We propose a visual ego-motion learning
architecture that maps observed optical flow vectors to an ego-motion density
estimate via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). By modeling the architecture as a
Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE), our model is able to provide
introspective reasoning and prediction for ego-motion induced scene-flow.
Additionally, our proposed model is especially amenable to bootstrapped
ego-motion learning in robots where the supervision in ego-motion estimation
for a particular camera sensor can be obtained from standard navigation-based
sensor fusion strategies (GPS/INS and wheel-odometry fusion). Through
experiments, we show the utility of our proposed approach in enabling the
concept of self-supervised learning for visual ego-motion estimation in
autonomous robots.Comment: Conference paper; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2017, Vancouver CA; 8 pages, 8 figures,
2 table
RGBDTAM: A Cost-Effective and Accurate RGB-D Tracking and Mapping System
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using RGB-D cameras has been a fertile
research topic in the latest decade, due to the suitability of such sensors for
indoor robotics. In this paper we propose a direct RGB-D SLAM algorithm with
state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness at a los cost. Our experiments in the
RGB-D TUM dataset [34] effectively show a better accuracy and robustness in CPU
real time than direct RGB-D SLAM systems that make use of the GPU. The key
ingredients of our approach are mainly two. Firstly, the combination of a
semi-dense photometric and dense geometric error for the pose tracking (see
Figure 1), which we demonstrate to be the most accurate alternative. And
secondly, a model of the multi-view constraints and their errors in the mapping
and tracking threads, which adds extra information over other approaches. We
release the open-source implementation of our approach 1 . The reader is
referred to a video with our results 2 for a more illustrative visualization of
its performance
GSLAM: Initialization-robust Monocular Visual SLAM via Global Structure-from-Motion
Many monocular visual SLAM algorithms are derived from incremental
structure-from-motion (SfM) methods. This work proposes a novel monocular SLAM
method which integrates recent advances made in global SfM. In particular, we
present two main contributions to visual SLAM. First, we solve the visual
odometry problem by a novel rank-1 matrix factorization technique which is more
robust to the errors in map initialization. Second, we adopt a recent global
SfM method for the pose-graph optimization, which leads to a multi-stage linear
formulation and enables L1 optimization for better robustness to false loops.
The combination of these two approaches generates more robust reconstruction
and is significantly faster (4X) than recent state-of-the-art SLAM systems. We
also present a new dataset recorded with ground truth camera motion in a Vicon
motion capture room, and compare our method to prior systems on it and
established benchmark datasets.Comment: 3DV 2017 Project Page: https://frobelbest.github.io/gsla
An Underwater SLAM System using Sonar, Visual, Inertial, and Depth Sensor
This paper presents a novel tightly-coupled keyframe-based Simultaneous
Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system with loop-closing and relocalization
capabilities targeted for the underwater domain. Our previous work, SVIn,
augmented the state-of-the-art visual-inertial state estimation package OKVIS
to accommodate acoustic data from sonar in a non-linear optimization-based
framework. This paper addresses drift and loss of localization -- one of the
main problems affecting other packages in underwater domain -- by providing the
following main contributions: a robust initialization method to refine scale
using depth measurements, a fast preprocessing step to enhance the image
quality, and a real-time loop-closing and relocalization method using bag of
words (BoW). An additional contribution is the addition of depth measurements
from a pressure sensor to the tightly-coupled optimization formulation.
Experimental results on datasets collected with a custom-made underwater sensor
suite and an autonomous underwater vehicle from challenging underwater
environments with poor visibility demonstrate performance never achieved before
in terms of accuracy and robustness
Encoderless Gimbal Calibration of Dynamic Multi-Camera Clusters
Dynamic Camera Clusters (DCCs) are multi-camera systems where one or more
cameras are mounted on actuated mechanisms such as a gimbal. Existing methods
for DCC calibration rely on joint angle measurements to resolve the
time-varying transformation between the dynamic and static camera. This
information is usually provided by motor encoders, however, joint angle
measurements are not always readily available on off-the-shelf mechanisms. In
this paper, we present an encoderless approach for DCC calibration which
simultaneously estimates the kinematic parameters of the transformation chain
as well as the unknown joint angles. We also demonstrate the integration of an
encoderless gimbal mechanism with a state-of-the art VIO algorithm, and show
the extensions required in order to perform simultaneous online estimation of
the joint angles and vehicle localization state. The proposed calibration
approach is validated both in simulation and on a physical DCC composed of a
2-DOF gimbal mounted on a UAV. Finally, we show the experimental results of the
calibrated mechanism integrated into the OKVIS VIO package, and demonstrate
successful online joint angle estimation while maintaining localization
accuracy that is comparable to a standard static multi-camera configuration.Comment: ICRA 201
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