6 research outputs found
Robust Fusion of LiDAR and Wide-Angle Camera Data for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Autonomous robots that assist humans in day to day living tasks are becoming
increasingly popular. Autonomous mobile robots operate by sensing and
perceiving their surrounding environment to make accurate driving decisions. A
combination of several different sensors such as LiDAR, radar, ultrasound
sensors and cameras are utilized to sense the surrounding environment of
autonomous vehicles. These heterogeneous sensors simultaneously capture various
physical attributes of the environment. Such multimodality and redundancy of
sensing need to be positively utilized for reliable and consistent perception
of the environment through sensor data fusion. However, these multimodal sensor
data streams are different from each other in many ways, such as temporal and
spatial resolution, data format, and geometric alignment. For the subsequent
perception algorithms to utilize the diversity offered by multimodal sensing,
the data streams need to be spatially, geometrically and temporally aligned
with each other. In this paper, we address the problem of fusing the outputs of
a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanner and a wide-angle monocular image
sensor for free space detection. The outputs of LiDAR scanner and the image
sensor are of different spatial resolutions and need to be aligned with each
other. A geometrical model is used to spatially align the two sensor outputs,
followed by a Gaussian Process (GP) regression-based resolution matching
algorithm to interpolate the missing data with quantifiable uncertainty. The
results indicate that the proposed sensor data fusion framework significantly
aids the subsequent perception steps, as illustrated by the performance
improvement of a uncertainty aware free space detection algorith
User-oriented markerless augmented reality framework based on 3D reconstruction and loop closure detection
An augmented reality (AR) system needs to track the user-view to perform an accurate augmentation registration. The present research proposes a conceptual marker-less, natural feature-based AR framework system, the process for which is divided into two stages - an offline database training session for the application developers, and an online AR tracking and display session for the final users. In the offline session, two types of 3D reconstruction application, RGBD-SLAM and SfM are integrated into the development framework for building the reference template of a target environment. The performance and applicable conditions of these two methods are presented in the present thesis, and the application developers can choose which method to apply for their developmental demands. A general developmental user interface is provided to the developer for interaction, including a simple GUI tool for augmentation configuration. The present proposal also applies a Bag of Words strategy to enable a rapid "loop-closure detection" in the online session, for efficiently querying the application user-view from the trained database to locate the user pose. The rendering and display process of augmentation is currently implemented within an OpenGL window, which is one result of the research that is worthy of future detailed investigation and development