8,951 research outputs found
Reflection-Aware Sound Source Localization
We present a novel, reflection-aware method for 3D sound localization in
indoor environments. Unlike prior approaches, which are mainly based on
continuous sound signals from a stationary source, our formulation is designed
to localize the position instantaneously from signals within a single frame. We
consider direct sound and indirect sound signals that reach the microphones
after reflecting off surfaces such as ceilings or walls. We then generate and
trace direct and reflected acoustic paths using inverse acoustic ray tracing
and utilize these paths with Monte Carlo localization to estimate a 3D sound
source position. We have implemented our method on a robot with a cube-shaped
microphone array and tested it against different settings with continuous and
intermittent sound signals with a stationary or a mobile source. Across
different settings, our approach can localize the sound with an average
distance error of 0.8m tested in a room of 7m by 7m area with 3m height,
including a mobile and non-line-of-sight sound source. We also reveal that the
modeling of indirect rays increases the localization accuracy by 40% compared
to only using direct acoustic rays.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 2018. The working video is available at
(https://youtu.be/TkQ36lMEC-M
Don't Look Back: Robustifying Place Categorization for Viewpoint- and Condition-Invariant Place Recognition
When a human drives a car along a road for the first time, they later
recognize where they are on the return journey typically without needing to
look in their rear-view mirror or turn around to look back, despite significant
viewpoint and appearance change. Such navigation capabilities are typically
attributed to our semantic visual understanding of the environment [1] beyond
geometry to recognizing the types of places we are passing through such as
"passing a shop on the left" or "moving through a forested area". Humans are in
effect using place categorization [2] to perform specific place recognition
even when the viewpoint is 180 degrees reversed. Recent advances in deep neural
networks have enabled high-performance semantic understanding of visual places
and scenes, opening up the possibility of emulating what humans do. In this
work, we develop a novel methodology for using the semantics-aware higher-order
layers of deep neural networks for recognizing specific places from within a
reference database. To further improve the robustness to appearance change, we
develop a descriptor normalization scheme that builds on the success of
normalization schemes for pure appearance-based techniques such as SeqSLAM [3].
Using two different datasets - one road-based, one pedestrian-based, we
evaluate the performance of the system in performing place recognition on
reverse traversals of a route with a limited field of view camera and no
turn-back-and-look behaviours, and compare to existing state-of-the-art
techniques and vanilla off-the-shelf features. The results demonstrate
significant improvements over the existing state of the art, especially for
extreme perceptual challenges that involve both great viewpoint change and
environmental appearance change. We also provide experimental analyses of the
contributions of the various system components.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, ICRA 201
Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery
One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
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