27,894 research outputs found
3D Registration of Aerial and Ground Robots for Disaster Response: An Evaluation of Features, Descriptors, and Transformation Estimation
Global registration of heterogeneous ground and aerial mapping data is a
challenging task. This is especially difficult in disaster response scenarios
when we have no prior information on the environment and cannot assume the
regular order of man-made environments or meaningful semantic cues. In this
work we extensively evaluate different approaches to globally register UGV
generated 3D point-cloud data from LiDAR sensors with UAV generated point-cloud
maps from vision sensors. The approaches are realizations of different
selections for: a) local features: key-points or segments; b) descriptors:
FPFH, SHOT, or ESF; and c) transformation estimations: RANSAC or FGR.
Additionally, we compare the results against standard approaches like applying
ICP after a good prior transformation has been given. The evaluation criteria
include the distance which a UGV needs to travel to successfully localize, the
registration error, and the computational cost. In this context, we report our
findings on effectively performing the task on two new Search and Rescue
datasets. Our results have the potential to help the community take informed
decisions when registering point-cloud maps from ground robots to those from
aerial robots.Comment: Awarded Best Paper at the 15th IEEE International Symposium on
Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics 2017 (SSRR 2017
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
Accelerating Reinforcement Learning by Composing Solutions of Automatically Identified Subtasks
This paper discusses a system that accelerates reinforcement learning by
using transfer from related tasks. Without such transfer, even if two tasks are
very similar at some abstract level, an extensive re-learning effort is
required. The system achieves much of its power by transferring parts of
previously learned solutions rather than a single complete solution. The system
exploits strong features in the multi-dimensional function produced by
reinforcement learning in solving a particular task. These features are stable
and easy to recognize early in the learning process. They generate a
partitioning of the state space and thus the function. The partition is
represented as a graph. This is used to index and compose functions stored in a
case base to form a close approximation to the solution of the new task.
Experiments demonstrate that function composition often produces more than an
order of magnitude increase in learning rate compared to a basic reinforcement
learning algorithm
Simultaneous localization and map-building using active vision
An active approach to sensing can provide the focused measurement capability over a wide field of view which allows correctly formulated Simultaneous Localization and Map-Building (SLAM) to be implemented with vision, permitting repeatable long-term localization using only naturally occurring, automatically-detected features. In this paper, we present the first example of a general system for autonomous localization using active vision, enabled here by a high-performance stereo head, addressing such issues as uncertainty-based measurement selection, automatic map-maintenance, and goal-directed steering. We present varied real-time experiments in a complex environment.Published versio
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