5,112 research outputs found
Metric Learning for Generalizing Spatial Relations to New Objects
Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations
between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such
environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and
generalize them to objects with different shapes and sizes. For example, having
learned to place a toy inside a basket, a robot should be able to generalize
this concept using a spoon and a cup. This requires a robot to have the
flexibility to learn arbitrary relations in a lifelong manner, making it
challenging for an expert to pre-program it with sufficient knowledge to do so
beforehand. In this paper, we address the problem of learning spatial relations
by introducing a novel method from the perspective of distance metric learning.
Our approach enables a robot to reason about the similarity between pairwise
spatial relations, thereby enabling it to use its previous knowledge when
presented with a new relation to imitate. We show how this makes it possible to
learn arbitrary spatial relations from non-expert users using a small number of
examples and in an interactive manner. Our extensive evaluation with real-world
data demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in reasoning about a
continuous spectrum of spatial relations and generalizing them to new objects.Comment: Accepted at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems. The new Freiburg Spatial Relations Dataset and a demo
video of our approach running on the PR-2 robot are available at our project
website: http://spatialrelations.cs.uni-freiburg.d
Real-time Monocular Object SLAM
We present a real-time object-based SLAM system that leverages the largest
object database to date. Our approach comprises two main components: 1) a
monocular SLAM algorithm that exploits object rigidity constraints to improve
the map and find its real scale, and 2) a novel object recognition algorithm
based on bags of binary words, which provides live detections with a database
of 500 3D objects. The two components work together and benefit each other: the
SLAM algorithm accumulates information from the observations of the objects,
anchors object features to especial map landmarks and sets constrains on the
optimization. At the same time, objects partially or fully located within the
map are used as a prior to guide the recognition algorithm, achieving higher
recall. We evaluate our proposal on five real environments showing improvements
on the accuracy of the map and efficiency with respect to other
state-of-the-art techniques
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
Use of graphics in decision aids for telerobotic control: (Parts 5-8 of an 8-part MIT progress report)
Four separate projects recently completed or in progress at the MIT Man-Machine Systems Laboratory are summarized. They are: a decision aid for retrieving a tumbling satellite in space; kinematic control and graphic display of redundant teleoperators; real time terrain/object generation: a quad-tree approach; and two dimensional control for three dimensional obstacle avoidance
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