Localization and Navigation of the CoBots Over Long-term Deployments

For the last three years, we have developed and researched multiple collaborative robots, CoBots, which have been autonomously traversing our multi-floor buildings. We pursue the goal of long-term autonomy for indoor service mobile robots as the ability for them to be deployed indefinitely while they perform tasks in an evolving environment. The CoBots include several levels of autonomy, and in this paper we focus on their localization and navigation algorithms. We present the Corrective Gradient Refinement (CGR) algorithm, which refines the proposal distribution of the particle filter used for localization with sensor observations using analytically computed state space derivatives on a vector map. We also present the Fast Sampling Plane Filtering (FSPF) algorithm that extracts planar regions from depth images in real time. These planar regions are then projected onto the 2D vector map of the building, and along with the laser rangefinder observations, used with CGR for localization. For navigation, we present a hierarchical planner, which computes a topological policy using a graph representation of the environment, computes motion commands based on the topological policy, and then modifies the motion commands to side-step perceived obstacles. The continuous deployments of the CoBots over the course of one and a half years have provided us with logs of the CoBots traversing more than 130km over 1082 deployments, which we publish as a dataset consisting of more than 10 million laser scans. The logs show that although there have been continuous changes in the environment, the robots are robust to most of them, and there exist only a few locations where changes in the environment cause increased uncertainty in localization

CNN for IMU Assisted Odometry Estimation using Velodyne LiDAR

We introduce a novel method for odometry estimation using convolutional neural networks from 3D LiDAR scans. The original sparse data are encoded into 2D matrices for the training of proposed networks and for the prediction. Our networks show significantly better precision in the estimation of translational motion parameters comparing with state of the art method LOAM, while achieving real-time performance. Together with IMU support, high quality odometry estimation and LiDAR data registration is realized. Moreover, we propose alternative CNNs trained for the prediction of rotational motion parameters while achieving results also comparable with state of the art. The proposed method can replace wheel encoders in odometry estimation or supplement missing GPS data, when the GNSS signal absents (e.g. during the indoor mapping). Our solution brings real-time performance and precision which are useful to provide online preview of the mapping results and verification of the map completeness in real time

Automatic Extrinsic Calibration of Vision and Lidar by Maximizing Mutual Information

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112212/1/rob21542.pd

GEMA2:Geometrical matching analytical algorithm for fast mobile robots global self-localization

[EN] This paper presents a new algorithm for fast mobile robot self-localization in structured indoor environments based on geometrical and analytical matching, GEMA(2). The proposed method takes advantage of the available structural information to perform a geometrical matching with the environment information provided by measurements collected by a laser range finder. In contrast to other global self-localization algorithms like Monte Carlo or SLAM, GEMA(2) provides a linear cost with respect the number of measures collected, making it suitable for resource-constrained embedded systems. The proposed approach has been implemented and tested in a mobile robot with limited computational resources showing a fast converge from global self-localization. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been partially funded by FEDER-CICYT projects with references DPI2011-28507-C02-01 and HAR2012-38391-C02-02 financed by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion and Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Spain).Sánchez Belenguer, C.; Soriano Vigueras, Á.; Vallés Miquel, M.; Vendrell Vidal, E.; Valera Fernández, Á. (2014). GEMA2:Geometrical matching analytical algorithm for fast mobile robots global self-localization. Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 62(6):855-863. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2014.01.009S85586362