Towards an Autonomous Walking Robot for Planetary Surfaces

In this paper, recent progress in the development of the DLR Crawler - a six-legged, actively compliant walking robot prototype - is presented. The robot implements a walking layer with a simple tripod and a more complex biologically inspired gait. Using a variety of proprioceptive sensors, different reflexes for reactively crossing obstacles within the walking height are realised. On top of the walking layer, a navigation layer provides the ability to autonomously navigate to a predefined goal point in unknown rough terrain using a stereo camera. A model of the environment is created, the terrain traversability is estimated and an optimal path is planned. The difficulty of the path can be influenced by behavioral parameters. Motion commands are sent to the walking layer and the gait pattern is switched according to the estimated terrain difficulty. The interaction between walking layer and navigation layer was tested in different experimental setups

Deep Network Uncertainty Maps for Indoor Navigation

Most mobile robots for indoor use rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping and navigation. These sensors, however, cannot detect transparent surfaces or measure the full occupancy of complex objects such as tables. Deep Neural Networks have recently been proposed to overcome this limitation by learning to estimate object occupancy. These estimates are nevertheless subject to uncertainty, making the evaluation of their confidence an important issue for these measures to be useful for autonomous navigation and mapping. In this work we approach the problem from two sides. First we discuss uncertainty estimation in deep models, proposing a solution based on a fully convolutional neural network. The proposed architecture is not restricted by the assumption that the uncertainty follows a Gaussian model, as in the case of many popular solutions for deep model uncertainty estimation, such as Monte-Carlo Dropout. We present results showing that uncertainty over obstacle distances is actually better modeled with a Laplace distribution. Then, we propose a novel approach to build maps based on Deep Neural Network uncertainty models. In particular, we present an algorithm to build a map that includes information over obstacle distance estimates while taking into account the level of uncertainty in each estimate. We show how the constructed map can be used to increase global navigation safety by planning trajectories which avoid areas of high uncertainty, enabling higher autonomy for mobile robots in indoor settings.Comment: Accepted for publication in "2019 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)

Memory Augmented Control Networks

Planning problems in partially observable environments cannot be solved directly with convolutional networks and require some form of memory. But, even memory networks with sophisticated addressing schemes are unable to learn intelligent reasoning satisfactorily due to the complexity of simultaneously learning to access memory and plan. To mitigate these challenges we introduce the Memory Augmented Control Network (MACN). The proposed network architecture consists of three main parts. The first part uses convolutions to extract features and the second part uses a neural network-based planning module to pre-plan in the environment. The third part uses a network controller that learns to store those specific instances of past information that are necessary for planning. The performance of the network is evaluated in discrete grid world environments for path planning in the presence of simple and complex obstacles. We show that our network learns to plan and can generalize to new environments